The Economic Emergence of Women: Second Edition

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The Economic Emergence of Women

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The Economic Emergence of Women Second Edition

Barbara R. Bergmann

THE ECONOMIC EMERGENCE OF WOMEN

© Barbara R. Bergmann, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–312–21941–5 ISBN 0–312–23243–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bergmann, Barbara R. The economic emergence of women / by Barbara R. Bergamann.— Second ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–21941–5—ISBN 0–312–23243–8 (pbk.) 1. Women—United States—Economic conditions. 2. Women— Employment—United States. 3. Sex discrimination against women— United States. 4. Housewives—United States. I. Title. HQ1426.B429 2005 305.43⬘0973—dc22

2005040556

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To my mother Nellie and my daughter Sarah and the long line of women, going back to cave days, from whom we three are descended


Contents

Acknowledgments 1. The Breakup of the Sex-Role Caste System

viii 1

2. Why Did Women Emerge?

11

3. The Social Factors: Births, Schools, Divorces, Ideas

25

4. “Women’s Place” in the Labor Market

41

5. Occupational Segregation by Sex: The Root of Women’s Disadvantage

61

6. Setting the Pay for the Jobs Women Hold

85

7. Government Action Against Discrimination

103

8. Affirmative Action and Pay Equity

119

9. The Occupation of Housewife

133

10. Lone Parents and their Poverty

153

11. Keeping House: The Economics and Politics of Family Care

175

12. “Industrializing” Housework and Child Care

189

13. A Policy Agenda for the Sex-Role Revolution

209

Appendix

219

Notes

231

Index

251

Acknowledgments

I have profited over the years from the ideas of Heidi Hartmann, Suzanne Helburn, Nancy Folbre, Marianne Ferber, Mary Gray, Myra Strober, and Harriet Presser, and sometimes also from hearing their opposition to my ideas. Fred Bergmann has also been a source of ideas and criticisms, besides making possible 40 years of good living, on which all else has been based. I have learned from Sarah and David, my children, and Sarah has contributed the figure in chapter 4 to this book. Generous contribution of the data in table 11.1 was made by Liana Sayer, and of research assistance by Jennifer Cohen. Their help is gratefully acknowledged. This book had a globalized production. Copy editing, design, and proofing were done by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

1 The Breakup of the Sex-Role Caste System

The ancient system of sex roles, under which men were assigned a monopoly of access to money and the public sphere, and mature women were restricted to the home, came under severe attack over the course of the last century and a half in most developed countries. The social and economic forces behind the release of women from obligatory domesticity are far from spent; they continue to reinforce each other and grow stronger. An economic cataclysm or a wave of religious fanaticism such as occurred in Iran and Afghanistan could bring a regression, but barring such upheavals, women will not retreat back into domesticity. On the contrary, the emergence of women into the money economy and into larger roles in the society will probably go further, both in the developed and in the developing countries. The worldwide liberation of women from a dependence on men for money to live on, and the opening of opportunities to lead whatever lives their talents and inclinations permit deserves recognition as a revolution in human affairs. As an extension of freedom to people who previously had little or none, it surely ranks with the French or American revolutions in historic importance. Not everyone welcomes the changes that revolution has wrought. Some despair at what they see as the ruination of a system that provided a warm and comfortable home life. They mourn the passing of the sheltered existence that most women and children had. But many women and young girls relish their freedoms and opportunities. Many mothers and fathers are delighted that their daughters have a chance to express their talents and will be able, if they wish, to avoid complete dependence on the goodwill of a “breadwinner.” A majority of women in the developed countries have by now emerged from the home, but many habits, policies, and institutions survive from the era when all mature women were expected to be lifelong housewives, and all male workers were expected by their employers to have the services of a fulltime housewife at home. The reduced supply of “caring labor” contributed by family members—child care and elder care—has yet to be addressed by public policy. Many husbands of employed women still expect to be waited on at home as before. Domestic violence continues to be a severe problem.

2


As women’s behavior and positions have changed, men’s have too. More men are taking an active part in the daily care of their children. But the share of men’s financial resources that are devoted to the support of children has decreased. An increasing proportion of men are abdicating entirely their traditional role of provider for the children they have sired. About 30 percent of children in the United States live apart from their fathers, and in a majority of such cases the father contributes little or nothing toward the child’s expenses.1 Progress has been made in the labor market. The gap between men’s and women’s average pay has narrowed significantly, and women’s presence in the professional and managerial ranks has increased markedly. Yet men still retain a highly disproportionate share of the best jobs. Occupational segregation by sex and the discriminatory treatment that causes it remain prevalent, particularly in the kinds of jobs filled by people who have not gone on to higher education. The new conditions require new habits, policies, and institutions. We need to complete the task of driving sex discrimination and race discrimination from the workplace. This will enable women to earn enough, not just to keep out of poverty, but to achieve a comfortable lifestyle whether or not they have a man in their household. We have to find and implement a way of helping single parents live decently. We need a system under which single parents will be earners, but will have government guarantees of child support payments, health care, and high-quality child care. We need new rules and facilities that will help working people, with no full-time homemaker to depend on, to carry on their home lives and raise their children with less strain—shorter work weeks, no compulsory overtime, a ban on discrimination against part-timers, “service-mall” apartment complexes.

The Long Transition from Domesticity In 1870 only 14 percent of working-age women in the United States were employed, most as servants. In subsequent decades, the percentage of women in the job market rose slowly but quite steadily. In 2001, 60 percent were participating, as compared with 74 percent of men.2 Women’s ongoing emergence into the money economy went largely unnoticed until the late 1970s, when the labor force participation rate of American women with children under 18 passed the 50 percent mark.3 This was the start of an era in which a woman who was working for pay could see herself as part of a majority. The employed woman was now comfortably within the mainstream. By the same token, the 1970s marked the start of minority status for the woman devoted exclusively to domestic service at home for her husband and children. After that, the housewife could not have the same assurance as before that the place she occupied was the only right and honorable one. The changes in women’s economic role have been unfolding gradually for a long time, as a result of long-standing tendencies in the economy and society. Records on U.S. employment for the last 13 decades show a steady

The Breakup of the Sex-Role Caste System

3

rise over that period in the proportion of adult women working for pay. Nothing that has gone on steadily for more than a century has happened by chance, or depends on the whim of fashion, or is easily reversible. The growth in women’s labor force participation has its origin deep within the economic system, in the process of technological change that started in the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. Advances in labor productivity since then have raised the wages employers are willing to pay women. Real wages—corrected for inflation—have about quadrupled since the beginning of the century. Women’s wages have been and continue to be considerably lower than men’s, but they are a lot higher than they used to be. And these higher wages have made the time of millions of women too valuable to be devoted entirely to homemaking. The fall in birthrate in all the developed countries has been another powerful cause of change in women’s economic roles. In the United States, women are giving birth to about half as many babies in the course of their lifetime as they did in 1900, and about one-quarter as many as in 1800. The birthrate is not independent of economic factors—it is affected by them and affects them in turn. Having a job cuts the number of babies a woman wants to have, and the fall in the number of babies leaves space in her life for a job. Developments of the same nature in so many countries cannot result from minor or local or temporary causes, but from factors that are close to the mainspring of economic and social functioning. The economic forces that have furthered women’s emergence are far from exhausted. Thus, we can expect to go still further along this path. Women’s participation in the money economy may grow until it is equal to men’s. In paid employment, American women are already over 80 percent of the way there. Less-developed countries will follow as their economies mature.

Sex Roles in Economic Functioning Women’s place in the economy was previously determined by their assignment to sole responsibility for the care of their children, and to chores that could efficiently be combined in the home with child care. In most families, men had been exempted from taking a share in “women’s work.” Most people accepted these automatic assignments by sex as biologically right and inevitable, as a necessary provision for the nurture of children. Until a few decades ago, only a tiny minority of men and women thought that assigning people economic functions based entirely on their sex might be unjust, inefficient, or unnecessarily constricting. Different economic assignments for men and women gave them different lives. One’s gender determined the likelihood of having paid work that an intelligent person could find interesting and enjoyable. A talented person’s gender determined the likelihood of the talent being developed and expressed. It determined whether one exercised power over others, or was narrowly, perhaps tyrannically, constrained by others’ power. One’s gender has largely determined how and with whom one spent time, and the chances

4


that one would suffer economic deprivation, boredom, isolation, physical abuse. Men’s and women’s different places in the economy gave them different chances for high status, respect, and honor. Women’s economic specialization was a source of limitation, boredom, and deprivation for many of them and of powerlessness for virtually all of them. Of course many men have been denied opportunities as well, for reasons of class or race. But the denial of opportunities to women has always been more severe, more pervasive, and harder to evade. Heidi Hartmann has argued that women have been subordinated to men in all aspects of life because they have lacked direct access to economic resources on the same basis as men.4 Women have had to seek indirect access to economic resources through their personal relations with men, and the resulting dependence has put them at a crucial disadvantage. Through the nineteenth century, women were denied access to economic resources by law and custom. They could not learn or practice most trades or professions, borrow, make contracts. At the beginning of that century they could have jobs as domestic servants or low-paid factory hands, but not much else. Later, teaching jobs at low wages became open to women.5 Women’s only way of achieving a comfortable standard of living, a respectable status, and a decently provided-for motherhood was by taking up the occupation of housewife. This meant finding a willing marriage partner, thus gaining access to a household his income would finance, and in return contracting to devote oneself entirely to running his home. It also meant having sex with him on demand, bearing and raising as many children as he engendered, keeping him in good humor, and obeying him on pain of violent punishment, if that was the way he was inclined. The evidence we have shows that many marriages were partnerships based on love and respect between the woman and the man.6 Most women probably wanted children, many enjoyed the sex, were reconciled to the housekeeping, and felt affection for the men they married. Nevertheless it is a daunting job description. Daunting or not, it was the only way a nineteenth-century woman could earn a decent living. The difference in status and opportunities between today’s women and the women of the nineteenth century appears enormous. With freedom of contraception and abortion, women don’t have to have babies they don’t want. Higher education, at least at the undergraduate level, is now as available to them as to men. Women’s confidence and self-esteem are far higher than in the past. More kinds of jobs are open to them. Staying at home, isolated from the chance to earn money, is no longer required of women after marriage. Nevertheless, today’s women are still at a considerable economic disadvantage relative to men in the labor market and in the support of parenthood. For women, unlike men, marriage is still the only route to parenthood that promises a comfortable life. While it is difficult for a single mother or a single father to raise children, a high wage makes the burden tolerable for most men. But few female single parents earn enough to buy a comfortable life for themselves and their children.


5

Women’s Place in the Labor Market In a modern economy, the access to economic resources for the vast majority of the population is through jobs. The labor market is the arena where women’s economic access or the lack of it is maintained and played out, with all of its social, economic, and political consequences. It is the place where the degree of equality between the sexes is contested and decided. In the American labor market, today as in the past, a considerable majority of the “good” jobs—those with interesting work, promotional possibilities, and good pay—are occupied by men. Full-time women workers’ average pay is 77 percent the pay of full-time men. A woman with a college degree has on average about the same earnings as a man who has not finished college. In the last decade, there has been rapid change in a few fields, principally those where entry is controlled by schools. The proportion of new lawyers and physicians who are women has grown rapidly. Some advances have been made in the proportion of women in managerial jobs. On the other hand, there has been very limited penetration of women into blue-collar skilled-crafts jobs and into the higher reaches of business and governmental management. The result of discriminatory actions by a host of individual employers is that women, rejected for many of the better jobs, have to throw themselves on the market cheaply. There are still many employers who specify a few occupations as female, push all of their women applicants into them, and assign to them the low wage the market specifies for labor services considered second rate. Many a woman college graduate, after a fruitless search for a job worthy of her education, eventually succumbs and takes a job that is routine and a dead-end. The idea that our economy is shot through with unfairness to women workers is not accepted in all quarters. Many economists deny the very possibility that qualified women could be unfairly dealt with by employers. Seeing nothing amiss, they oppose government intervention to improve women’s place in the labor market. They have convinced themselves through purely theoretical exercises, based on made-up and untested assumptions, that systematic and long-lasting discrimination is simply impossible.7 Those who take that position argue by implication that nothing at all is wrong with the present situation. Having proved to their own satisfaction that employers’ lapses from impartiality are unimportant or nonexistent, they are led to believe that women’s low position must derive from the free choice of the women themselves.8 Women occupy the lowest rungs of the ladder at the lowest pay voluntarily. Any woman who doesn’t want to doesn’t have to, these economists imply. Yet there is a great deal of evidence that women’s poor labor market position has derived in large part from discrimination in placement and pay, and that, despite some progress, discrimination continues to play a significant role. Statistical studies of the data on women’s and men’s pay and

6


qualifications indicate that the gap between men’s and women’s pay cannot be explained away by differences between the sexes in experience or education. The evidence from statistical studies is reinforced by sworn testimony in courts of law about conditions in many workplaces. There are employers who routinely refuse to hire women for certain jobs and to consider them for most promotions.

The Future of the Two-Parent Family The wife in a traditional family spent full time in and around the home, on permanent assignment to clean it up, care for the children, prepare the meals, see to everyone’s comfort. The marriage ceremony was supposed to obligate her and her husband to stay together until one of them died. There was a strong taboo against having children out of wedlock. These arrangements made life comfortable and secure for many people, at least for those who had a white man with a good job as part of their family. But the comfort and security were based on the denial of freedom to women and men. Women who wanted children were all but forced into such an arrangement by the denial of any alternative means of getting money. Men were denied the right to exit easily from a marriage they found unsatisfying, although the double standard did allow them a wide-ranging sexual freedom both before and during marriage. A homosexual lifestyle was difficult for either sex, but far more difficult financially for women. The emergence of women into the paid labor force on a large scale has reduced and disrupted home comforts because the wife is absent much of the day. High-quality child care is no longer built into each family. The wife herself is buffeted by competing demands on her time. Half of the marriages now end in divorce, as wives’ jobs allow both wives and husbands to terminate marriages they are unhappy in. The custom of being married before having a child is eroding, especially among blacks, but among whites as well. In 2000, one-third of births were to unmarried women.9 Not only have the comforts and the stability of the husband–wife family been impaired, its very existence as the basic social unit in our society has been brought into question. People holding to religious traditions of female subservience preach against the emergence of women into the marketplace and the weakening of the husband–wife family it has caused. They sympathize not at all with the constricted life of the obligatory housewife. They see the comfort and security of the traditional family, and the god-given authority of the husband, as having been traded away for a mess of pottage—the appliances, gadgets, cars, vacations financed by the wife’s paycheck. One does not have to be a devotee of Old Testament attitudes to recognize that valuable things have been lost in women’s transition to a place in the market economy. Children of job-holding mothers can’t spend their first years in a quiet and protected environment, basking in the undivided attention of a person who prizes them above all others. The assumption that


7

a marriage was for life created feelings of security that have now been lost. But the old system sacrificed the autonomy of the female half of the adult population to the convenience of the male half and to children’s secure nurture. It is not the injustice of putting all of that sacrifice onto women that has brought it to an end, but the lure of a better standard of living. In any case, the evident hope of conservatives that wives can be cajoled back into being housewives looks to be in vain. The old-fashioned family at its best provided stability, warmth, company, adequate financing, a sustaining flow of caring and help. We should not have to do without them, but it should not require a caste-like sex-role system and the subordination of women to provide them. We can recapture some of the comfort and security only by reforms that take account of the new realities. The sacrifices required to raise children and maintain a comfortable home have to be redistributed between the husband and the wife. New schedules of working hours, new purchases of services, new habits of sharing domestic chores would reduce conflict, make marriage more equitable, and possibly reduce divorce.

Changes in Men’s Lives Men are bound to be affected by the changes in women’s lives. Up to now, however, women have done most of the changing. They have taken on tasks and duties previously typical only of men, but men have been much slower in taking on activities and responsibilities typical of women. This is hardly surprising, since men’s superior status has required holding themselves aloof from women’s work. So far, men’s failure to take on an equal share of housework appears to have produced gains for them. Those whose wives have become employed have enjoyed a substantial increase in income and standard of living with very little increase in effort on their part. Some of the increasing number of divorces may be due to friction over housework. Men’s preeminence in the labor market will weaken as women compete with them on previously male turf. The flow of women into the labor market puts downward pressure on wage levels in all parts of the labor market—including the parts where men predominate. Wives’ increasing economic independence has been another cause of increased rates of divorce. The foundation stone of a lifetime, monogamous marriage had been the wife’s lack of ability to support herself at a level above subsistence. According to law and custom, males have had the responsibility of being the sole source of the money their wives and children lived on. Men have prided themselves on this role and have taken their central identity from it. Both economically and psychologically, it has been the counterpart for men of the child care role for women. In the past, some men did desert their wives and children, even though that meant leaving them destitute. But that took a very callous heart. Now that wives have jobs, husbands can leave with less of a wrench to their consciences. Many men have gone on to found second families, some of which have been abandoned in their turn.

8


It is hard to believe that the happiness of men would best be served by the conversion of a high proportion of adult males to rogue elephant status, living only fitfully with females and the young, of use to them only at mating time. But unless the husband–wife family based on long-run committment can be revitalized to accommodate the new roles of women, that is the direction in which men may be headed. In all likelihood, men’s financial wings will be somewhat clipped in future. Divorced fathers and fathers of out-of-wedlock children have not been rigorously forced to share some of their income with their children. Currently only a minority of absent fathers make substantial, steady contributions.10 Progress in requiring men to support the children they sire has been painfully slow despite computerization, which allows closer financial monitoring of individuals.

Looking to the Future:The Role of Policy Some feminists claim that a mere equalization among men and women in the chances for high status and reward is not what they are after. They hope that as the old sex-role system breaks up, a new system will emerge in which differences in status and rewards will diminish, competition will be less fierce, and management and supervision will be less hierarchical and more collegial. They want our economy and our society to adopt what they claim is a female style of cooperation, and they advocate an abandonment of the male style of competition and hierarchy. It is by no means clear that these “styles” are really associated with gender, nor is it clear that one style or the other produces better results and happier lives, or that a less competitive style is attainable. That women and men should have equal opportunity in whatever system emerges seems a more realistic if more limited goal. The achievement of that goal is not yet in sight, however. At this point, it is difficult to know whether we are witnessing a trend toward similarity in the roles of men and women, or are instead moving toward new forms of separate roles. Nor can we know if the new roles will be more comfortable and more just. Our main task, through public policy, through private debate, through discussion in the media, is to get rid of old habits and institutions that are sources of injustice or are out of line with the new realities. New habits of behavior, more appropriate to the new situation, have to be found and made habitual. In the past, the habit of reserving jobs with a “family wage” for men was rationalized on the ground that men were the sole support of their families. That rationalization served male superiority, but even as an excuse it has become outdated. A majority of husbands have been joined in the labor market by their wives, and are no longer their families’ sole earners. Millions of single mothers need jobs with wages that will allow them and their children to live decently. Yet the mindsets and behavior patterns that have in the past kept women out of the better jobs are by no means extinct or even close to it. There still are men who disdain to have women as


9

superiors on the job, even as coworkers. Many women, sensing that unconventional behavior brings trouble, still restrict their ambitions to traditional jobs. Sex discrimination in employment has been against the law in the United States since 1964, and has diminished, but it is far from dead. Unless we can create a fair labor market, the era of independence for women will be an era of poverty for many of them and their children. We have yet to put in place a system that will insure a decent level of living for the families of single parents. In the 1930s, when no one expected that a mother would or could take a job, single mothers were given entitlement to a stipend, which was paid on condition that they not earn substantial pay. That “welfare” system was almost universally acknowledged to be a failure—on the right because it facilitated out-of-wedlock births, on the left because the stipend provided a below-the-poverty-line standard of living. In 1996, a “reform” bill was passed which took away the entitlement. But the needs of working single parents, whether previously on welfare or not, for subsidized child care, health insurance, unemployment insurance, and help with housing have not yet been met. The current court-based system of awarding and collecting child support payments from absent parents does a poor job and needs reform. Eventually child support payments will have to be administered like tax collections. When they are, sexual relations with women will be less of a lark for men than they are now. Intercourse will carry risk of serious long-term consequences for men, as it always has for women. Marriage can become a loving alliance between two economically and socially equal people. For this to happen, attitudes toward housework will have to be reformed. Husbands will have to change more diapers, sweep more floors, wash more clothes. Of all changes in habits and attitudes that are needed, this may be the hardest to accomplish. The adoption of flexible, shorter work hours by employers would facilitate sharing of housework between husbands and wives. The current standard workweek dates from a time when most full-time workers had full-time housewives to wait on them. To some degree, capitalist enterprises have risen to the rescue of the twoearner family. Businesses providing out-of-the-home child care and “fast food” have grown in number. These developments have enabled families to buy some of the services formerly performed on an unpaid basis by the wife, and has allowed wives to reduce their hours of housework. We need to encourage a further organization of public and private ventures to advance this trend. Innovative housing and neighborhoods might allow two-earner couples with children to live and work in a safe environment, close to their jobs, where their need for child care and other services can be met in an efficient way. It is by no means certain that habits and institutions can be changed so as to bring about a society that is equitable between women and men. The alternative is a sad one. Men would maintain their larger paychecks and women their smaller ones. But the increasing divorce rate and the decreasing marriage rates mean that progressively fewer men would be sharing their

10


paychecks with women and children. More children and their mothers would slide into poverty or near-poverty as the fathers of those children spent their family wage on themselves. Within the husband–wife family, the overload of duties on the wife would continue. We need work, study, and experimentation to find the right mix of policies, and political means to carry them out. Both men and women will have to take part in this work—in the refashioning of our habits and institutions so that they are just, comfortable, and safe. It may be possible to move toward a world in which both men and women can have the same freedom to develop and contribute. It may be possible for adults to join in stable family unions for economic and social sustenance, in which the loving and generous care and support of children is assured. If we can imagine such a world, then it may be in our power to devise the means to move toward it.

2 Why Did Women Emerge?

The liberation of women from exclusive domesticity did not originate in feminist books, or a war, or a big inflation, although those things did contribute to its progress. The rising enrollment of women in the paid labor forces of the developed world is a straightforward consequence of the industrial revolution of over two hundred years ago. That revolution has produced a long and continuing rise in the productivity of labor in the developed nations of the world. Economic progress has steadily raised the wage for an hour’s labor—the price of human beings’ time. Women have had to sell their time at a cheaper rate than men, and still must do so. But over the decades, the price employers have paid for women’s time has steadily risen along with the price paid for men’s. The key to women’s economic emergence is that their time has risen in price until it has become too valuable to be spent entirely in the home. The spread of the idea that women are entitled to equal status and opportunities, as well as the changes in attitudes about what kinds of lives are possible, decent, and desirable for women, are a direct result of the rise in women’s employment. The changes in women’s lives which the rise in their jobholding has brought about are visible not only in the workplace, but also in schools, divorce courts, kitchens, child care centers. The cash wages which women earn motivate and finance many of the changes that have occurred in their lives. The prospect of good jobs motivates college education for many women, and their earnings pay for some of the tuition of their children. Women’s earnings finance paid-for child care, and the independent lives they must lead in case of divorce. The idea that women should have the same rights as men, and the same right to play leading roles in the economy and in society, gains acceptance as more women can and do pay for some or all of the bread on their tables. The tide of women into paid employment has risen for more than a century. But for decades very little attention was paid; possibly the liberation of women from exclusive domesticity was news that people did not want to hear. The progressively greater numbers of employed women started drawing public attention only toward the end of the 1970s. By then,

12


people could not help noticing, because women who were employed had become the majority and women without jobs a minority. If we look back, beyond the nineteenth century, which was the heyday of the housewife, to our preindustrial past, we see an era in which most wives did more than just housekeeping work. They did farm chores, or performed tasks in small-scale crafts enterprises run out of the family’s home. As industrialization progressed, however, people moved to cities and the work of urban men was moved to sites away from the home. Most married women became isolated from all work apart from housekeeping and child rearing. An urban husband in modest circumstances could take pride in the fact that he was now like a rich man in one respect at least—his wife had nothing to do with earning money, only with spending it.1 We can sight the modest beginnings of wives’ emergence from this isolation from earning in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The labor market then was uninviting to women—the largest single paid occupation open to them was domestic service. Many of the women who worked for pay then did so because they lacked a father, a husband, a brother, or a son to keep them at home in comfort. African American and immigrant women from poverty-stricken families made up a considerable part of the female workforce, and their status and condition were such that no one would choose to emulate them. To society at large, and particularly to women enjoying the economic protection of a father or a husband, the condition of those women who worked for pay as servants or in factories, and even that of the “old maids” who worked as teachers, appeared pitiful. Gradually, however, conditions changed. Some of those women who had men who could pay for their keep started to join the workforce. Among them were women with the ambition to practice a profession or run a business, and a few with literary aspirations—the “thousand scribbling women” of whose competition Hawthorne so bitterly complained. But women of more common gifts made up the bulk of the new entrants.2 Some of them enjoyed the work they were allowed to take up and all of them appreciated the money that went with it. The economic and social forces favoring the emergence of women from full-time unpaid domesticity grew steadily more important. As more and more women joined the parade from the home into paid work, attitudes toward employed women changed. What had been a mixture of pity and opprobrium became acceptance and even, in some quarters at least, admiration.

The Steady March to Employment In 1870, women were about 16 percent of the labor force—those in a job or looking for one. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, their share had grown to 47 percent—just short of half.3 The proportion of women of working age in the labor force doubled in the seventy years between 1870 and 1940. Then there was an acceleration, and it doubled again between 1940 and 1985.4 Women’s participation in the job market has risen more

Why Did Women Emerge?

13

slowly since the 1980s, but has kept rising nonetheless, and in 2004 was near its all-time high, despite a sluggish labor market.5 The steadiness of the advance in women’s participation over this long time period is quite remarkable. Every decade after 1870 shows an advance in the proportion of the labor force that is female. It fell back for a few years right after World War II, when Rosie the Riveter was fired so that her job could be given to a man, and in an occasional year of recession. Between 1948 and 2003, women’s labor force participation rate rose from 32 to 61 percent. By contrast, men’s participation rate has dropped quite steadily since 1948, when it was 89 percent, and was down to 76 percent by 2003. The drop in men’s participation rate is mostly due to a decline in the participation rate of men aged 65 and over.6 The gap between the sexes in participation rates, which was 68 points in the last decades of the nineteenth century, had gradually shrunk to 15 points by the early twenty-first century.

Changes in Life Patterns In each succeeding decade over the last 130 years, more and more women were to be found participating in the labor market. But numbers of workers do not tell the whole story. As time went by, the pattern of women’s lives changed. Successive generations of women spent more years in the labor market than their mothers and grandmothers had done, and worked during phases of their lives their mothers would have considered sacred to domesticity. Many women born in the later half of the nineteenth century never spent a day of their lives in a paid job. However, by 1890, considerable numbers of young, unmarried women were holding jobs, as women of their age had done over the centuries. In 1890, most young women left the labor force very promptly when they married. Some of them were forced by their employers to leave when they married, but most of them probably gave up their jobs before the wedding voluntarily, as a matter of custom.7 This retirement from paid work must surely have accorded with the desires of their husbands, for whom the possession of a stay-at-home wife was a matter of pride. As time passed, newly married women started staying in their jobs until they became pregnant with their first child, at which time they retired. Some of them retired for good. But as the years went on, it became more common for women to come back to paid jobs when their youngest child finished high school. At the same time, the number of children that women were having decreased, reducing the number of years between the birth of the first child and the departure from the home of the last. And as time went on, more women returned to take up a job while still having a child of school age. Today, some new mothers stay home from work after the birth of a child only long enough to recover physically from the delivery. Others take a few weeks or a few months at home with the baby. Still others stay home for longer periods, but they are in the minority. One study found that as many as one-fifth of employed mothers-to-be stayed on the job until the final

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month of pregnancy and resumed working shortly after childbirth. Most of this group did not reduce their hours on the job after the birth.8 Of mothers of children less than one year old, 31 percent participated in the labor force in 1976 and 55 percent in 2000.9 In the nineteenth century, women from the most prosperous families were the ones who stayed out of the labor force. Their counterparts today are to be seen populating the most prestigious professions. Of women born in the period 1886–1895, about 30 percent were in the labor force in their early twenties. The rest were at home, many with children. As more of this cohort of women married, their labor force participation diminished still further. A very slight increase in participation rates is visible for this group after age 35, but the greatest majority of them never did come back to a job. The cohort of women born in the period 1926–1935 had a pattern quite different from that of the women born in the previous century. At each age, they have had higher participation rates than the group born earlier. In their mid-thirties, a considerable number of them took jobs as soon as they sent their youngest child off to school. By the time of the 1970 Census, when women in this group were between 35 and 44, half of them were in the labor force. Each successive cohort of women born after 1935 has had strikingly higher participation rates than its predecessor at each age. This is the result of fewer babies, shorter periods of nonparticipation after the birth of a child, and an increase in the number of women who do not drop out at all. Married women with very young children have been coming into the labor market in recent years or never leaving. Already by 1970, a quarter of the married women who had children under three were in the labor force. By 2000, their participation had grown to 58 percent. Of all mothers of babies under one year, 55 percent were labor force participants in 2000. When the youngest baby became a year old, 63 percent participated, and when it reached two years, 65 percent participated. In all, 72 percent of mothers with children under eighteen were in the labor force, three-quarters of them working full time. Of women with children under six who were employed, 71 percent worked full time.

The Rise in the Price of Time We now want to look for reasons for the movement of women into jobs—a movement that was already in progress by 1870 and continues to this day. During the course of those 130 years, there were periods of war and of peace. There were prosperous periods when the number of jobs grew rapidly, and periods of depression, when the number of jobs shrank and unemployment was high. There were years of inflation and years of price stability or decline. There were, during that period, times when the agitation in favor of equality for women was at a high level, and times when little was heard on that vexing subject.


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Throughout the entire period, however, the rise in women’s participation in paid work went on with no important reversals from one decade to another. This suggests that it was not singular events such as wars, or bursts of inflation, or shifts in ideological fashion that were at the root of this development. We must look for a causative factor which exerted a steadily increasing push throughout the entire period. It is not difficult to find what we are looking for: a gradual economic change that went on over the whole period in question, that was of an important magnitude, and that would have been highly relevant to family decisions about women holding jobs. The substantial increase over the decades in women’s wage rates—the reward they would get for spending time at a job—meets that description perfectly. The hourly wage earned by the average employed women has been on a rising trend since the industrial revolution. Some of that wage rise has been cancelled by inflation in the prices of goods that workers buy. However, when we look at wages after they have been corrected for inflation—so-called real wages—the long-term trend is unmistakably and substantially upward. The data that we have indicate that women’s real wages have more than quadrupled since 1890. The value of goods and services a woman could buy with the earnings from an hour’s work at a job has grown by 1.64 percent per year, on average.10 Looking at more recent times, the median annual earnings of women who worked full time throughout the year in 2003 was $30,982. In 1939, fulltime women workers earned $10,854 in 2003 dollars. Hence women’s pay increased 2.9-fold in terms of purchasing power between those two dates.11 In contrast to the increased value of the time on the job, the value of the time spent at home decreased on average over that same period. An hour of care for a baby at the beginning of the twenty-first century presumably produces the same benefit as an hour of baby care half a century ago. An hour of home baking produces the same pie. However, the mother of the twenty-first century has fewer babies. If she is devoted to full-time domesticity on a long-term basis, she does less baby care than her counterparts of a half century earlier, and spends more time at lower-priority tasks such as pie baking. A women considering leaving full-time domesticity and going to work compares her life in the two situations. She considers the financial reward of outside work, and also how much she values the leisure and housework she would have to forego. (She knows that if she makes the move, she will still have to provide most or all of the basic housekeeping services. She will have to cut corners in doing them, and cut into her own time for rest and recreation.) Even if the value of the activities of a wife at home had stayed the same throughout that period, the rise in the real wage rate would have made the reward for trading off her home activities for job activities almost three times as great in 2003 as it had been in 1939, and more than four times as great as in 1890. We can sum up the argument: over the decades of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a woman’s benefit from working at a paid job was

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gradually rising, and the benefit of staying home was declining. This being the case, the benefits of going out to work were bound to catch up with and surpass the benefits of staying home for an increasing number of women. Each year, more families decided it had become too expensive to spend as much of the wife’s time at home as before. The “price” of her time had become too high for that.

Why the Real Wage Grew If the rise in the real hourly wage available to women workers is at the heart of the outpouring of women from the home, it behooves us to ask why that rise has occurred, and what the prospects are for its continuance. Progressively higher wages over the long term have resulted from progressively higher worker productivity. As time has gone on, workers have been enabled to produce a greater volume per hour of output of improved quality. The improvement in productivity has on occasion faltered, but the long-term direction has been upward. In any particular country, a bad recession or a disruptive turn in economic policy or in the political setup may interrupt progress. Nevertheless, the basic progressiveness of Western capitalist economies seems to be deeply embedded, and the process of fairly continual improvement shows no sign of coming to an end. On the contrary, we are now in a period of very rapid technological change. The most important source of increase in worker productivity in our economy is technological change. Newer and better processes of production, new products, more efficient machines, and better management are introduced year after year. Improvements in the technology used in the productive processes have been going on in Western capitalist countries since the industrial revolution in the latter part of the eighteenth century. A second factor leading to greater worker productivity has been the continual growth in our stock of capital goods—the productive equipment of the workplace. This growth in capital allows us to implement the advances in scientific and technological knowledge by creating improved and more plentiful machinery and equipment. The better and more plentiful the capital stock that an economy’s workers have to work with, the more productive they are. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the computerization of the economy gave an important boost to productivity. A third major factor leading to higher worker productivity is more and better education. The workers in any particular plant usually have very little to do with changes in the quantity and quality of the equipment with which they work; rather, these improvements in equipment are due to the ingenuity of scientists and engineers, the planning of the management, and the financial investments of the company’s stockholders and creditors. If the improvements in capital structure were narrowly confined to just a few companies, the workers in those companies would be unlikely to get much of a share in the increase of per-worker production. All of it would have gone to the stockholders and the management. However, this process of improvement


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in the quantity and quality of capitalization has permeated large parts of the economy, and as profits increased, the competition for good workers throughout the economy has encouraged an increase in the level of real wages throughout the economy. When the size of the national income increases relative to the size of the labor force, workers tend to get a share of the increase, in the form of increased real wages. Female workers’ wages have remained well below those of men, but as men’s wages have moved up, theirs have too. Had they not done so, female workers would have fallen further and further behind the male workers. There has been little or no tendency for this to happen, despite the fact that the supply of female workers has been increasing faster than the supply of male workers.

Men’s Wages and Women’s Employment The same process of technological change and capital accumulation which has increased women’s wage levels has increased men’s wage levels as well. A rise in the husband’s wage makes the family less needy and better provided with goods. Each successive addition to family income is devoted to buying goods, which, while desirable, are perhaps increasingly less vital to health and comfort.12 Further additions to family income become less urgent; hence the rise in men’s wages works against the entry of wives into employment. The rise in men’s wage levels reduces the additional utility the family would derive from a second paycheck of a given size. At the same time, the rise in women’s wages increases the size of that potential second paycheck. These two effects work in opposite directions, and which effect predominates depends on how close the family is to satiation with purchased goods. Today’s families appear to be still far away from satiation; the continual development of new products bolsters the desire for additional income. So the rise in the family’s standard of living, deriving from the husband’s higher wage, has done little to dampen the desire to cash in on the wife’s improved earning opportunities. The utility the family sees as coming from the wife’s paycheck has on balance grown, until it has overshadowed the benefit derived from her full-time presence in the home. In households where the husband is a physician, a dentist, an independent businessman, or a corporate executive, and he has an income that is considerably above average, a high proportion of the wives are still at home. The benefit of additional dollars to such a family is relatively low. If the wife does not have the training or inclination for professional work, it is relatively difficult for her to find work befitting the social status she derives from her husband. Such families constitute the last bastion of the at-home wife.

The “Need” of Couples for the Money Looked at over the long term, as productivity and wages have risen, jobs have grown progressively more rewarding for men and for women to hold.

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However the explanation that most people give of why more women are holding more jobs than their counterparts in the low-wage past has nothing to do with the increased reward the economy provides to those who choose to hold them. On the contrary, they speak of an increasingly dire need for the income the wife might earn. Without women’s employment, they say, families are deprived, and mothers need to go out to work, to remedy that deprivation. It’s a rotten shame, they imply, but these families now have no other choice. To give just one example, we can quote the historian Alice Kessler-Harris who says, “[A]s the requirements of keeping a home have changed, so too has the framework of women’s lives. Whereas once only poor and working-class families required two incomes to operate a household, in contemporary America the need for two incomes cuts across class lines.”13 The reason for the rise of this alleged need, which must have been less pressing in earlier times when fewer women held jobs, is rather mysterious, at least in the case of married couples. As we have noted, a husband at the beginning of the twenty-first century commands a salary that is (after accounting for inflation) perhaps four times as large as the salary of his counterpart at the beginning of the twentieth century, whose wife was by no means thought to need to work. If today’s family is so much better provided for by the salary of the husband alone, why does the family need the wife’s paycheck when it was not needed previously? Before going further, it will be worth our while to spend some effort demystifying the word “need.” The word can mislead, because it implies very different degrees of urgency in different contexts. When we speak of the needs of extremely poor people, we are talking of what they must have to avoid severe deprivation or possibly even death. However, when people in more ordinary circumstances say they need some product, they usually do not mean that without it they would die or even be in grave difficulty. On the contrary, the most common usage of the term need implies no real urgency whatsoever: we frequently say we need a product we customarily use, but have run out of. When we use the word in that context, the term need merely means that our attention is focused on the product because we will soon be going out and buying it. This is what we mean when we say that we need a jar of mayonnaise. We sometimes say we need a product that, given our income, is just outside of our grasp, but would be one of the first items purchased if more income came our way. Thus, we might say, “Our family needs a second car, but we can’t afford one.” The need for a product we don’t currently buy signifies that the product is at the top of our wish list, and our attention is focused on our desire for it. The same psychological process is at work when we say we need more money. Here the expression of need represents a mental focus on the hoped-for and much-desired next upward step in our standard of living. When a married woman with young children whose husband is working says she is taking a paid job because of her need for the money, she is doing


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two things simultaneously. She is using the term in its ordinary economic context, to signify that her mind is focused on the goods she will buy with the new income—on the rise in the standard of living that the additional income will bring. However, she is probably also doing a bit of punning by evoking the term need as it is used in the context of extreme deprivation, so as to plead an urgency of need somewhat beyond the usual. The reason for the extra burden the word need carries when a mother takes a job is that she is committing a stigmatized act. The married mother who takes a job, even in current circumstances, is still somewhat afraid of being seen to be neglecting her children—a very serious accusation to be faced by any mother. By the same act, she can also be seen as injuring her husband, who loses some of her services and loses his previous status as sole breadwinner. To top it off, all of these allegedly bad things are done so that she may earn money that will be spent on things the family might well do without. A woman’s allusion to her family’s need for the money neatly fends off such accusations (and self-accusations) of callousness and triviality, and invites inferences of self-sacrifice on her part.14 For some women, the invocation of the need for the money also serves to draw attention away from other benefits, which working outside the home might bring—benefits that some consider illicit when enjoyed by women. On the job, she may enjoy the company of other adults (demonstrating, to some eyes, that she lacks complete devotion to her children); she may be accorded some prestige on account of her accomplishments (demonstrating egotism and false pride); she may relish a sense of independence (demonstrating incomplete loyalty to her family role); and may find an outlet for talents and aggressiveness, which are not allowed expression in the housewife role (thereby demonstrating a lack of true femininity). Focusing on need helps to squelch accusations that she is not a true woman. While the rhetoric of needs has been pressed into service to smother criticism of women’s move to paid work, it has not been used without some damage to the cause of equality between women and men. Those trumpeting the financial need, which has caused many women to take jobs have by implication downgraded their other reasons for wanting jobs. The false dichotomy between women who “have to work” and women who “don’t have to” undercuts the right of the woman whose husband has a well-paying job to pursue a career.15 The invocation of the need for women to work reached a crescendo during the inflationary period from 1969 to 1981. Those were the years during which women’s labor force participation was growing rapidly. That was also, as we have seen, the period during which the participation rate of women in jobs passed the 50 percent mark, and the continuing entry of women into the labor force became salient to the general public. People were starting to cast around for explanations for women’s greater participation in the labor market, and the most common reason cited both by individual women themselves and by the media during that period was that

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inflation was forcing women into the labor market. There were predictions that if inflation could be conquered, women would go back to the home. During the inflation of the 1970s, real hourly wages did cease to rise, and after-tax real incomes did fall for some.16 So there may have been some justified feelings of deprivation. However, the most likely reason for the popularity of the inflation explanation was that it fitted in so well with a desire to make women’s move to the labor market look involuntary. In any case, inflation has not been a problem in subsequent decades, but women have continued to enter and stay in the workforce. The invocation of need as an explanation of women’s entry into the job market is, in most cases, for the purpose of laying down a smokescreen. But, of course, the need argument does hold water in the case of those women, many with children, who do not have a husband on whose paycheck they can rely. Such women are a growing share of the population, and the welfare reform of 1996 has reduced their ability to refrain from jobholding. Moreover, among couples, those with only one spouse in the labor market do have less income than those among their friends who are in two-earner couples. As a result, even if they are affluent, they may feel deprived relative to their friends, and thus consider themselves in need.

The Effect of Labor-Saving Devices in the Home Labor-saving devices in the home have probably encouraged labor force participation on the part of wives. They reduced the time required to maintain a given standard of meal preparation and cleanliness, and freed up time of the wife for use on the job. The invention, production, and diffusion of household devices are integral parts of that process of technological change and capital accumulation that has raised real wages levels. However the laborsaving effect of home appliances is probably minor compared to the effect of the rise in real wages. Cooking, washing, cleaning, and shopping have gotten very much easier over the last century thanks to piped-in water, running hot water, electric lighting, the replacement of coal or wood burning stoves by gas and electric ones, the flush toilet, and the refrigerator. With the exception of automatic washers and dryers, the important labor-saving household devices were in common use, at least for city dwellers, by 1930.17 However, there is one pivotal domestic task whose time requirements no piece of machinery can change—the care of a child. Being continually on call for the children and rendering them personalized, loving, and attentive care has been and continues to be the essential raison d’etre of the housewife occupation. New products have brought minor changes in some of the techniques of home child care—disposable diapers or amusing the child with television come to mind. But no product can reduce the need for spending time in the company of the child, watching over its safety, and being on call to comfort it and keep it in order. The only way family members can reduce


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the amount of labor they devote to child care is to have fewer children, and to procure the paid or unpaid help of nonmembers. This peculiarity of child care—the fixity in what we might call the attendance requirement for carrying on the care of children at home— somewhat attenuates the importance of labor-saving devices as an explanation of women’s increasing labor force participation, particularly for mothers of preschool children. For them, the use of domestic labor-saving devices cannot have the effect of creating perfectly free time. Child care is easy to combine with other domestic chores, but not easy to combine with leisured relaxation.

New Products as a Spur to Work New mechanized household appliances saved wives’ housekeeping time, but they may have affected wives’ work behavior in another way as well. Economist Clair Brown has suggested that the desire to acquire these and other new consumer goods was a major force propelling women into the paid labor force.18 In theory, this is certainly possible, although it is an effect that seems difficult to measure, and difficult to compare in importance to other effects. One product introduced in the last 100 years stands out as particularly likely to have occasioned a rearrangement of priorities—the automobile. Married couples with children have expenses connected with automobiles that average almost $10,000 out of a family budget of $51,000 in the United States.19 An expense of this magnitude would be impossible in many families with only one paycheck. If the introduction of automobiles into widespread use is indeed a major factor in drawing housewives out into the labor market, then it is possible that we have underestimated the extent to which husbands’ desires have played a part. For a number of decades husbands did most of the driving, and were the major enthusiasts for the automobile. Perhaps the most common image of family decision making concerning the wife’s work—wives pushing to go out to work over the sullen but somewhat soft opposition of their husbands—is not accurate. Perhaps husbands have been more instrumental in the demise of the housewife occupation than has been realized. In addition to new products, there were new ways of selling them. Television advertisements increased people’s hunger for goods outside their current budgets. The vividness of television advertising, the sight of fictional families luxuriating in new-minted material comforts, may well have caused many real families to reassess their priorities. Large numbers of families certainly ended up trading part of the wife’s household services and much of her leisure for cash they used to buy things they saw on their home screens. If the introduction of highly desirable new products were to flag, a continued rise in wage levels would eventually bring about a situation in which the benefit of family members’ extra hours in the labor force would be dropping rather than rising. Family members (not necessarily only the

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wife) would eventually want to increase their home time and curtail their time at paid work, particularly if work schedules were to become less standardized and more flexible.

The Growth of “Suitable” Occupations The growth in jobs considered suitable for women has been cited by some social scientists as a major explanation for the growth of women’s labor force participation.20 The occupations that seemed suitable, according to this theory, were those that reminded people of the tasks women have traditionally performed. Nursing the sick, caring for and teaching small children, and sewing are examples. Clerical work was considered clean and ladylike. The suitable-jobs theory and the wage-increase theory that are by no means mutually exclusive. Both emphasize the importance of changes in the methods of production. In the wage-change theory, improved productivity increases the demand for labor, leading to higher wages, which attracts women to leave off being housewives. In the suitable-jobs theory, changes in technology and also in the kinds of products produced have altered the nature of the jobs that employers want to fill, and this is pointed to as the main force behind women’s greater employment. The suitable-jobs theory can have both supply-side and demand-side implications. Employers may have expanded the demand for women’s labor because they considered new jobs they were creating to be suitable for them. Or women themselves may have supplied more labor as they found that an increasing number of jobs had duties that were congenial to them.21 In trying to assess the validity of the suitable-jobs theory, we have to think about what “suitability” means. There are certain societies in Africa where women do all of the heavy agricultural work, all of the business dealings, and all of the work of family care. The men are at leisure full time. In such a society, presumably no tasks are unsuitable to women. Lifting and carrying the heaviest of loads is “women’s work” in many societies. The designation of some jobs as unsuitable for women in any particular society is a matter of social convention, rather than a reflection of women’s inherent disabilities or inborn dislikes for certain kinds of work. People’s ideas about suitability can and do change when the economy changes. It is certainly true that the number of jobs considered suitable for women grew very rapidly in the industrialized countries in the course of the twentieth century. Women indeed came forward to occupy such jobs in large numbers. However, some of the jobs currently considered suitable, which have had high growth rates, were originally not thought suitable for women. Clerks were once exclusively male, and their jobs considered unsuitable for women by employers.22 As long as there were few, if any, women clerks, most women probably considered the work unfeminine and therefore unsuitable for them. In order for there to be a change, a few employers had to decide that hiring women as clerks was a reasonable and profitable thing


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to do. They had to find a few women to take the jobs, which was probably not difficult. Once that happened, the growth of the idea among employers and women workers that such jobs were suitable for women was only a matter of time. The job of bank teller, which once required a male to signal the bank’s financial probity and expertise, has also gone from all male to mostly female.23 A change in the sex typing of a job does take effort and innovation on the part of employers. It appears to happen most easily in wartime, when labor shortages develop, and the mobilization of all resources available to the society may be required. The immediate postwar period typically brings an almost complete reversion to the prewar situation, but traces of the wartime experiences remain and the seeds of subsequent change may have been sewn.24 In peacetime, reclassifications happen relatively infrequently. Since changing the sex typing of occupations is difficult, the incorporation of newly entering women workers into jobs probably goes more smoothly if jobs of a type already considered suitable for them become available in larger numbers. If that happens, few additional occupations need to have their sex-identity changed. However, history suggests that attitudes toward suitability can and do change in response to large fresh supplies of women’s labor. Higher-than-average rates of growth in clerical and retail sales jobs already considered suitable for women did facilitate women’s labor force entry over the twentieth century. But the idea that the massive move of women into paid work depended on that happening is probably invalid.

Might the Trend Ever Reverse Itself? The increase in women’s labor force participation over the last century is rooted in the long-term rise in the real wage—the price of women’s time—a rise based on technological change and capital accumulation. Even in periods where the growth in the real wage has sputtered, come to halt, and temporarily reversed itself, the momentum built up by decades of growth continued to pull women into the paid workforce. We can anticipate further technological advancements and capital accumulation. However, it is possible that globalization—resulting from freer trade and the growing ability of multinational enterprises to profitably utilize low-paid labor in underdeveloped countries—might disrupt the trend toward higher real wages in the developed countries. The labor force available to owners of advanced capital equipment has in effect been enlarged manyfold. While this will eventually foster women’s emergence into the money economy in countries that are currently underdeveloped, it puts downward pressure now on the real wage of both men and women in North America and in Europe. If the labor forces of the underdeveloped countries are joined with those of the developed countries into a worldwide labor market, wage levels and the treatment of workers in developed countries might worsen considerably. For similar reasons, the high rate of legal and

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illegal immigration that is occurring in Europe and North America may reverse at least for a time the trend to higher wages there. Another result of globalization might be increased unemployment, as wages in the developed world do not move down fast enough to prevent substantial outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries. In times of high unemployment, governments think of getting women out of the labor force. The provision of three years of paid parental leave in Sweden, France, and Germany may well be an expression of a desire to shrink the unemployment rate. It is possible, however, that even if the economic factors that have brought about the entry of wives into the workforce were to be reversed, women would stay in jobs. If wages fell, living standards would fall. But people attempt to preserve their standard of living when economic developments threaten to reduce it. Keeping two earners per family in the labor market is a way of doing that. But even more importantly, the changes in social practices and attitudes that occurred during the twentieth century will continue to promote women’s work, even if the purely economic factors that engendered them were to reverse themselves for a time. Birthrates have fallen, more women are getting a college education, and divorce rates are higher. All of these social developments have furthered the move of women into the labor force, and the increase in women’s participation has in turn had the effect of furthering these social developments. There has been a revival of an ideology of equality between the sexes. Furthermore, because of the currently high women’s labor force participation, the force of social conformity now works to push women into the labor force, whereas it previously worked to keep them out of it. It is to those social changes that we now turn.

3 The Social Factors: Births, Schools, Divorces, Ideas

Yesterday’s women viewed their marriage as lifelong, and expected big families. Many of them knew that their parents had supported their brothers’ education and aspirations while scanting theirs. They were used to hearing themselves described as weak and silly, and many of them thought it advantageous to describe themselves in that way. Today’s women understand that their marriages are for as long as they and their husbands wish. Many give birth to one child or have no children at all. There are still fathers and mothers who favor their sons over their daughters, but they are far fewer. Besides, today’s daughters fight back. When they get to college, they are studying business management in large numbers, and as many female students as male students are headed for medicine or the law. There are still those who think of women as weak and silly. More and more, though, people who think that way are learning to keep such ideas to themselves. These social developments, to which we now turn, have furthered and have been furthered by the rise in women’s employment. They have increased the incentives for women to take up employment and made it harder for them to remain housewives. The new social and economic behaviors reinforce each other. It is easy to see how the social and economic factors interact. The reduction in the number of children per woman reduces the pull to stay home. Once a woman is out at paid work, the financial sacrifices involved in having another baby becomes obvious, and a deterrent to having it. A divorced woman needs an independent income, and all married women now understand that divorce is a possibility for them. Once a married woman has her own income, she and her husband may have less incentive to preserve their marriage. If the wife has a job, she has an easier time escaping an abusive marriage. The spread of higher education for women and changes in attitudes toward their roles have opened up more and better jobs for them. In turn, the prospect of better jobs has affected girls’ educational plans, and their parents’ plans for them.

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Changes in Birthrates The fall in birthrates has been going on for even longer than the rise in women’s employment. The number of children per woman fell throughout the nineteenth century, and that continued into the twentieth century, with only a temporary interruption for the post–World War II baby boom. Fewer babies have meant more jobs for wives, and more jobs have meant fewer babies. The drop in fertility is of great economic consequence in many respects. A family with fewer children will have different expenditure patterns, and will make different residential choices. For the community, the birthrate affects the demand for schools, the supply of soldiers to the army, the supply of young people’s labor. It affects the ratio of working to retired people, and thus the rate at which working people will have to be taxed to support the retired. The decline in fertility has not been as smooth as the rise in employment and wages for women. The baby boom which erupted after the close of World War II in 1945 sent birthrates climbing back to levels as high as those in the 1920s. However much of the increase in birthrates which occurred during the baby boom represented a change in the timing of the births rather than an increase in the number of babies born per woman. By 1956, the long-term downward trend in the birthrate had reasserted itself, and with some interruptions that trend has continued. Birthrates were at a record low in 2002.1 The average age at marriage is rising, and the number of people who do not marry is also on the increase. The number of women remaining childless also appears to be on the rise. So is the age of the mother at her first delivery. These developments suggest larger numbers of women will have continuous job experience at the start of their careers. White American women born in the first half of the nineteenth century who became mothers averaged more than 5 children. A third had 7 or more children, and families with 12 children were not uncommon. White women born in the first 15 years of the twentieth century averaged 2.9 children.2 White women in 2000 were averaging 1.9 children.3 Black women have historically had higher birthrates than white women, despite facing greater economic stringency, a greater incidence of single parenthood, and despite their higher rate of labor force participation. They participated in the baby boom, and like white women have had generally declining rates before and since. They were averaging 2.1 children in 2000; Hispanic women were averaging 3.1 children.4

Why Birthrates Have Fallen One commonly cited reason for the long-term fall in the birthrate is that having children has ceased providing economic benefits to the parents. Another reason is the increasing cost of a child, both in terms of outlay

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required and wages and opportunities foregone, usually by the mother. A third is the improved ability to prevent unwanted births. When families had a farm or a small crafts business, children provided cheap and reliable labor for the their enterprise. The economic benefits the family derived from the children might surpass the costs of raising them. At the very least, there were economic benefits to offset some of those costs. A farm or a crafts enterprise represented a set of valuable assets, which were ordinarily passed on to the children. The existence of these assets gave the parents considerable power over the children, who had an incentive to stay close to and remain on good terms with the parents. The children were expected to run the enterprise in the parents’ old age, and help to support them out of the proceeds. Now family farms and small family crafts enterprises have largely disappeared. Since the industrial revolution, people have increasingly made their living by working for large-scale enterprises they do not own. To a man with a job in such an enterprise, the purely economic benefits of a child are nil. With greater numbers of young people going to college, and needing support into their twenties, the costs of bringing up a child have on average grown considerably. Government pension systems have eliminated the dependence of old people on their children’s support. Under modern conditions, the family has little economic leverage it can bring to bear to influence their children’s behavior. There will be little or no inheritance in most cases; whatever the family can give is presented to the children in the form of a college education. Moreover, the children have opportunities to go off and get jobs on their own. They feel no obligation to live with or close to their parents, much less to contribute out of their wages to their parents’ income. Nancy Folbre, one of the economic historians who has elaborated this argument, suggests that in the past the fathers reaped considerable benefits from children. As industrialization proceeded, and the economic usefulness of children to fathers declined, fathers lost their enthusiasm for large numbers of children, and started cooperating with their wives in fertility control. Since all of the burden of bringing children into the world and almost all of the work of bringing them up has been borne by mothers, they have been glad to fall in with this sentiment.5 Birthrates have historically been highest in rural areas. In the United States, the proportion of the population making its living from agriculture has fallen steadily and dramatically. In 1870, 53.2 percent of American workers were on the farm, while in 2001, fewer than 1 percent of workers were there.6

Women’s Ability to Control Pregnancies and Births Birthrates have been lowered by improvements in the means of contraception and the increase in their availability. Demographers believe that 40 percent of the women born in the 1840s, 60 percent of those born in the 1870s,

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and 70 percent of those born in the 1910s practiced some method of birth control.7 By the 1930s, use of contraceptive devices was almost universal among urban white Protestants and Jews.8 Catholics were slower to adopt the use of artificial birth control, but now do so with the same frequency as other groups, despite the continued opposition of their church to the practice. Prior to the 1960s, birth control methods of relatively low reliability such as coitus interruptus and douches were commonly used. To get an abortion, a woman had to go outside the law to find a back-alley “butcher.” Many abortionists were unskillful, dirty, and rushed. Their services, though expensive, were both painful and dangerous; deaths were not uncommon. A vigorous campaign in the 1920s led by Margaret Sanger popularized mechanical contraceptive devices.9 A contraceptive pill of high reliability was licensed for sale in 1960, and oral contraceptives have since been adopted by a considerable proportion of women. Sterilization has also increased. By 1976, in 40 percent of couples in their thirties and forties, the man or the woman had been sterilized. About half of the sterilizations had been undergone by husbands and about half by wives.10 Margaret Sanger’s campaign for contraception had been carried on in the face of laws in most localities forbidding and punishing the sale of contraceptive devices. It was against the law to send contraceptive devices or information concerning them through the U.S. Mail. The principal political force behind such laws were religious groups, most notably the Roman Catholic Church. Physicians were not active on behalf of freedom to use contraception, and the medical profession had promoted state laws against abortion in the nineteenth century. Prior to the 1960s, many doctors and clinics had a policy of refusing to fit a woman with a diaphragm—then the most reliable contraceptive device— unless she had already had a baby. Laws restricting the use by married couples of contraceptive devices were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965 on the ground that they constituted an invasion of privacy; and the principle was extended to unmarried people in 1972.11 State laws barring abortion were ruled unconstitutional by the Court in 1973 in the landmark case Roe v. Wade, also on privacy grounds.12 Since then, legal abortions have grown to be an important form of fertility control. In 1999, there were 1.3 million abortions in the United States, 342 abortions for every 1,000 live births.13 Although public opinion appears to favor a pregnant woman’s freedom to choose to have an abortion, vocal and politically potent opposition to that freedom continues, again led by religious groups. The mechanical contraceptives, some of them crude, had progressively reduced the average number of children born per women. But through the 1960s, the prospect of an unwanted pregnancy was still a large and daunting possibility for any woman. Couples could not plan the timing and number of their children with a high degree of confidence, so plans did not count for much. With highly effective contraception, backed up by safe and legal

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abortion, it is possible for a woman to make and carry out firm plans for her life in a way that was never possible before. Now that effective planning of fertility can be counted on, education and career planning can proceed with more confidence. More women are looking ahead, and in doing so, they are planning for fewer children than might have been born had they been unable to make reliable plans. Thus effective contraception, and the freedom to have an abortion in case of contraceptive failure, have lowered the number of desired as well as undesired births. Claudia Goldin believes that the availability of the birth control pill has had an important effect on women’s educational plans and subsequent career. The pill reduced the risk involved in having sex, and that, she says, eliminated an important reason for early marriage. Longer singlehood left women free to pursue the kind of education that would lead to a serious career. She notes that after the pill became available, the number of woman getting BA degrees rose rapidly, as did their enrollment in business, medical, and law schools.14 This assumes that early marriage had been due to women’s desire for sex, which could now be satisfied outside of marriage. One might argue instead that early marriage had been due to men’s desire for sex, and that the increasing sexual activity of unmarried women, facilitated by the pill, made marriage less necessary to men. Despite the ample means now available to prevent them, there are still unwanted births. In response to a 1996 survey, mothers characterized 10 percent of the children born to them as “unwanted at conception.”15 Contraceptive failures are more common among the less educated. Among teenagers, failure to use contraception is common. Girls are still imbued with the idea that they are debased by having sex; so they have to pretend to be swept away by passion—a state hardly conducive to contraceptive forethought.16 Obviously there remains considerable room for a further reduction in birthrates. Some economists had speculated that decisions about having children might be thought of in the same way as decisions about buying “consumer durables.” They reasoned that additional income for the family might mean the inclusion in the expanded budget not only of a second car or a vacation home, but also of an additional baby or two.17 Thus, they predicted that as average family income rose, the number of children desired would increase as well. Even before the failure of the birthrate to rise in the prosperous 1990s falsified this theory, it was much criticized by most demographers. There are, after all, important differences between children and consumer durables which this theory did not take into account. Children, far more than durables, commit an adult’s time for years to come, and to activities that are not entirely pleasurable. Children who are difficult or disappointing cannot be scrapped, or sold, or left to gather dust. Those who predicted rising birthrates largely ignored the increased value of the mother’s time, the higher divorce rates, and the increasing power of women, on whom the major burden of child rearing falls, to control their fertility.

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Effect of Lower Birthrates on Labor Force Participation In Moslem countries, the well-understood purpose of the seclusion of women in the home is to isolate them from men who are not their husbands. In the West, the rationale given for the wife’s seclusion from economic activities outside the home has been her need to care of the couple’s children. Thus fewer children brought a relaxation of that seclusion. Lower birthrates clearly do increase the numbers of women in jobs. Causation probably runs in the other direction as well—higher rates of employment for women lowers birthrates. Women with no children or few children have a greater opportunity and incentive to take up a job than women with larger numbers of children. Once on the job, women have an incentive to limit further births. One hundred years ago, a woman might have expected a large number of children and foreseen that much of the rest of her life would be spent caring for them. Seeing seven children through might have taken 30 years or longer. A fall in the number of children per mother has reduced the number of years of child care and increased the number of years in which the mother has an “empty nest.” Women’s life expectancy has increased, thanks in part to reductions in the number of pregnancies and to reduction in the likelihood that a pregnancy will result in death. This has also served to increase the years of life mothers spend without children in their homes. Even among women who abstain from paid work, those who have decided to have one or two children have different expectations and attitudes than those who contemplate more. A mother at home with one or two young children, who has no intention of having any more, can at least contemplate the possibility of taking up a job in six years or less. She is unlikely to view child care as a lifetime vocation. By contrast, a mother with many children, who anticipates the possibility of more, can see motherhood as an all-absorbing occupation into an indefinite future. She knows that for a considerable proportion of the time, at least one of her children, will have some illness or other and will require continuous attention. The larger the number of children, the higher is the likelihood of having one with a severe physical or mental problem, requiring a full-time caretaker indefinitely. The more children a mother has, the larger would be the child care costs and the smaller would be the net financial benefit from her paycheck, were she to take a job. Mothers who have fewer children are more likely to participate in paid work and so the reduction in the number of children per family has encouraged mothers to take jobs. However, that factor cannot account for the entire increase in women’s employment in recent years, or even most of it. The effect of fewer children on the work behavior of mothers is relatively small, quantitatively.18 Participation remains substantial regardless of the number of children. Of mothers with one or two children, 74 percent are

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labor force participants. This drops only to 63 percent for mothers with three children and 53 percent for those with four.19

The Effects of Education In 1870, women received only 17 undergraduate degrees for every 100 men received.20 The number of women earning colleges degrees increased steadily and took a big leap after World War II. Men made an even bigger advance at that time, as a result of government programs subsidizing the education of veterans of the armed services. However, women have been making progress relative to men since then at a rapid rate. Female undergraduate enrollment has surpassed male enrollment in colleges since 1980, and there are now 128 female undergraduates enrolled for every 100 males.21 The increase in the latter half of the twentieth century in the share of professional degrees awarded to women is particularly striking. In 1960, women were earning 6 percent of the degrees in medicine, 3 percent of those in law, and fewer than 1 percent of those in dentistry. By 1997, they were earning 41 percent of the medical degrees, 44 percent of the law degrees, and 37 percent of the dentistry degrees. They were getting 39 percent of the MBA degrees, as compared to 4 percent in 1971.22 These increases testify to a greater interest on the part of women in practicing these professions, a greater willingness of their parents to support them through expensive years of study, and a decrease in sex discrimination in admissions on the part of professional schools. Women who have achieved these degrees have been able to get professional jobs, a necessary condition for encouraging enrollment. A considerable part of the credit for these developments is due to those who passed Title IX of the Education Amendments in 1972, which bars educational institutions that receive federal funds from discriminating on account of sex. That meant that the professional schools could no longer discriminate against women applicants. Women college graduates earn pay that is 75 percent higher than women with only a high school diploma.23 Not only does a college graduate command higher pay, she is also more likely to have a job with higher status and more interesting work. As a result, women who are college graduates are more likely to be in the labor force than those who are high school graduates. Increasing enrollment of daughters in college has affected the labor force participation of mothers. Daughters’ college expenses have increased the financial needs of families, pushing more mothers into taking jobs. While it is clear that more education motivates employment, it is certainly reasonable to suppose that there is some influence going in the other direction. The increasing awareness that their daughters will hold a job for a considerable part of their adult lives encourages parents to contribute to daughters’ college expenses, where previously many were only willing to contribute to sons’. Increasing affluence resulting from the long-term rise in wage rates has also encouraged this.

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The Demise of Marriage-for-Life The traditional view of marriage in this country and in Western Europe has been that the bride would acquire a permanent source of financial support for herself and any children she might have. This view was enshrined in the husband’s legal duty to be the family’s sole provider of financial support, a legal theory that lives on in a somewhat attenuated form. Except under unusual circumstances, it was contemplated that a marriage would be terminated only by the death of one of the spouses. Women were encouraged by their parents to search for spouses who would be “good earners.” Having found and captured the affections of a man willing to marry her, a woman was taught by the prevailing culture that any effort to sell her own labor in a hostile marketplace would be unnecessary and undesirable. A wife was not, of course, infallibly secure. She might be impoverished by her husband’s failure as worker, or businessman, or farmer. He might sink into alcoholism, go to prison, or die an early death, leaving her with no source of income. But in that case, her parents, her numerous brothers and sisters, or perhaps her children, might come to the rescue. The one calamity from which she was supposed to be safe was her husband’s desire to terminate the marriage, provided she remained faithful to her marriage vows. In reality, we may speculate that, even if divorce was unlikely, desertion was an ever-present threat. The huge size of the country and the existence of the frontier allowed men to escape and make a new start somewhere else, possibly with a new wife. Many husbands who had tired of the brand of domesticity provided by their wives must have escaped that way. It is difficult to estimate the incidence of marital breakup due to desertion in the nineteenth century, but formal divorce was uncommon. However, divorce rates were on the rise by the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century saw further rise. There was one divorce per year per thousand married couples in 1860, and nine a century later. After 1960 a rapid spurt took place, during which divorce rates more than doubled.24 It is currently estimated that 54 percent of first marriages will have ended in divorce within the 25 years following the wedding. Only about half of the divorces occur in the first 7 years, so that many of the breakups occur in relationships that have gone on a considerable time.25 Separation by mutual agreement or by desertion remains common. Now separations more frequently end in formal divorce than was the case in prior years. However the fall in the death rate has lowered the proportion of marriages that end due to a spouse’s death in a given year. Women’s labor force participation has been increased by divorce in obvious ways. Alimony or child support payments from the former husband, if received at all, are small and unreliable. So a wife who has stayed out of the labor market has to get a new source of income when she gets divorced. Prior to 1996, a divorced woman with children had the

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option of going onto the welfare rolls, which meant living in poverty. That option has now been much curtailed. But even before welfare reform, divorced women had a relatively high rate of labor force participation. Now, after welfare reform, the number of divorced women with the custody of children in the job market has increased. While remarriage is frequent, unremarried divorcees are a sizeable group, currently constituting 15 percent of all ever-married women.26 Young girls see quite plainly that they cannot depend on their own marriages to last for their whole lives. Some see their own mother’s marriage disrupted, and all of them see it happen to the mothers of friends their own age. They understand that the economic security of a housewife is precarious. As time passes, it is likely that a smaller and smaller proportion of young girls plan to spend long years in that precarious state. In matters of divorce and jobs for women, we can again see that causation runs in both directions. Conflicts about the sharing of housework in two-earner couples may make separation and divorce more likely. Women with independent access to money income are more likely to want to end a distasteful marriage. Husbands of women with earnings may find it easier on their consciences to terminate their marriages than do husbands of housewives. While women’s earnings motivate or permit some divorces, they probably improve the quality of life in the marriages that persist. Dual-earner couples have more money than they would have if they depended completely on the husband’s salary, and the husband is relieved from the strain of being the sole provider. His periods of unemployment or illness are less stressful. Moreover, the spouses may interact more as equals, which may make life more pleasant.

A Shortage of Husbands? Some observers have suggested that a husband shortage has been an important factor in the rise in women’s move toward financial independence. The proportion of the adult female population not currently married has grown from 34 percent in 1950 to 46 percent in 2002.27 About a third of this rise comes from an increase in the proportion of women who have never married. The rest results from a rise in divorce, and a rise in the proportion of divorcees who have not remarried. These figures suggest a lesser availability of men for marriage, a greater desire and ability on the part of women to remain unmarried in the absence of a suitable man, or a combination of the two. Barbara Ehrenreich has suggested that much of the change in sex roles derives from an increasing desire on the part of men to be free from a permanent commitment to one woman.28 Some shun the “ball and chain” of marriage and family altogether. Other men practice “serial polygamy” through multiple marriages and divorces. Either way, women are left without the promise of reliable support. Ehrenreich does not venture an explanation

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for the waning of men’s willingness to serve as the reliable lifelong support of one woman, but she says that the waning has left women with no alternative but to be prepared to fend for themselves. The result, she says, is increased interest in jobs for women and the rise of the ideology of feminism. Martha Guttentag and Paul F. Secord also stress the reduced availability of support from a husband, and consider it the leading cause of women’s increasing independence.29 They cite a progressive reduction in the ratio of men to women. There were 104 males per 100 females early in the twentieth century in the United States, but only 95 per 100 females in 2002.30 The causes included lower death rates for women, wars which take male lives, and a cessation of male-intensive immigration. The scarcity of men means that some women will have to remain unmarried. Guttentag and Secord cite evidence going back through medieval and ancient times showing that societies with excess women have tended to allow women relatively more independence. By social custom, men have been inhibited from marrying women who are better educated or more successful than themselves and women inhibited from marrying men who are less educated or successful. Women’s gains on men in education and in career success means keener competition among a bigger pool of successful women trying to find husbands out of a relatively static pool of successful men. Most men want to marry women younger than themselves. Widows and divorced women have difficulty remarrying because the pool of potential male partners older than they has been thinned by deaths. The tradition that prescribes that a husband should be older than his wife also causes a shortage of husbands if there is a period of rapid increase in population. Two decades after the onset of a baby boom, there will be more women in their early twenties than there are men who are five to ten years older. Thus the women of the baby boom generation have spent longer periods of their lives without husbands than would be the case had they been born in times of more moderate population growth. The sexual revolution—a reduction in the taboo on sex for women outside of marriage—has made the cohabitation of unmarried couples more common. In 1999, there were five million of such households, accounting for more than 9 percent of all heterosexual couples in the United States.31 Their numbers appear to be growing, as the number of married couples shrinks. In this less formal alternative to marriage, the female partner is less likely to consider financial dependence on the man to be a long-term possibility, and is more likely to hold on to a job and perhaps a career. In any case, the existence of such relationships reduces the numbers of people available for marriage, in which dependence of the woman on the man is still common. In the past, a considerable number of gay men and lesbians felt they had to conceal their proclivities by marrying a person of the opposite sex. The greater freedom that they now have to live openly with a same-sex partner has had the effect of decreasing the number of women married to men.

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The hypothesis of spouse unavailability, as expounded by Guttentag– Secord and Ehrenreich, is not incompatible with the hypothesis that improved economic incentives have brought many additional women onto the job market. The two factors may operate at the same time. It is certainly likely that some part of the increased interest of women in taking jobs is due to their lessened dependence on marriage as a source of financial support. Although it is plausible that the scarcity of husbands has contributed somewhat to women’s greater focus on paid work, the husband shortage cannot possibly account for all of the increased labor force participation. Much of the increased employment of women since 1960 is due to the entry into jobs of married women who have young children. This is the part of the population least likely to be affected by a shortage of husbands.

Changing Norms of Behavior for Women Thus far in our discussion, we have largely ignored the fact that people do not make decisions as to work and lifestyle without regard to what others are doing. Most academic economists tend to portray individuals as considering the pros and cons of various courses of conduct in isolation from other individuals, and without any follow-the-herd tendencies. But there is more to the decision-making process than just comparing the material advantages of two paths. Women (and their husbands and children) are highly attentive to the paths their friends and neighbors are choosing to take. All of us feel powerful pressures to conform our conduct to what is perceived to be the norm. At the early stages of the move of women into paid work, the norm was clearly the stay-at-home housewife, doing her womanly duty by her husband and her children. The happy feeling of approval which comes to those who conform to majority practice was among the benefits of continuing as a housewife. The lack of approval attendant on nonconformity reduced the attraction of taking a job. The purely economic incentives were such that an increasing number of women did enter the labor force despite the penalties of unconventionality. Nevertheless, those penalties must surely have acted as a drag, and slowed down the flow of wives into jobs. Since the 50 percent mark in women’s labor force participation was approached and passed in the 1970s, the shoe has shifted to the other foot, so to speak. It has begun to be the full-time housewife who is now seen as failing to conform, and who has been made to feel the pain of nonconformity. There is still some praise to be reaped by those who stay home with their children. But a woman who says she is “just a housewife” is telling us that her status is low and she knows it. A desire for conformity no longer slows down the movement of women into paid work, as it did in the past; rather the desire for conformity to the new norm of the working wife speeds it up. People want to conform in terms of their work behavior; they also want to “keep up with the Joneses” in patterns of expenditure. As more and more married couples have had two earners in the labor force, the standard of

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living of a two-earner couple has increasingly become the norm. In 2001, a married couple with children—with both spouses employed—had on average total earnings that were 46 percent higher than a couple in which only the husband had a job.32 The “Joneses” most of us want to keep up with are not the celebrities or the very rich people we read about in People Magazine or in the style section of the newspaper. We want to keep up with our peer group: our friends, the people we went to school with, our coworkers on the job who are roughly at our level, the parents of our children’s friends. Most American families are now members of a peer group in which most of the couples have two paychecks to spend. These couples have used the wife’s salary to set a new standard for emulation. As the two-earner “Joneses” with whom one have to keep up has grown more numerous in each peer group, the onus of failing to keep up has grown correspondingly greater. The remaining one-earner families have found themselves still further down in the pecking order of their peer group with each succeeding year. This should have the effect of further speeding the demise of the full-time housewife, especially among younger couples. Some sociologists have suggested that the competition of American families for social status through conspicuous consumption has all along played a crucial part in the rise in women’s labor force participation.33 They argue that as more men came to work for large corporations with complex structures, the prestige to be assigned to men’s job titles has grown more difficult for outsiders to gauge. Thus, the assignment of status to a family on the basis of the husband’s job title has become less certain, and to relieve the uncertainty, new markers of status were developed. The purchase and display of expensive goods became a substitute method of displaying status, and wives were enlisted in the battle for status through expenditure. While this theory seems to be in line with much of what we are currently observing, it is less convincing as an explanation of a process that has been going on since the nineteenth century. To Thorstein Veblen, the originator of the idea of “conspicuous consumption,” the centerpiece of a man’s display was his economically useless wife. A man has tended to lose status if his wife took a job. The further back in time we look, the more peculiar would her job have seemed, and the more status would he have lost. Until recently, the loss of the man’s status as sole breadwinner—as a man whose wife “doesn’t have to work”—would have been a severe one. His loss in status was widely seen as a problem for the wife who wanted to take a job, and some of those who stayed home said it was because “he wouldn’t let me.” In short, striving for relative status through showy consumer goods may be an increasingly important cause of the women’s increasing appearance in the job market. But this is probably a recent development, as only recently has wives’ work outside the home ceased to cause a loss of status.

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The Revival of Feminist Ideology Expression of the idea that women should function in the economy and in the community as the equivalents and equals of men goes back at least to Plato’s Republic, written in the fourth century BC. At the end of the fourteenth century, Christine de Pisan, a French single mother who supported herself with her writings, complained about the injustice in the position of women in a long poem.34 In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women expressed ideas of equality of the two sexes essentially identical to the ideas of today. In mid-nineteenth-century America, antislavery agitation energized a group of able and eloquent women—the Grimké sisters, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who went on to spend the rest of their lives campaigning for women’s rights. In England, the philosopher and economist John Stewart Mill was considerably influenced by the feminist ideas of his friend and later wife, Harriet Taylor. His 1869 treatise, On the Subjection of Women, spread those ideas in a wide circle. In 1898, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote of “the demand in women not only for their own money, but for their own work for the sake of personal expression . . . Few girls today fail to manifest some signs of this desire for individual expression.”35 In the beginning of the twentieth century, both in England and in the United States, the advocates of feminism concentrated on gaining women the right to vote. It was finally achieved in 1920 in the United States and in 1928 in Great Britain. After the granting of suffrage to women, the movement for women’s equality seemed to languish for a time. The “flappers” of the 1920s wore shorter skirts, and they moved about, drank and danced with greater freedom than their mothers had done. However, the persona they presented to the public was that of lighthearted and somewhat empty-headed pleasure seekers rather than that of women who might want to or be able to compete with men in the world of business and public affairs. During this period, and into the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, it was not unusual to hear women deride the suffragist leaders who had led the fight for the vote as overly harsh and strident. Perhaps, it was said, that kind of “masculine” woman was needed then, but the need for her had passed, and what was needed and wanted now was a more “feminine” type of woman. Two books signaled and led the reawakening of feminist sentiment. In 1949 in France, just as the baby boom period was starting, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, which reached the United States in a translation in 1953.36 The book enumerates for the reader the customs, assumptions, educational practices, laws, literature, modes of speech, and jokes that show to the young girl and the mature woman that she is an inferior and limited being, and that convince her to occupy the place in the economy and society marked out for her. A decade after The Second Sex appeared in English, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.37 That book was an attack on the “working

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conditions” of the housewife occupation—the boring and mindless nature of many of the duties, the powerlessness, the isolation it entailed. It was also an attack on the caste-like assignment of all married women to that occupation, without regard to their individual talents. Hypocritical exaltation of the housewife occupation, much of it by men who would never consider occupying such a limiting niche, had been going on since the “cult of domesticity” for women had taken hold in the nineteenth century. So lengthy and unchallenged had been the public praise for housewifery as a highly desirable— indeed the only desirable—career for women that Friedan’s brilliantly articulate attack came as a surprise. Its frankness and directness made it immensely popular. The 1960s saw the founding of a number of organizations to promote the advancement of women in economic and political roles, and to preserve women’s right to regulate their own fertility.38 These organizations have worked through the information media and the election process with varying effectiveness. At this time, there was a grass roots movement of informal women’s meetings whose purpose was “consciousness raising”—a conversational process of bringing out into the open women’s disgust at the discrimination and lack of respect from which they suffered both in the workplace and within the family. The period saw the coinage or popularization of a vocabulary which described women’s oppression—sexism, sexual harassment, male chauvinist pig. An Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution passed the Congress in 1972. It fell short of ratification in state legislatures, despite public opinion polls showing support of a majority of both men and women. Since the 1970s, especially in universities, research and writing by people committed to greater equality between the sexes has flourished. Economists founded the International Association for Feminist Economics, now with a worldwide membership, and a journal, Feminist Economics. Feminist economists have tried to formulate a policy agenda that takes account of the legitimate needs and rights of women and children. They have criticized mainstream economics as inattentive to important issues, many involving gender.39 In sociology, the prevailing story on gender relations and the family in the 1960s was “functionalism,” which held that role differentiation by gender—the separation of wives from earning money, and their resulting subordination—had developed and lasted because it “worked” as a necessary ingredient for smooth-running family organization, and was therefore healthy and desirable. Under feminist influence in the discipline, the benefits of such arrangements to men and their costs to women have moved to center stage. Feminist sociologists (both male and female) have done telling work demonstrating the existence of labor market discrimination, and debunking the notion that women voluntarily chose low-paying occupations because it was to their advantage to do so.40 In psychology, prior to the appearance of feminist academics and therapists, good mental health was defined as the possession of traits considered

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appropriate only to men—assertiveness, rationality, problem-solving, lack of fear. Women who displayed such traits were considered maladjusted. Studies of leadership and achievement motivation enrolled only men as subjects of interest. The misogyny of the Freudian story, the doctrine of penis envy and its assuagement through the birth of a baby, and the practice of therapy designed to reconcile unhappy women to their subordinate place in society, were mainline Freudian themes. Feminist agitation, along with the development of psychoactive medications, contributed to the end of Freudian dominance. Historians had for centuries made women invisible, passing over in silence their lives, roles, influence, problems, and achievements. In recent decades, historians have created the field of women’s history, within which feminist perspectives receive ample coverage. Feminist demographers have looked at how the burden on women of raising children affects birthrates. Feminists in education and counseling devised methods to reduce the conditioning for inferiority that girls were receiving in schools.

The Web of Causes for Women’s Emergence How can we rate the importance of the factors encouraging women’s slowmotion liberation from compulsory and exclusive domesticity? The “social” factors—fewer births per women, fewer marriages, even fewer stable ones, better education for women, the rise of an ideology of equality—must have been important. They have supported and furthered that liberation. However the ultimate cause of that liberation is located elsewhere—in advancing technology, which has been the source of the long upward trend in the real reward the money economy pays for human beings’ time. As we have seen, technological change has done more than raise wage rates. It has reduced the strain of housekeeping. Technological change also created new consumer goods which families have coveted, encouraging a willingness to trade women’s time for access to them. The changes in the occupational structure of industry, which have been cited by many authors as influencing women’s movement to jobs, are themselves the result of technological change. The almost continual flow of new products and methods of production accustom us to change of all kinds, including change in social habits and patterns. Most of the social factors, with the possible and partial exception of the fall in birthrates, can be accounted for as responses to the changing economic environment. By contrast, the dynamic of continually evolving technology is independent of these social factors. Its origin is deep in the structure of advanced economies—in the rewards that are given for innovation and capital accumulation. The one social factor that may have arisen independent of economic trends—the fall in the birthrate—has been powerfully affected by the changing technology of contraception. Women’s real wages have continued to grow through the 1980s and 1990s, and were at their all-time high in 2001, even as men’s wages stagnated.

40


Further, the trends in the social forces favoring women’s independence—in education, ideology, and in consumption norms—have gathered momentum. Whatever their origin in economic forces, these social trends now have a life of their own. The view that technology and economic factors have been the key elements in women’s emergence into the money economy is not as congenial to our egos as the view that attributes change to the spread of liberating ideas. But the importance of economic factors in women’s escape from the kitchen does not mean that consciousness raising is of no use or that policy is irrelevant. There is a great deal of work we can usefully do to make the social and economic structures of our society more fit for human habitation in an era of equality between women and men. In succeeding chapters, we shall explore some of the possibilities for work of that sort.

4 “Women’s Place” in the Labor Market

In the last half of the twentieth century, large numbers of American women decided they wanted to take paying jobs. The American labor market was in one sense hospitable to these women—it absorbed millions of them at rising real wages. But employers’ hospitality was extended most readily to women who were willing to work in a “woman’s job.” Employers offered women an abundance of such jobs, but at a wage far lower than that paid in jobs open to men of comparable education and experience. The jobs employers most often offered to women carried duties with little scope for initiative, allowed little chance of learning valuable skills, and provided few opportunities for promotion. To women unwilling to settle for a place in the female job ghetto, and looking for the pay, duties, on-the-job training, and promotion possibilities routinely offered to men, the labor market was a great deal less hospitable. When Irene LoRe applied in the early 1970s to the Chase Manhattan Bank for a job as an executive trainee and didn’t get an answer promptly, she assumed her application had been lost. She sent in a second one, and eventually two answers came from the bank. One, addressed to “Mr. LoRe,” asked the applicant to come in for an interview. The other, addressed to “Ms. LoRe,” advised her that there were no job openings.1 Discrimination by employers on account of sex had been declared unlawful by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But putting a law on the books did not suffice to eradicate employers’ habits of personnel management that went back centuries, and the attitudes behind those habits that went back millennia. Almost all employers continued routinely to exclude women from jobs in all occupations except the relatively few that were traditionally considered appropriate for women. They very seldom mixed women and men in the same kind of job. The few woman who succeeded in being taken on in a “man’s job” were likely to be harassed sexually and in other ways by male coworkers and supervisors. At the time of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the wage of women with full-time jobs averaged about 60 percent of men’s. It did not escape

42


notice that this ratio was the very same one ordained in the Old Testament: the Book of Leviticus states that the value of maidservants should be counted as three-fifths that of manservants. Those who invoked the biblical text seemed to be hinting that the ratio was one of nature’s constants, like pi or the atomic weight of the hydrogen atom, or perhaps that it had been fixed by God Himself.2 Indeed, for the next 15 years, that ratio failed to advance significantly. Around about 1979 the deity apparently relented. As figure 4.1 shows, women’s pay has since risen slowly but fairly steadily relative to men’s. By 2002, women were averaging 78 percent of men’s pay.3 However, at this rate of advance, parity will not arrive until the fifth decade of the twentyfirst century. One important cause of that advance was the enactment of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which forbade discrimination against women in educational programs receiving federal funds. Title IX is best known for forcing schools to offer more opportunities to women athletes and to spend more on women’s sports. But its effect on women’s place in the world of work has been of far more importance to women’s lives. Schools were told that they could not discriminate against women in admissions, or in any other way. With the admissions process no longer stacked against them, women were able to enter law, medical, and business schools in large numbers. The jobs they obtained did not pay as well as the jobs men with similar credentials got, but those jobs were far better paid than the ones open to women without such degrees. Moreover, the respect customarily accorded to men with such credentials was extended, at least in part, to the women holding them, and from the professionally credentialed women to women workers more generally. 700 650 600 550 500 450 400 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 Men

Women

Figure 4.1 Weekly earnings of full-time workers (dollars of year 2002).

“Women’s Place” in the Labor Market

43

Progress has been made in closing the gap in pay between male and female workers, but the gap that existed in the 1960s has been closed by less than half. The advantage in pay that men have over women in the American labor market continues to be sizeable. A man with a bachelor’s degree earns on average $20,521 more a year than a male high-school graduate. A woman with a bachelor’s degree who works full time earns only $6,758 more than that male high-school grad. Outright exclusion and harassment of women workers still occur, and important segments of the labor market remain virtually closed to women. An important reason for trying to improve women’s labor market situation is the continuing rise in single parenthood, and the recent “welfare reform,” which marked a sharp reduction in the public support available for single parents. Single mothers supporting children need paychecks that will keep them and their children out of poverty. Those who have not been to college are in a particularly bad situation. Many types of well-paying jobs, particularly those that do not require much in the way of formal education, are closed to them, because they are still, in the twenty-first century, “men’s jobs.” The jobs open to these single mothers, many of which carry no benefits, pay wages that cannot cover health care, child care, and a decent place to live. This chapter, first of all describes the situation of women in the labor market, and compares their jobs and wages with those of men. It then examines the ideas of those who believe that these differences between the sexes in pay and position result almost entirely from women’s lack of qualifications, or from the desires and interests of women themselves and so are benign and require no remedy. Next comes a statistical analysis that suggests that such views are not supported by the evidence. The chapter ends with a review of some of the discriminatory situations women have faced, as revealed in materials divulged in connection with lawsuits. The subsequent two chapters describe the reasons for discrimination against women, the forms that discrimination takes, and its consequences.

Women’s Jobs,Women’s Pay Women’s organizations have succeeded in publicizing the discrepancy between the pay of men and women. When people express a sense of grievance about women’s position in the world of work, it usually attaches to the pay gap. Less is said about the fact that men and women hold different kinds of jobs. Giant Food, a supermarket chain in the Washington, DC area, was sued for sex discrimination because the bakery managers, all of whom were women, were paid less than the managers in other departments, all of whom were men. If the chain had not shaved a few dollars off its daily payroll in each store at the expense of the bakery managers, it could probably have avoided the lawsuit, despite the clearly unlawful exclusion of women from most of the managerial jobs. That some jobs are “women’s jobs” and some are “men’s jobs” is something that most people still accept as a fact of life, and as nothing to get angry about.

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One can see from everyday experience that some occupations have virtually no women, and that a high proportion of women work in predominantly female occupations. Jobs that carry authority and prestige are most often occupied by men. The skilled blue-collar jobs are also mostly male. Sex-based differences in job assignments are obvious even to young children. They very quickly grab hold of the idea that it is natural, right, inevitable that there are men’s jobs and women’s jobs. Children come to believe that holding a sex-appropriate job is an important way in which a man demonstrates manhood or a woman shows that she is womanly. Many adults apparently maintain the beliefs about occupational roles they formed in childhood. Little popular sense of grievance or injustice appears to be attached to the segregation of occupations by sex, and the organizations that constitute the women’s movement have not been very active or successful in trying to generate much. People do understand that there is a connection between occupational segregation and women’s low wages. “Women have jobs that are low paying,” is a common explanation of the pay gap. That simple way of putting it manages delicately to avoid any reference to unfairness. It suggests that the wage each job pays has somehow or other been set without regard to whether the job is customarily a man’s or a woman’s. It also suggests that women have somehow had the bad luck to land in just those jobs that happen to pay the worst. Or perhaps women have purposely chosen them. That way of explaining the pay gap pushes under the rug important connections between occupational segregation by sex and women’s low wages. First, women’s possibilities to get many kinds of well-paying jobs have been and still are limited by discrimination. Second, the pay of the jobs they can get is kept low by their limited job options. Third, if an employer wants to systematically pay women less than men (both because the market permits it and because it fits in with his or her ideas about what is owed to manhood), it is easier to invent justifications if the women are in one set of jobs and the men in a different set. The next two chapters are devoted to spelling out the nature of those connections.

Men’s and Women’s Occupations We can see some of the differences between the sexes in the kinds of jobs they hold in table 4.1, which gives employment and wages by major occupational groups for full-time workers. Women hold 45 percent of the management jobs, up from 20 percent in 1972. They hold 54 percent of the professional jobs, up from 44 percent in 1972. In these occupations significant progress has been made. However, the clerical and administrative support occupations continue to be a women’s ghetto, with women holding 74 percent of the jobs, a figure virtually unchanged since 1972. Of male workers, 18 percent have jobs in the skilled crafts, which are relatively high paying, and do not require a college education, but not even 1 percent of women workers have such jobs. The male mechanic’s


45

Table 4.1 Employment and wages of full-time workers by sex, by occupation group in 2003

Number employed (000)

Women’s share of jobs Women (%)

Distribution of workers among occupation groups (%) Men Women

Average weekly wage ($)

Occupation group

Men

Men

Women

Management, business, and financial Professional and related Service Sales and related Office and administrative support Farming, fishing, and forestry Construction and extraction Installation, maintenance, and repair Production Transportation and material moving All full-time workers

7,936

6,437

45

14

15

1,140

793

9,633 6,620 5,416 3,776

11,444 6,707 4,437 10,996

54 50 45 74

17 12 10 7

26 15 10 25

1,018 477 703 583

740 366 461 512

541

137

20

1

*

376

323

5,408

153

3

10

*

605

480

4,167

175

4

8

*

669

631

6,014 5,651

2,479 860

29 13

11 10

6 2

581 534

411 397

55,162

43,825

44

100

100

740

577

* Less than 0.5%. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

$669 weekly paycheck, as compared with the female clerical worker’s average of $512 or the female service worker’s average of $366 shows the crucial advantage of men over women in the part of the population that has not been to college. The inability of a noncollege woman to get a crafts job virtually condemns her to a low standard of living if she finds herself with a child or two and lacks a man who will share his income with her. In this respect, the labor market has not improved since the 1970s. The crafts jobs all require training. Some of this training is at the discretion of the employer, who may exclude women. Some training is obtained in public vocational schools, which remain highly segregated by sex.4 To get a better focus on the degree of occupational segregation still existing in the American labor market, we need to look at the more finely defined occupations within each major occupational group. This information is shown in Appendix table A.1, based on a survey taken in the year 2002. For example, the sales occupational group, which employs fairly equal proportions of men and women, is really a collection of occupations, some mostly male, others mostly female. Only 8 percent of those selling motor vehicles in 2002 are women, the same percentage as was recorded in the year 1984.5 Sales representatives, who sell to business firms, are 75 percent male; they were 86 percent male in 1984. A stroll through a department store will verify that the sales occupations found there are still largely segregated.

46


Cashiers are 78 percent female, and may earn little more than the minimum wage. They were 82 percent female in 1984. Those selling television and other big-ticket items under more lucrative commission arrangements are 69 percent male; they were 80 percent male in 1984. Clearly, much segregation remains. Progress in desegregation has been slow, and in some fields nonexistent. The 357 occupations in Appendix table A.1 are ranked by the percentage of workers who are women, with the mostly female jobs at the beginning and the mostly male jobs at the end. Half of all women workers are in the first 71 occupations, which employ only 7 percent of the men. Half of the male workers are employed in the last 154 occupations in the table, which employ only 8 percent of the women workers. Only 60 occupations out of the 357, those with 35–55 percent women (occupations 113–172) are relatively well integrated. They employ only 19 percent of the full-time workers of each sex. In 1984, 18 percent of the women and 15 percent of the men worked in the 57 occupations integrated to the same extent. Again, change has been minor. For women and men to have the same distribution among the occupations in Appendix table A.1, about 30 percent of full-time women workers would have to change their occupations.6 Nearly 18 million women workers in occupations that are now disproportionately female would have to move into occupations that are now disproportionately male, and the same number of men would have to move into occupations now disproportionately female. The massive changes—36 million people taking up a different occupation—that would be required to equalize by gender the occupational distribution of the American labor force testifies to the extent of the current segregation in today’s labor market. Even where men and women are in the same finely defined occupation, few people among them may work with people of the opposite sex as colleagues for the same employer. Some employers (those that pay higher than average wages) will hire only men in particular occupational categories, and others hire only women. An example, which is obvious to the naked eye, is the occupation of waiter. Most restaurants will have all-male crews or all-female crews, with the former to be found in the more expensive establishments, where the tips are higher. Mixed-sex crews are a relatively recent development, and are found in a minority of restaurants. In a survey of employed people in North Carolina published in 1993, sociologist Donald Tomaskovic-Devey asked respondents about the sex and the race of the people who worked for the same employer as they did, doing the same kind of work and having the same job title.7 He found that a considerable majority of workers have colleagues who are exclusively people of their own sex. Of all respondents, 70 percent said that all of the colleagues who shared their job title were the same sex as themselves. Another 16 percent of respondents said that segregation by sex was not total, but nearly so. Only 14 percent of the employed people held jobs in which males and females worked together in numbers approximating their share in the workforce.8


47

Tomaskovic-Devey found that occupational segregation by sex was considerably more severe than by race. More recent evidence of this phenomenon is available. In 1996, a Manhattan steakhouse named Smith & Wollensky published a full-page ad in the New York Times praising its waiters as highly experienced—“aged on the premises” just like its steaks.9 The ad showed 36 waiters all with seven or more years of experience at the restaurant. None was female, none was African American. A telephone call to the corporation that owns the restaurant confirmed that no women or blacks had been put on the restaurant’s wait staff in the previous seven years either, and that, in fact, the wait staff was and had always been perfectly segregated by race and sex. A member of the corporation’s human resources staff, when asked to explain how this segregation came about, thought for a while, and then said that blacks didn’t want such jobs (which the company had no trouble recruiting white men for) because they would be reminded of their servile status in the pre–Civil Rights era. As for women, well, the company had them serving in some of its other restaurants, but not in that one. A still more recent piece of evidence of segregation by race and sex on the job, again in the New York Times, resulted from the destruction by terrorists of the towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11 of 2001. The newspaper printed several pages full of the portraits of the firefighters who had lost their lives on that day.10 Out of the 343 who died, only 10 appeared to be African American; not a single one was a woman.

The Sex Gap in Wages A man who worked at a full-time job for at least 50 weeks in the year 2001 had earnings of $40,796 on average. A woman working full time had earnings of $30,504.11 Thus a woman made 75 cents on average for each dollar earned by a man. As shown in table 4.2, women high-school graduates earned less than male high-school dropouts, women college graduates earned less than men who had dropped out of college. Even women with a doctorate earned less than men with a master’s degree. Still, these figures represent Table 4.2 Median earnings in 2001 of full-time year-round workers by education level and sex, ages 25–64

Education Some high school High-school graduate Some college Bachelor’s degree Professional degree

Male

Female

Female earnings as a percent of male

25,904 33,107 40,200 53,628 99,942

17,977 24,253 28,822 39,865 60,256

69 73 72 74 60

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey.

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a significant improvement over the situation 40 years previously. At the time of the Civil Rights Act, and for many years thereafter, women college graduates working full time were earning less on average than male high-school dropouts. The evidence of occupational segregation and the continuing gap between men’s and women’s wages suggest that women are still not allowed to compete throughout the labor market on a fair basis, and that some employers regularly and habitually act so as to unfairly disadvantage them. Not everyone concedes that this is true, however. There has always been controversy among economists as to how much if any of the difference in the wages of men and women workers at any particular time could be due to discrimination. Some economists deny the very possibility that employer discrimination against women and blacks contributes to their low wages. They rely on a much cited “theory” propounded by Gary Becker.12 If some employers discriminate, Becker says, that will lower the wages of those workers who are discriminated against, making their labor a bargain for nondiscriminating employers. An employer can hire a woman for 75 percent of what it costs to hire a man. Any employer who discriminates against women by refusing to hire them for any job they are competent to do and uses high-priced male labor instead will have costs that are higher than necessary. A nondiscriminating rival would be able to come into the market, and hire women for all the jobs they can perform. The nondiscriminator could offer the same product for a lower price, taking customers away from discriminators. In time, competition should put any discriminating employer out of business. Thus, according to Becker, any company that starts discriminating will eventually die, and will not continue polluting the labor market with its bad behavior. The labor market we observe has cleansed itself of any such evildoers, Becker and his followers claim to believe. According to this line of reasoning, when we observe that women are poorly represented or not represented at all in a certain job, we should not rush to assume discrimination. But even if incontrovertible evidence were presented that competent women were being turned away, governmental intervention would still not be necessary. The employer in question was, after all, in the process of committing economic suicide, and would not go on marring an otherwise discrimination-free labor market much longer. This argument is just the kind of pure theory that appeals to many economists, based on deductive logic rather than on observation of any actual events. Becker’s theory is contradicted by hard evidence. We see thousands of business failures every year in the United States, so firms do make fatal mistakes; but no one has ever reported seeing a firm that discriminated reduced to ruin by a less bigoted competitor. On the other hand, we do know of firms that have discriminated, yet have remained successful. In deciding a discrimination case against the Hertz Company, the judge, after hearing the evidence, declared it had had “a long history of discriminating against women.” Yet it had famously managed to remain number one in its


49

industry.13 As we shall see, a great deal of evidence presented in the courts has convicted many other firms of discrimination against women and African Americans. Such firms typically do not fail, at least not for that reason. But the number of economists who believe a theory has never been diminished by lack of evidence or by counterevidence. Unfortunately for the science of economics, the acceptance and circulation of a theory by economists has never depended on the existence of actual observations that support it. Nor have counterexamples impeded its circulation. The problem with Becker’s argument was pointed out by John Stuart Mill more than a century-and-a-half ago. Price competition is in reality not severe enough always to accomplish in actuality what armchair theorizing leads us to think it would tend to do—in this case, eliminate companies that do not charge rock-bottom prices.14 (Two gas stations across the street from each other can go on selling an identical product at markedly different prices for years.) Moreover, if most employers discriminate, and those who do not discriminate are very few and far between, price competition by the latter is not a big problem for the former. The argument that firms that discriminate are at a fatal competitive disadvantage is based on the picture of economic life painted by economic theorists: atomistic competition, dog eat dog, an unrelenting search for economic advantage in which social relations have no part. To economists, only money counts to a business firm in making decisions. Sociologists, on the other hand, have always understood the force of custom and the durability of caste systems. They have stressed the importance in the workplace of social relations reflecting dominance and subordination based on characteristics such as race, age, social stratum, as well as sex.15 The sociological perspective suggests that the iron law of competition has not been sufficient to eliminate discrimination practiced by firms: 1. Competition is not as severe as economic theorists have claimed; it is possible to have costs that are way above the minimum possible and still stay in business. 2. Social custom circumscribes what people will do, even for profit. American men used to go to the expense and trouble of maintaining very short haircuts. Social pressure rather than tastes or cost-effectiveness dictated that. Similarly, employers are under social pressure to have men in men’s jobs. A universal custom among employers not to hire women for certain jobs would eliminate competitive pressures.

Of course, differences in average wage levels between two groups in the labor market can arise for reasons other than discrimination. Differences between women and men in qualifications, sometimes called “human capital,” can cause such wage gaps. Human capital can be acquired in school, in on-the-job training, or it can take the form of know-how gained by the experience of working on a job. There can be costs to the worker in acquiring human capital—tuition, loss of earnings when in school—and to make those costs worthwhile, there is a return in the form of higher earnings over

50


the worker’s career. If women and men have on average differing amounts of human capital, that could explain some or even all of the gap between men’s and women’s average wages. Many economists believe that all wage differentials in a labor market can be explained by differences in workers’ human capital. In the past, women did have less human capital than men. Far fewer women than men went to college, and most women dropped out of the labor market when they gave birth to a child and did not return for a considerable period, if they returned at all. Thus women in the labor market had considerably less experience than men, on average. Economists theorized that during their time at home, women’s human capital “rusted,” so that when they returned their human capital would be worth less on the labor market than that of men with similar education and experience. They also argued that acquiring human capital was less worthwhile for women than for men, because their long absences from the labor market meant less time for them to reap the expected financial benefits.16 This supposedly caused women’s lesser participation in education. Or women and men might differ in behavior. Employers might be reluctant to train women or entrust them with any but the most routine jobs, because of their greater likelihood of leaving. Women might have a higher absentee rate, because mothers stay home with sick children more often than fathers do. These behaviors could make women workers less valuable to employers and perhaps justify their lower wages. But just asserting that “men have more human capital than women,” or “women behave in ways that make them less valuable workers than men” is not enough to clinch the argument that none of the wage gap arises from discrimination. We have to look systematically at what the data show about the size of the differences in human capital between women and men. We have to look at the evidence about differences in behavior. And when we have done that, we have to look at how much these factors actually affect wages. In particular, we want to know how much of the gap between women’s and men’s wages has an “innocent,” that is, nondiscriminatory, explanation, and how much remains to be explained by discrimination.

Statistical Evidence that Discrimination against Women Persists A study published in 1979, when women on average earned 40 percent less than men, found that men had slightly more education, and a considerable amount more of experience and training than women.17 However, such differences accounted for only about a quarter of the wage gap. The researchers also considered the effect on women’s wages of the greater responsibility women undertook for the care of children. Having in the past worked parttime or having left the workforce for a spell were taken to be indications of a lower level of “labor force attachment.” This accounted for another fifth of


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the gap. In total, 45 percent of the gap was accounted for by these seemingly innocent factors, leaving 55 percent of the gap to be explained by other factors, of which discrimination is the most obvious part. An assessment of the current situation can be derived from a survey done by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in March 2002. It shows that the gap had diminished considerably. Adult women working full time earned 25 percent less than full-time adult men—the difference amounted to $210 per week. Workers included in the survey were asked questions about their age, education, weekly salary, race and ethnicity, the number of children in their family under and over six year of age, and whether they had worked full time year round in the previous year. We can look to see how men and women differ in these respects, how much difference these factors make in the wages they earn, and how much of the gap is explained by them. The first two columns of table 4.3 show the current differences between men and women in these factors. In education, women have decisively Table 4.3 Characteristics of full-time male and female workers, and their effect on weekly wages, March 2002

Men

Women

Estimated effect on wage ($)

9.9 32.5 27.6 19.6 10.4

6.6 30.3 30.7 22.0 10.4

— 143 281 590 785

20.8 87.1

20.7 82.1

6 120

Children Number of children under 6 Number of children aged 6–18

NA NA

0.2 0.5

33 7

Ethnicity African American Hispanic Sex ⫽ female

11.4 9.6 0.0

15.9 7.2 100.0

⫺105 ⫺90 ⫺231

Education achieved High-school dropout High-school graduate Some college Bachelor’s degree Graduate degree Experience Years since leaving school Worked full time year round previous year

Average gross weekly wage Predicted from characteristics other than sex Actual

$855

$876

21*

$855

$645

⫺210*

Notes: The values for men and women for the subheads “Education achieved,” “Ethnicity,” and “sex” represent the percent of the population in each category. Those for subheads “Years since leaving school” and “Children” are mean values. NA, not available. * Women’s wage minus men’s wage. Source: Compiled by the author from microdata in the Current Population Survey, March 2002.

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moved ahead of men. Fewer men than women now in the workforce had gone on to get some higher education—only 56.6 percent of men compared with 63.1 percent of women. More women than men got BA degrees, and about the same proportion got graduate degrees. At the lower end of the educational scale, having dropped out of high school before graduation is 50 percent more common among men than women. Thus in 2002, unlike what was true in earlier decades, none of the deficiencies in women’s pay can be attributed to deficiencies in the length of their formal education. Women and men are about equal in the number of years since leaving school. On the other hand, more men than women had worked full-time year-round in the year before the survey was taken.18 The 2002 Census data set does not give explicit information about previous periods of part-time work or being out of the labor force entirely or being absent from a job to tend to sick family members. All of these factors accounted for some of women’s lower pay in the 1979 study. However, we do have information for 2002 on whether or not a woman worker has children at home, and how many she has. After all, the birth and care of children occasion most of the periods out of the labor force and much of the absenteeism, which, it is claimed, cause women workers to have justifiably lower pay than men. Of course not all women workers have children under 18; a majority of women who work full time do not. In 2002, 85 percent had no children under 6, and 65 percent had no school-age children.19 The last column gives estimates of how workers’ characteristics affect their weekly pay.20 Graduating from high school raises a person’s pay by an average of $143 over what it would have been had that person dropped out of high school. Those whose schooling ended with a bachelor’s degree earned on average $590 per week more than a high-school dropout, and $447 more than a high-school graduate with no college ($590 minus $143). Workers average $6 more a week for each year since they left school. Those who worked full time year round in the previous year made $120 more than those who did not, on average. The most surprising aspect of the 2002 data is that women with children who work full time do not earn less than women who have the same education and are of the same age but have no children under 18 at home.21 In fact, they average slightly more.22 We can draw the important conclusion that in 2002 none of the $210 gap in weekly pay between full-time men and women workers appears to be attributable to the responsibilities women workers currently assume with respect to children.23 Race discrimination continued to play a big part in the American labor market in 2002. African Americans earned an average of $105 less per week than other workers with similar education and experience, and Hispanics earned $90 less than non-Hispanics.24 Adding the penalty for being black to the penalty for being a woman, we can see that an African American woman working full time could expect to earn $336 less than a white male with similar education and age, a discount in pay of almost 40 percent.


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In previous decades, the penalty for being a woman explained only part of the difference in men’s and women’s pay. The rest of the gap in their earnings was explained by differences in education, experience, child responsibilities, all of which favored men. By 2002, the estimated loss in women’s weekly pay due to their sex, after education, age, and the presence of children had been taken into account, was $231. The loss is actually larger than the gross difference between women’s and men’s pay. This suggests that women full-time workers now have better qualifications than men, that the entire pay gap is due to discrimination; were it not for the discrimination against them, women would be earning as much or even more than men. There are some economists who would argue that this analysis overestimates the extent to which discrimination is responsible for the pay gap. They would point out, quite correctly, that some of the worker characteristics which might account in a nondiscriminatory way for the gap were not included in the analysis. For example, the Census data do not tell us anything about what the people they surveyed had studied in school. They tell us nothing about their on-the-job training. Both of these probably do explain some of the wage gap, although, as we learn from previous studies, only a modest amount. For example, if women had studied engineering and become engineers in proportion to their numbers in professional jobs, that would have erased about 4 percent of the gap.25 The difference between the sexes in the amount of on-the-job training was found to account for 11 percent of the gap in the 1979 study, and may account for some in 2002. However, in most places of work, the decision as to who gets a training slot is controlled by the employer, and employers’ exclusion of women from training opportunities should certainly count as a form of discrimination. (See below the story of the woman employed by Home Depot who applied for training to operate a forklift.) Of course, while we are thinking of factors not accounted for in the statistical analysis that could legitimately have the effect of pushing women’s average wages down relative to men’s, we should not (as almost all analysts do) omit to remind ourselves that there are other factors, also unaccounted for in the analysis, that should have the opposite effect—pushing men’s wages down relative to women’s. Employed men suffer more from alcoholism than do employed women. Men in charge of a vehicle are more likely than women to have a bad accident. Men are far more likely to have criminal records than women. Alcoholism, a criminal record, and an accidentstudded driving record are likely to affect one’s ability to get and keep a good job, and one’s promotion possibilities as well. Hence people with those problems would be likely to have less-than-average earnings. Since the study did not account for any of them, it omitted some important and legitimate factors, which should lower men’s pay relative to women’s. Those economists who deny the importance of discrimination have apparently been frustrated by their inability to demonstrate statistically that the wage gap is caused by women’s poor qualifications or measurable lack of devotion to their careers. Some of them have cast around for other

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explanations. For example, Gary Becker argued that women with responsibilities for housework would have less energy available for the market than men would. This would reduce the hourly earnings of married women, affect their jobs and occupations, and even lower their investment in market human capital when they worked the same number of hours as married men. Consequently, the housework responsibilities of married women may be the source of much of the difference in earnings and in job segregation between men and women.26

Becker (who maintains that it is rational and therefore right and inevitable for wives to do all the housework) was saying that women are simply too tired to put forward the necessary effort to earn good wages. He was just guessing when he wrote that; he had no measurements of the energy level of women workers or men (who also have some energy-draining ways of spending time). Luckily we do not have to accept Becker’s guess on faith. When actual evidence on work effort was examined by sociologists Denise and William Bielby, they found that women allocate more effort to their work on the job than men do.27 When all is said and done, we cannot make a precise estimate of what women’s wages would be in the absence of discrimination. However the latest evidence available suggests that men’s and women’s salaries would now be about equal on average. Has there been progress in getting rid of discrimination? In 1979, discrimination reduced women’s pay by about 22 percent. The data for 2002 suggest that discrimination is currently reducing women’s pay by about the same percentage.

Direct Evidence of Discrimination The statistical study of the 2002 wage data casts doubt on the truth of a statement such as, “The cause of women’s low earnings is that they have children to attend to.” The 2002 data suggest that women’s current responsibilities for children account for none of the wage gap between men and women who work full time. Women who have children and those who don’t earn about the same if they are equivalent in education and experience. Since women’s care of children, differences in men’s and women’s education, and differences in men’s and women’s work experience do not explain away much if any of the gap, discrimination remains a plausible explanation for virtually all of it. Such analyses suggest the existence of discrimination by eliminating other possible explanations for the wage gap rather than demonstrating it directly. But more direct evidence is available. The work of women is commonly evaluated in a discriminatory way. In one famous series of experiments, a researcher presented an article for evaluation to a group of people. Half of the evaluators were told that the article was by “John T. McKay” and the other half that it was by “Joan T. McKay.” The article attributed to the man was evaluated more favorably than the identical article attributed


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to the woman. Both men and women put a lower value on the article they were told was written by a woman, but the discrepancy was greatest among male evaluators.28 Women under consideration for employment or promotion are likely to have their qualifications judged more harshly than those of men, even by evaluators who feel themselves to be fair. The court records deriving from lawsuits that women have brought against employers do provide direct and vivid evidence of discriminatory behavior. This is not the kind of evidence that economists are trained to use, and they sometimes dismiss it as “anecdotal.”29 This is a rather peculiar way of arguing, since one would imagine that anecdotes, if true, would trump theories based on no evidence whatsoever. And there are hundreds of such anecdotes. Based on them, employers have been forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. It is interesting to first look at a case that was brought a few years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act which outlawed discrimination, and then review some recent cases, which demonstrate the persistence of some of the same discriminatory practices in large segments of the economy. In 1972 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed a complaint of race and sex discrimination against American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T).30 At that time AT&T, through its regional Bell Company affiliates, had a high degree of monopoly of telephone services in the United States. The EEOC complaint observed that occupational segregation by sex in the company was very rigid: A total sex segregation of jobs is reflected in virtually all . . . Bell System documents. Through pictures of males or females, pronoun reference or through straight-forward identification, all jobs are strictly classified as male or female. This sex denotation of jobs is carried consistently throughout company personnel manuals, collective bargaining agreements, job descriptions, company publications, general company advertisements, requisitions for employees . . . interviewer’s aids, training manuals . . . Crafts jobs, outside sales jobs, and middle and upper level management jobs are always identified as male jobs.31

The company’s literature reflected the reality of the company’s practices of assigning workers to jobs. Of the 190,000 craft workers in 1970, 99 percent were male. This company had always trained workers for each job, so there can be no presumption that lack of previous training or experience is what kept women out. Women were given some of the lower-level management jobs that involved supervising other women. However, they had almost no chance of penetrating into higher management. Of the 2,650 employees in the higher management, only 1.2 percent were female. In the course of interviews, male managers at Bell frankly displayed their stereotypical view of women employees, and their belief in their lack of competence. As a result of this case, AT&T signed a consent decree promising to institute an affirmative action plan and to bring women and African Americans into all jobs in the company on a fair basis. However, during the third of a

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century that has elapsed since the consent decree was signed, progress in introducing women into the telephone industry’s crafts jobs has been slow, and in some vital areas progress has been nonexistent. For example, we learn from the records of a subsequent lawsuit that the Michigan Bell Telephone Company, which had 502 women crafts workers in 1970, had only 508 in 1983. Normal turnover over this period would have allowed the company to have more than 2,000 women in crafts jobs by the 1980s, had men and women entering employment with the company been assigned to crafts jobs in equal proportions.32 In the year 2000, women occupied 22,000 of the telephone communication industry’s 136,000 crafts jobs nationally.33 This is certainly an improvement over the almost total exclusion of women from these jobs that was in effect in the 1970s. However, if women had had equal access to crafts jobs in this industry, we would expect women to have three times as many such jobs. In this industry, as in the economy generally, employers have failed to enroll women workers in the high-paying blue-collar jobs in numbers that match their availability. By contrast, the managerial jobs appear to have been integrated.34 When the sex-discrimination case was filed against AT&T in 1972, the Civil Rights Act had been in effect only eight years. The Act had had its origin in the campaign to outlaw discrimination against African Americans, and little attention was being paid by business organizations and government agencies to its requirements for equal treatment for women. They had, up to that time, felt little pressure to amend the discriminatory hiring, assignment, and promotion practices with respect to women, which their management personnel had long practiced, were comfortable with, and considered efficient, reasonable, and even natural. These days, that should no longer be the case; large corporations maintain legal and human resources departments that might be expected to provide expert guidance on compliance with the antidiscrimination laws. Yet discrimination against women workers is still a common occurrence in their operations. Recent lawsuits have successfully targeted chains of supermarkets, hardware stores, and general merchandise stores, which are among the biggest employers of women today. Typically, women predominate in the lowest-level jobs of these businesses, and although considerable promotion from within takes place, fewer women advance to management than would be expected as a result of a nondiscriminatory promotion process. One of the largest recent cases was filed against the Home Depot chain, which sells hardware, housewares, and material for remodeling. At Home Depot, the new hires were assigned either to sales jobs or to jobs as cashiers. Those in sales jobs had opportunities to move into positions as department supervisors and assistant store managers, while promotion was unlikely for those given jobs as cashiers. About 77 percent of the newly hired men were assigned to sales jobs, but only about 20 percent of the newly hired women got them. The few women assigned to the sales floor were in home decor or gardening, which were deemed “women’s work.” The lawyers who brought


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the suit likened the cashiers’ situation to being under a glass ceiling supported by glass walls, because they were kept separate from the kinds of entry-level jobs that could lead upward. The result was that only 20 percent of those considered for promotion to Assistant Manager Trainee were women. Moreover, the few women who did get to be considered had a much smaller chance of actually landing a managerial slot than the men being considered. Only 12 percent of those slots went to women.35 Patty Nichols, who worked in a Houston branch of Home Depot, had been hired as a cashier in 1988. As she tells it, she began making inquiries about an assistant manager’s position in 1996, after eight years of service, with a bachelor’s degree in management, and a good work record. She was interviewed for the position four times in the next two years, but was passed over each time in favor of a less experienced and less knowledgeable man. (Nichols was probably passed over on other occasions as well, occasions when there were openings she did not get to know about. Openings in management jobs were not announced, and an employee who had not been picked for an interview couldn’t know of them and so couldn’t apply to be considered.) She had been given a long string of very good performance reviews, but after she complained to the EEOC in 1999, the performance evaluations assigned to her turned poor. In 2001, after a lawsuit in which she was a plaintiff had been filed, she was promoted. She ruefully remarked that had she been promoted earlier, she might have been $100,000 richer thanks to the stock options offered only to management employees.36 The major lawsuit against Home Depot was initiated by a woman who worked in one of the sales jobs considered women’s work; she was a designer/salesperson in the decorating department of a New Orleans branch. Carol Lee Griffin was fired at the age of 59 when a young male management trainee spotted her sitting and looking over some written material. He accused her of taking an unauthorized break from work (at Home Depot it’s called “time theft”). In actuality, she had been reviewing materials for a customer. The injustice of her firing caused her to think back over her treatment at the company, and she realized that she had been working in a heavily sexist environment and had been excluded from activities that might have brought advancement. She remembered that whenever she had had to take a customer into the plumbing or the hardware departments, she had been treated brusquely, as though women sales people didn’t belong there. She had asked many times to be trained to install overhead displays in her department, which involved operating a forklift, but had never been included in the training sessions. Griffin took her story to an attorney, who made contact with three other women in the area who had complained of discrimination. The four of them filed complaints with the EEOC. Eventually the case became one of a group of class action lawsuits on behalf of 25,000 women throughout the country. These kinds of cases are based on three kinds of evidence: testimony concerning discriminatory behavior experienced by individuals, descriptions of personnel practices that are discriminatory or have a discriminatory effect,

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and statistical studies which analyze differences between the sexes in types of job assignments and wage levels. The company originally said the allegations were unjustified and that it would fight them, but ended up settling the cases out of court. It did not admit to wrongdoing, but agreed to pay $104 million to settle the claims.37 It also agreed to change its promotion procedures, to train managers in equal employment opportunity issues, and to improve its internal procedure of dealing with complaints of gender discrimination. A lawyer for the women employees said of the settlement, “The important thing is that it includes a system where the employees can register their interest in jobs and provides procedures to make sure they are fairly considered whether they are men or women.”38 Other sex-discrimination lawsuits in the past decade against retailers include the supermarket chains Lucky Stores, which paid $107 million in 1997 to settle the case against it, and Publix, which paid $81 million that same year.39 Home Depot’s defense that the sex segregation of jobs reflected men’s greater interest in carpentry and plumbing was not available to the supermarkets. Yet the personnel practices in the supermarkets were very similar to those of Home Depot. Women were disproportionately assigned as cashiers, with little or no chance to move up. There were a few other jobs that were considered women’s jobs; in the supermarkets, these were jobs in the deli and bakery departments. Those were the only departments where women were allowed to serve as managers. They were paid less than the male managers who served in the grocery, produce, or meat departments, and typically did not get a chance to move up into higher management as the managers of those other departments did. Just as had happened in the 1970s with AT&T, the unions representing the employees of those stores had negotiated contracts that incorporated these arrangements. The ongoing suit against Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest employer of women, alleges many of the same practices that segregate women into the lowest-level jobs and make it difficult for them to be promoted into betterpaying positions. The New York Times of February 16, 2003 reported some of the experiences that caused the women to sue. One woman, single with no children, who had made it to assistant store manager, told her superiors of her ambition to become a store manager. The answer she got was that store managers worked long hours and “it was maybe not something for women because it means you have to be away from home a long time each day.” Another, a single mother with a child, was told that a man was favored over her for promotion because “he has a family to support.” Still another was told that Wal-Mart paid men more than women for the same job because the Bible says God made Adam before Eve.40 The Home Depot suit, which covered 25,000 women, cost that company tens of millions of dollars. A successful sex-discrimination suit against Wal-Mart, covering 500,000 women employees, could cost the company billions. One might imagine that the Wal-Mart management might have taken note of the Home Depot suit and made a greater effort to impress on


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managers that their personnel practices should be nondiscriminatory. The women’s stories reported in the Times show that some of those charged with making these decisions have attitudes that prevent them from being fair to women. The overall statistics by sex on pay and promotion at Wal-Mart which the lawsuit has revealed suggest that such attitudes are by no means rare among Wal-Mart managers. A major complaint against the retail firms that have been sued is that women are not given a fair chance at management jobs. Industries and firms vary considerably in this respect. In the telephone communications industry, which has almost totally excluded women from crafts jobs, women now have 44 percent of the managerial jobs, which is about the average for the entire economy. On the other hand, a lawsuit against Texaco in 1991 revealed that of its 54,000 employees in supervisory positions, only four were women.41 It’s a long, long way from the cashiers at Home Depot and the Lucky Stores supermarkets to the women scientists on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But those scientists, surely among the best of the best, conducted a study and found that sexist attitudes and behaviors had put them at a severe disadvantage compared to their male colleagues. They found that the number of women scientists given jobs at MIT had not increased in two decades. For the few who had achieved tenured positions, there were inequities in salaries, teaching assignments, awards and distinctions, inclusion in important committees, and, what is vitally important for scientific experiments, access to laboratory space. “Senior women faculty were ‘invisible,’ excluded from a voice in their departments and from positions of any real power.”42 The chair of the MIT faculty wrote: The key conclusion that one gets from the report is that gender discrimination in the 1990s is, and stems largely from unconscious ways of thinking that have been socialized into all of us, men and women alike. This makes the situation better than in previous decades where blatant inequities and sexual assault and intimidation were endured but not spoken of. We can all be thankful for that. But the consequences of these more subtle forms of discrimination are equally real and equally demoralizing.43

The report made recommendations designed to improve the situation. One was that the numbers of women faculty be increased, and steps were taken to do that. It was also recommended that administrators who knowingly practice or permit discriminatory practices against women faculty be replaced. This kind of measure has been notably absent in discrimination cases that have gone through the courts or been settled. And as we have seen, the hundreds of thousands of women employees in retail trade, unlike the handful of women scientists at MIT, have not yet passed from the era of “blatant inequities” into an era of “more subtle forms discrimination.”

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The Anatomy of Discrimination Evidence of discriminatory conduct by individual companies continues to appear in the records of court cases. The statistical analysis of nationwide data presented in this chapter suggests that these are not isolated incidents, but are representative of practices still common throughout the economy. In the next chapter we take a much closer look at occupational segregation, which I shall argue is due in large part to discrimination, and is at the root of women’s poor position in the labor market. This will lay the stage for the discussion in later chapters of a discrimination-based theory of the wage gap, and of societal and legal remedies for that discrimination.

5 Occupational Segregation by Sex:The Root of Women’s Disadvantage

The separation of work assignments into “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs” must have originated in the earliest stages of human society. That heritage is still largely with us in the twenty-first century, despite the dramatic changes in women’s roles which have occurred in the last 50 years, despite the laws against sex discrimination, and despite the elimination in most jobs of any need to use more strength than women typically have. In the last halfcentury, women have entered some male preserves, but many jobs remain off limits to them. The descriptions we read of women’s inferior position in the labor market, whether by academic experts or by reporters in the press, concentrate almost exclusively on the wage gap. But occupational segregation plays an important part in creating that gap, and needs to be attacked directly and reduced if the wage gap is to diminish further. There are some jobs for which an employer will hire either sex. But in most cases, employers, probably without thinking much about it, will earmark particular job titles for one sex or the other, largely on the basis of tradition. A job earmarked for men will be assigned a higher wage, and the employer will not consider women for it. This exclusion of women from many jobs continues to be the key to women’s poor position in the labor market. In the last two decades, there has not been much progress in desegregating those male-dominated occupations which have been the most extremely segregated. In 1984, 27 percent of male workers were in occupations that employed very few women—5 percent or fewer. By 2002, 23 percent of male workers were still in such occupations. In 1984, 17 percent of women worked in occupations that employed 5 percent or fewer men. In 2002, only 9 percent of women workers were in such predominantly female occupations. The most common arrangement, even in today’s workplaces, is for women to have only women as colleagues in the same job title, and for men to have only male colleagues.1 Women still have a considerably lower likelihood than men of landing jobs that pay wages that would support more

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than one person at a decent standard. And it is not only differences in pay that occupational segregation begets. Jobs earmarked for men tend to allow some independence of action, to be those where the work is not restricted to boring, repetitive duties, and to be those that lead to still better jobs. Not all men’s jobs have these characteristics, but the jobs men hold are far more likely to have them than the jobs women hold. We need to explore the labor market habits and traditions that keep women out of many of the good jobs, and the reasons such behaviors persist. We need to explore the reasons employers decide to consider only men for a job, even though they cost onethird more. Those people who are invested in the belief that markets produce fair results discount discrimination as an important cause of sex segregation on the job. They say that employers fill certain jobs only with men because there are no women applicants for those jobs. Or if there are women applicants, none of them are worth what they would be paid. Employers maintain all-male groups of employees because no woman would want those jobs, no woman is or could be trained for them, no women would have the talent for them, no woman would stay on such a job long enough to make it worthwhile for the employer to hire her. Jobs that employers have historically filled only with men do not, it is true, attract many women applicants. Most women take the existence of men’s jobs and women’s jobs as a fact of life. They do not waste time or court rejection by trying to breach the boundaries of the female ghetto. But some women do want higher paying, more responsible jobs that carry more of a chance for promotion than those that are open to them. Some of them would give a far better performance in a “man’s job” than some of the men in them. There are more than enough such women to desegregate all of the 67 occupations that had 5 percent or fewer women in 2002. (See Appendix table A.1.) The accounting firm with dozens of male partners and not a single woman partner has had women candidates who wanted partnership positions. They were women who had accounting degrees, who had successful experience in accounting, who intended to continue their careers without interruption. What a company like that does not have is a desire to appoint those women to partnership positions. The large construction company that has no woman carpenters, the insurance company that has no women in entry jobs with promotion prospects, are not that way because not even one good women candidate could be recruited. Nor is the police department that has no females on patrol, the all-male economics faculty, the expensive restaurant with seven men in the kitchen and twenty waiting on table. It passes belief that there are no women at all in those well-paid jobs because no worthy woman wanted one. In these days especially, all-male crews are not kept free of women without some vigilance and effort. The women who do aspire to get berths in “men’s jobs” are kept off-balance by a host of practices and policies that employers and male workers use to exclude and discourage them. In some

Occupational Segregation by Sex

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workplaces such practices have been curbed, but progress has been slow and appears to have diminished in the last decade. The failure to make more dramatic progress in reducing occupational segregation by sex is responsible for a great deal of poverty, much unused talent, many lost hopes, many children growing up in deprived circumstances.

Invisible in Plain Sight The continued existence of occupations that are to all practical purposes closed to women (and that are in many cases closed to African Americans as well) is documented in the Census statistics, but to find out about it doesn’t really require the help of the Census Bureau. Examples are easily observable in everyday life. It is on display on every building site or road repair project one passes, on every fire engine that goes by, and in every cockpit of the planes one flies on. One can see it whenever a crew comes to paint one’s home or office, and whenever the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, crowded with white men, is shown on TV or in the newspapers. Only men serve food in most upscale restaurants. Those of us who eat in Chinese restaurants can see that women are not among the regular servers in most of them, although for some reason they are the ones who get to push carts of dim sum pastries in the restaurants that make them a specialty. In Japanese restaurants, all of the people who wait on table are women, but all the people who cut up the raw fish for sushi are men. While everybody is confronted by evidence of the sex typing of jobs, very few people seem to consider it a problem. Black people generally understand that occupational segregation by race hurts them, but women display no sense of grievance concerning occupational segregation by sex. Most people take occupational segregation by sex to be in some sense natural and don’t reflect on the reasons for it, or the disadvantages such conditions inflict on women. There is no reason to think that women would be unable to perform adequately in virtually all the jobs currently monopolized by men. They should certainly be willing to do so, given that the pay and working conditions in the alternative employments open to them are considerably worse. Even those social scientists who devote their professional careers to women’s issues seem not to be aggrieved by occupational segregation when they meet it in the flesh, or even to notice it. In the summer of 2003, I attended a conference devoted to furthering women’s equality. It was held at a Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. One of the events was a luncheon in the hotel ballroom. It was attended by about 400 people, who were served their food by a crew of perhaps 20 waiters, all male. Access to those “banquet waiter” jobs are controlled by a union, and carry far better pay than the jobs most women waiters find open to them. Many of the people attending the event were researchers on gender issues, and presumably all of them were feminists dedicated to wiping out discrimination against women. Yet occupational segregation is so accepted and so common a phenomenon that, with the exception of myself, none of the people present at the luncheon

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seemed to notice anything amiss and none expressed any discomfort.2 Liberal organizations sponsor a not inconsiderable proportion of the banquet lunches and dinners in Washington, yet these groups seemingly never protest the obvious exclusion of women from these jobs. Needless to say, the lack of awareness of occupational segregation, leading to a lack of protest, contributes to its continuation.

Occupational Segregation:The Oldest Tradition The division of labor based on sex is and has been common to all human societies. It has been observed in all of the premodern societies that anthropologists have told us about. In primitive economies, such assignment systems may have served as an effective tool of economic management, and took account of men’s greater strength and women’s pregnancy and lactation. Those physical differences between the sexes also produced male dominance— a dominance that furthered and shaped the division of labor by sex. The most onerous tasks that had to be done daily, such as fetching water, which could have been shared by both sexes, were assigned exclusively to women and girls. Only men and boys were allowed to engage in the more entertaining tasks that were occasional, such as hunting. Of course, it is not only gender that influences the kinds of jobs a given person will be allowed to engage in. Other characteristics such as age, race, class, caste, family connections also count. Members of groups low in the pecking order are found in jobs with less pleasant duties. Such jobs are defined as less prestigious, so that one’s place in the social hierarchy is correlated with one’s occupation. In a modern economy, family connections are still of great value, and in Western economies, having African forbears is still a hindrance to occupational attainment. Relatively recently, the goal of equality of treatment regardless of race or sex has been expressed in antidiscrimination laws. Many assume that we have substantially achieved a system where people compete for jobs on the basis of merit, or are moving rapidly in that direction. But traditions subordinating and segregating women, which go back thousands of years, are only slowly being weakened. An etiquette of male–female interaction that has the social function of expressing and acknowledging the subordination of women to men is still in place. There are informal rules about who may properly give orders to whom, and habits of thought that construe all interactions between men and women as primarily sexual in nature. That etiquette, and the traditions behind it, remain as powerful inhibitors of the integration of men and women as equals and equivalents on the job. Occupational segregation, like any other system deriving from dominance and privilege, tends to perpetuate itself through the self-interest of its beneficiaries. Such regimes, whether based on sex, race, class, or religion, always produce elaborate rationalizations about why those groups that have drawn the more desirable economic, social, and political assignments


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deserve to have them (for the good of all, of course, and blessed by the deity’s sanction), and why those who have drawn the less desirable assignments could perform satisfactorily in no other role.

Women’s Willingness to Enter Men’s Jobs There are few women applicants for jobs in occupations that don’t already employ women. This is probably due less to women’s unwillingness to take such jobs than to their difficulties in entering mostly male occupations and their relative ease in entering mostly female ones. Holding out for a man’s job means a longer and potentially more frustrating period of unemployment. Economists Peter Riach and Judith Rich performed an experiment. They responded to advertisements of job openings for accountants. For each job, they wrote two letters offering very similar credentials, one seeming to come from a male applicant, the other from a female. The “male” applicants got many more responses than the “female” ones.3 Many jobs are advertised only by word of mouth, and male incumbents mostly tell other males. Conversely, mother, sisters, and friends are mainly in “women’s jobs.” Some occupational segregation may be due to people’s desire to “do gender,” to conform to what is expected of them as a man or a woman. People who do not adequately perform the activities and behaviors considered appropriate to their sex, or who do not display the appropriate dress, jewelry, haircuts, walk, or tone of voice, let themselves in for social penalties.4 As a result, exhibiting “masculinity” or “femininity” amounts to a compulsion in most people. The greater acceptance of gay and lesbian people in recent years may have caused some easing of the penalties, but they continue to operate in most social groups. Many of the ways in which women display gender, such as wearing lipstick, high heels, jewelry in pierced earlobes, pretending to be silly, or refraining from assertiveness, involve major or minor hardships or disadvantages for them. Not all women display all of these signs, but there is significant social pressure to stick to at least some of the current conventions, so as to avoid the greater pain of the label “unfeminine.” Working in an occupation that is typed as typically female does serve to show and confirm a woman’s “femininity.” Moreover there are penalties for people (men as well as women) who take jobs that are earmarked for the opposite sex. Women who pioneered into typically male professional and managerial jobs were derided as bossy harridans and unwomanly. But men’s and women’s jobs differ greatly in advantages. Those women who do succeed in being hired for men’s jobs get jobs that are better than those they could get in the female job ghetto. That makes at least some women want to breach the ghetto’s walls. One major advantage of men’s jobs is higher pay than is available in the typically female jobs, although the pay women get in men’s jobs is lower than what men get in those jobs. Further, more of men’s jobs have relatively entertaining duties, and confer relatively higher status than women’s jobs for people of equivalent education.

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This being the case, at least some women will try to get those jobs, even if they have to act unfeminine to get and hold them. So if occupational segregation is to be preserved, defenses of the men’s preserve against women interlopers must be constantly in readiness. Research by Sandra and Daryl Bem showed that even in the 1970s, when far fewer women were employed, some women did have an interest in crafts jobs usually reserved for males, even when it was made clear that they were “men’s jobs.”5 When women were showed advertisements for telephone crafts jobs written in such a way as to be obviously angled toward men exclusively, 5 percent of the women said they were interested in the jobs. While this is not a large percentage, it would have provided enough candidates to desegregate many job categories. These pioneers would have made it easier for other women to enter the occupation. When the language of the ads was changed so that they were sex-neutral, 25 percent of the women to whom the ads were shown expressed an interest. Finally, 45 percent expressed an interest when the ad they were shown was angled toward women. (As noted above, and shown in Appendix table A.1, only 16 percent of telephone crafts jobs were actually held by women in the year 2002.) These experiments show the extent to which women pay attention to clues about which job is for whom, but they also show that it is not women’s unalterable disinterest in such jobs that stands in the way of dismantling occupational segregation by sex.

Men’s Stake in All-Male Working Groups Belonging to an occupation that is identified as male has been a part of a man’s display of masculinity. So has earning a good wage, a wage that will support a family. Now that many of the professional and managerial occupations are fairly well integrated by sex, the main theater of masculinity is in the blue-collar crafts, and in the police and firefighter positions. Many men do not want women to join them as coworkers in the same job category. A man may want to exclude women from his occupation because he feels that his image of masculinity, the precious hallmark of a superior status, might be diluted or compromised by the entry of women colleagues. He may feel that the presence of women in his work group would dissipate the relaxed and clubby all-male atmosphere. He may have doubts about a woman’s ability to do the job, and may fear extra burdens on him as a result. Conversely, he may fear that a woman will be more competent than he is, and may thus undercut his pretensions to superiority. His wife may be unfavorably inclined to his having a female colleague, and may back him up in resisting it, because she fears he will get sexually involved with her. Wives do get upset about the entry of women into their husbands’ previously all-male work environment, in occupations such as those of police officer, firefighter, or construction craft worker. Wives of male executives may be against the entry of female executives. They do have anxieties about their husbands’ possible sexual relations with female clerical


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workers, but they know that it would be useless to agitate against their presence. Hilary Clinton couldn’t keep Monica Lewinsky and her ilk off the White House staff, although she was well acquainted with her husband’s propensities. Male workers may worry, with considerable justification, that the first woman to enter their job category presages the eventual change of identity of that job to a “woman’s job.” If the boss sees that women can do the job, he may decide to save some money by hiring only women in the future. The pay of the remaining men might not be lowered, but it would probably not rise year by year with inflation, and so those men would fall behind if they stayed. Just as a neighborhood can go from white to black, a job can go from male to female. When the first black family buys a house in a white neighborhood, the householders worry that the neighborhood will “tip over” into being all black, and possibly become a slum as well. The male worker who sees the first woman come onto the work floor may anticipate that his occupation will become part of the low-paying female ghetto. The first black family in a neighborhood may suffer stones thrown into its picture window, a fire set under its porch, and its children roughed up. The first woman in a “man’s job” may experience hostility, sexual harassment, even life-threatening violence. Men who might be inclined toward a liberal attitude may themselves be treated as outcastes if they display it openly. The result may be that there is no one who will make the new woman on the job welcome, no one to help her learn the ropes, as would routinely be done for a new male colleague. The segregation of men and women affects the duties that employers assign to each job. Most of the boring, repetitive tasks that need doing are assigned to the jobs designated for women. Tasks that might train the worker for higher positions, or bring the worker into the limelight as a candidate for promotion, get assigned to men’s jobs. It would certainly be possible, as Rosabeth Kantor has argued, to create fewer or no boring dead-end jobs, by spreading the good and bad duties around in a more evenhanded way.6 However, as things stand, the men are the beneficiaries of the present job structure, and they understand this quite well. It is sometimes said that people might discriminate against those of another race, but that most men would be unlikely to discriminate against women of their own race. After all, women are men’s mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives, whom they hold dear. That line of reasoning does not hold up under even a moment’s consideration. Saudi Arabian men also have mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives, whom they no doubt hold dear. But most Saudi men are apparently perfectly happy to help enforce the disabilities under which these women suffer. The most notorious of these is the inability to drive a car, but there are disabilities that are far worse, such as the inability of Saudi women to go anywhere unless accompanied by a male relative and covered up except for the eyes. There are reasons why a man might not want his wife or girlfriend to have as good a job as he has. In any case, most men on the job are not dealing

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with their own female relations, but with strangers. Perhaps a man does have a woman friend or relative or a spouse who he would like to see placed in a job like his own. He has to worry about the reactions of his male coworkers if he tries to get her taken on. If he has even a single sexist colleague, who may be an otherwise excellent friend and coworker, that person may give him grief. In situations like that, where each person in the work group has the power to blackball the candidate, the most bigoted person’s views may be allowed to govern. Since a woman candidate may have a low chance of being taken on, and may have a low chance of success on the job if she is taken on, the risk of upsetting any one of a man’s buddies to advance her cause looms as a big cost for a small expected payoff.

Productivity and Social Relations on the Job One important reason for the continued sex segregation of jobs is that workplaces are not “all business.” People on the job have to interact and cooperate with each other. Smooth social interactions make the work go easier. Some male workers make trouble when they are asked to take orders from a woman or even work alongside them as colleagues. Employers don’t want that kind of trouble, so they keep certain jobs off-limits to women. Employers want high productivity from their workforce, and understand that productivity is not just a matter of getting workers capable of doing the job and providing them with good equipment and supervision. The productivity of an establishment is crucially affected by the nature of the personal interactions that each employee has with his or her coworkers and supervisor. If these interactions are pleasant and unproblematic, then employees can pay undistracted attention to the details of their work and go at it with a cooperative attitude. Productivity suffers if there are time-consuming and disruptive fights. It also suffers if male workers on the job refuse to teach the job to new female workers. Disruptive incidents or a string of offensive remarks may poison the atmosphere of a workplace and cause breakdowns in the flow of work. When cooperation is called for, it may be refused, degrading performance of duties. Workers may sabotage operations to express spite. When troubles of this sort arise, an employer has the choice of transferring or firing employees who are causing this kind of trouble, or getting rid of the female workers. The aggressors may be people with considerable experience, special knowledge and skill, whom it is hard to dispense with. For this reason, it may be the innocent victims who are sacrificed. In that case, feelings of injustice are generated, which may have troublesome consequences, including lawsuits. Whatever the case, having to shake up the staffing of a department or a crew is disrupting and potentially difficult and expensive. New people have to be recruited and trained before things are back to normal. A student of mine served as the manager of a golf course. When he wanted to hire a woman for the grounds crew, the head greenskeeper told


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him he didn’t want a woman. Apparently a golf course depends crucially on the expertise of the greenskeeper, and his word is law. In this case, his word was that his crew had to remain all-male. An employer who fills jobs without prior regard to the compatibility of the individuals who will occupy them is obviously asking for trouble. Of course, the compatibility of two individuals is not unconditional, but depends on the roles they will play. Individuals who might be compatible when A is the boss and B the subordinate, might be incompatible if the roles were reversed. They might be incompatible as equal colleagues. Nothing is more obvious than that people bring with them to their work their ideas about status and respect, and about when it is right and reasonable for one individual to be subordinated to another. Many bring with them the idea that it is wrong for a man to have to take orders from a woman, and that he is shamed if he does. The managers of an establishment may have liberal attitudes, may have a realistic idea of the capabilities of women workers, and may want to avoid sex discrimination. Yet there may be pressures on them to pay attention to these compatibility issues when hiring, assigning, and promoting workers. Although managers may have sensible reasons for practicing occupational segregation, and such practices may increase productivity and profits in the short run, those reasons constitute no justification for doing so, either ethically or under the law. If there were rigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, if there were effectively operating affirmative action plans in more workplaces, and if there were strong ethical feelings against giving in to these sexist traditions, then occupational segregation by sex would be less common than it still is. As time goes on, the sexist traditions might fade. As it is, in the absence of compulsions requiring change, it is easiest for managers is to continue to practice occupational segregation. The less liberal among them feel free to indulge their prejudices.

Employers’ Ideas Employers still have preconceived notions about what is appropriate for women to do or what women can and can’t do well. Although women have been driving motor vehicles since the early 1900s, and with better safety records than men, there still appears to be great resistance on the part of many employers to letting women into jobs where they drive trucks, or even cars. In a survey performed in 2002, women were only 4 percent of truck drivers. Although there were prominent women aviators by the 1930s, women had only 5 percent of the pilots’ jobs by 2002. Construction jobs continue to remain largely closed to women. Employers seldom put women on jobs where they sell or service expensive or advanced equipment. Very few women are hired to sell cars. In department stores, few women sell refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, or rugs. Stores that sell video and audio equipment may have no women selling. They are there, but serving as cashiers, at low pay.

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One of my students told of the time she was working in a clerical job, but had asked to take the place of a part-time salesman who was leaving for another job. The owner of the business laughed and said “We need you girls in the back office.” Many of my women students reported that they are laughed at when they asked to be considered for promotions to maledominated positions, or when they asked to do things not usually done on the job by women, such as driving an automobile. The idea that women are “needed” for clerical positions and therefore cannot be considered for other jobs is also not uncommon. When a man is taken on in a typically women’s occupation, male managers feel social discomfort at seeing him doing duties they view as women’s work. They feel sorry for him, and look for a chance to place him in a more suitable spot, usually one with less boring duties and better promotional opportunities. This behavior, of course, goes to maintain occupational segregation. Employers may assume that women are on average less reliable, less energetic workers, and more likely to quit. Even if that were true, treating individual women adversely for that reason violates the antidiscrimination laws. An employer who rules out all women for a particular type of job because of a belief that the average male candidate is a better bet than the average female candidate is said to be practicing “statistical discrimination.” Thus membership in what is thought to be a low-performing group destroys opportunities for individuals whose behavior may be very different from the average. Whether the perception of difference in averages is true or false, statistical discrimination hurts individuals because of their sex, and is illegal under U.S. law (see chapter 7). Yet these practices have not been stamped out. As we shall see, enforcement of the law against discrimination is quite lax. The facts in the discrimination case against Rent-A-Center, a chain of 2,200 stores, displays the consequences of sexist attitudes on the part of an employer, and the ease with which an entire organization was mobilized to cater to them.7 The company’s business is renting furniture and appliances to low-income customers. At the end of some predetermined period, the customer owns the merchandise. In 1998, Rent-A-Center was acquired by Renter’s Choice, a company carrying on a similar business. Women employees of Rent-A-Center had previously enjoyed promotional opportunities, and some had become store managers. After the acquisition, the treatment of women changed dramatically. Regional managers were told that Ernie Talley, the new owner, wanted to get rid of every woman in the company, and that they needed to do it in any way they could. Talley said that women are “not right for the business . . . A woman’s place is not in my stores. They should be in the kitchen.” The company’s new executive vice president said that women “belong at home, having babies and doing what their husbands tell them to do.” Talley found many men in Rent-A-Center’s management only too willing to become accomplices in women’s ill-treatment. Male managers routinely expressed their contempt for female employees—they complained that


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women caused too much trouble, and were not carrying their share of the load. One manager, asked why he terminated a woman said, “We don’t have to have a reason. Women can’t do this job.” Another derided a woman’s successful job performance, saying her salary bonus could be going to a man. Hiring discrimination became blatant. Store managers were told that when a woman submitted an application, it was to be thrown in the trash. One store manager was told not to hire a woman unless the candidate could demonstrate that she could lift a recliner over her head. Another manager said women don’t make good store employees “because their boobs always get in the way.” Talley ordered an increase in lifting requirement to 75 pounds, and said openly that it would keep women from applying. The company devised a variety of maltreatments to get rid of women employees. Women would be sent by themselves to make deliveries of washers, dryers, and desks to second and third floor apartments in buildings without elevators. Psychological tests that included intrusive questions about sex, were administered to women by male managers. There was gender-based assignment of cleaning and clerical duties: women put to cleaning the stores’ restrooms; male coworkers told not to do it because it was women’s duty exclusively. Because of this kind of treatment, women, including some who had been given awards for excellence in management, were fired or made to quit, while less qualified men were hired and promoted. Linda Sheattler had gone to work for the company in 1994 and had been promoted to manager of a store in 1997. The store did well under her direction—it got a “Store of the Month” award three months in a row. After the acquisition, the regional manager started to scrutinize her operations intensely. He called daily about the details of her operations, and checked on her whereabouts constantly, apparently in the hope of showing that she was not attending to business. She was fired in 1999 and replaced by a man she herself had trained. The Rent-A-Center management’s behavior must strike the reader as way out of the ordinary—hardly typical of the way American companies conduct their business. Yet Renter’s Choice, the company that acquired Rent-A-Center, had been run for years under Ernie Talley’s rules, and his treatment of women employees there would not have been considered atypical. Talley had no need to employ unusually harsh measures to maintain the sex segregation of occupations in Renter’s Choice. He simply ran things as many businesses do: the women hired were assigned exclusively to “women’s jobs”. They stayed in those positions for as long as they worked for the company. To the women working for Renter’s Choice that seemed perfectly normal, and they saw nothing wrong in it, because it matched their experience with other employers. But the women employees in Rent-A-Center had been conditioned before the takeover to a regime in which they were allowed to compete with men for jobs. After the takeover, the harshness toward them was necessary to make the workplace “normally” sexually segregated. The result was a complaint of discrimination, and a class-action lawsuit. The suit against

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Rent-A-Center was settled in October 2003. Damages of $47 million were paid to a class of 5,000 women.

How Firms Keep Themselves Segregated If a firm is to be and continue to be sex-segregated, the processes under which people are hired, assigned to jobs, and promoted must be geared to maintain the segregation. Presumably few employers still have formal rules that explicitly exclude people from particular jobs for reasons of race or sex. But even a firm that officially adopts procedures to disallow such behavior may continue to have segregation in its jobs. Personnel decisions—who to hire, who to promote—have to be highly decentralized in larger organizations, because the style, attitudes, and abilities of the candidates have to be judged in each case by somebody on the spot. The case of Wal-Mart illustrates this well. The women’s stories reported in the New York Times coverage of the Wal-Mart lawsuit show that some of those charged with making these decisions have attitudes that prevent them from being fair to women. And the statistics on pay and promotion at Wal-Mart which the lawsuit has brought forth suggest that many, if not most, have such attitudes. An employer is unlikely to be free of discrimination unless there are ways of motivating all supervisors within the establishment to act in a nondiscriminatory way, and negating the influence of those who do not. This is unlikely to happen without an affirmative action plan, which contains incentives for managers who achieve integration of occupations and punishes those who do not achieve it. When people are being interviewed for a job, they can easily be steered to a job that the firm considers appropriate for their sex. After all, applicants are trying as hard as they can to please the person interviewing them. They know that if they appear stubborn or pushy they may get no job at all. Sometimes the candidate is given a female-job assignment on a take-it-orleave-it basis; other times the candidate may be given a signal which job to choose if she wants any. One of my students was urged by the personnel officer of an insurance company to “choose” to be a clerical worker rather than a claims agent, a job that was mainly male at that company. He said that the clerical job was good for her because “it would make use of your training.” She understood quite well that the clerical job paid less than the claims agent job and had no promotion prospects, but needing a job, she did what he was urging. Even where the official policy of the establishment is neutral toward sex segregation or is opposed to it, certain practices connected to the placement within the firm of new employees contribute to the perpetuation of separate jobs for men and women. It is common in placing a new employee to have the candidate interviewed by the prospective supervisor and coworkers. This serves the purpose of weeding out people who appear incompatible with the workers already on the job. However such a practice amounts to allowing relatively low-level employees to blackball candidates. Women


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may be rejected for openings in men’s jobs on the grounds that the people on the job have doubts about them, which indeed they might. Again, the opinion of the most sexist person in a department may be controlling. I recall the process of recruiting a new chair for the university economics department where I served as a professor. One of our candidates was a woman who was personable, bright, gave us a good lecture, and had published interesting scholarly work. When we held a meeting to discuss the candidates, one of the male faculty members opened the discussion on the woman candidate by saying “I’ve heard she’s hard on men.” No particulars were put forward or demanded. All discussion ceased, and that was the end of her candidacy. The department went on to hire a chair who, as it turned out, was hard on women. It is relatively easy to get new women employees assigned to female jobs, but they have to be kept from being transferred to men’s jobs if segregation is to be maintained. This may be done by a seniority system that forces those who take transfers from female jobs to male jobs to lose seniority. News of vacancies in male jobs have to be kept away from females. When a man’s job becomes vacant, a formal announcement of the vacancy may be avoided. The supervisors may tap only or mainly men for interviews, as is alleged in the case of Wal-Mart. Or applicants may be recruited through word of mouth. Men who have similar jobs pass on the news of the vacancy to other men they know who might be interested. Women simply do not get to know of the vacancy, or if they do are not encouraged to apply. As the Bems’ research shows, recruitment material which appears from its contents to be addressed solely to men discourages women from expressing interest. Any woman who agitates for an inappropriate transfer may be ignored, and if she persists she may be harassed, and pretexts used to set her up for firing.

The Treatment of Women in “Men’s Jobs” If a woman does manage to land a man’s job, the men who resent her incursion may employ tactics designed to dislodge her—to get her fired or to get her to quit. Not all men feel or act this way. The strength of the exclusionary sentiment varies from job to job, industry to industry, man to man. But enough men do feel this way to create a serious barrier to integration in many establishments. In any group of people who have to cooperate on the job, it only takes one man acting obnoxiously to make life very unpleasant for the intruding woman. Here are the experiences of a woman who wanted to be a carpenter, and who did succeed: I started work as a carpenter in the early 70’s. I was able to pressure a local contractor, a friend, into hiring me as an apprentice. He encouraged me to join the union. I was already on a union job in 1980, but not yet admitted to the union. They were waiting to see if I would “go away.” Two other females [were allowed to] join at the same time. Since then none have been allowed to

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The Economic Emergence of Women receive apprentice or journeyman books. There were 450 males in the local and the three of us. The [union’s] business agent and I argued about the number of women constantly and he ended by yelling at me that there were “three of you damn women and there will be no more.” He’s kept it exactly that way. The first outfit I was employed at, the supervisor was exceptionally good and fair, but the men hired were a rowdy group in general. They were openly hostile and verbally abusive to me and the other females. My carpenter steward treated me with constant verbal sexual abuse in order to be “macho” and get a laugh on me for the boys to share. I tried to befriend him and towards the end of the season he backed off somewhat but never really stopped. My next employment was with another bridge contractor. The management was polite, but got me off the job as soon as they could. The steward tried to keep me on, arguing that I was as good a worker as any man but I was laid off anyway. They played strictly by quotas and never kept a female working any longer than necessary even if she was a reliable employee … A foreman on another job had sworn he’d never have a woman on his crew and management put me on his crew to spite him. Of course he proceeded to punish me. In the morning he’d boom out a good morning to each man, then made a point of turning his back on me. At lunch break I was excluded from conversations and at times the men wouldn’t move over to allow me a space at the table. I was isolated working too—sent off on a trivial, meaningless job or on a job involving extreme endless repetition. A decent foreman will share with all crew members a repeating job, but it doesn’t often work that way. Females usually do the “dirt jobs.” My solution was to find a good company, which I eventually did—that is unlikely for all of us to be able to do. There are too few “good outfits.” Since then I have encountered several very good, tolerant, respectful foremen. There is no excuse for the many others who continue mistreatment of females and still get away with it. The union must set a good example, and it will trickle down. So far that has not happened in this area.8

This narrative was published in 1985, when women had 1 percent of the carpenter jobs. There has been very little change since then—women had only 2 percent of carpenter jobs in 2002, only 2 percent of the plumbing jobs and only 1 percent of the job for electricians. The carpenter’s narrative makes it clear what women have to go through if they aspire to cross the line into male job territory, and why many simply give up. The story includes sexual harassment, social ostracism by coworkers, lack of encouragement from supervisors, and punitive assignment to the worst part of the work. None of the hostile supervisors of this woman carpenter could have been interested in teaching her any tricks of the trade. The story is silent on how many times she got advice from friends and family members to stop batting her head against the wall and get into a line of work where she would be appreciated. The woman carpenter’s story also makes clear why some managements are not eager to hire women in male-dominated occupations. Managing construction sites is difficult enough, without hiring workers whose presence on the job creates such problems. To some managements, the male


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supervisors and workers are the mainstay of the business; it is the woman carpenter who is the troublemaker. The carpenter’s account does testify to the fact that there are “good outfits,” which are fair to women workers and which exercise discipline against male employees who might harass them. The carpenter’s story also testifies to the fact that “quotas” are effective in increasing the number of women in male-dominated occupations. She is referring to the goals and timetables that are part of affirmative action programs imposed by the Federal Office of Contract Compliance Policy on firms holding federal contracts. Some firms obviously conform only grudgingly. But as they get experience with women workers, they may come to conform less grudgingly. In the cases where a woman is assigned to a “man’s job,” her treatment by coworkers and supervisors may be designed to get her fired or to get her to quit. Regardless of the job, each new worker requires some help from coworkers to get started. She requires help in learning aspects of the work that are undocumented, in dealing with problems that come up in any new job, and in getting hints about peculiarities of the work process and the administrative procedures. Where there are multiperson tasks, she needs to be given a chance to learn to cooperate as a team member. If her fellow workers refuse to give that help, and instead surround her with an unrelentingly hostile environment, then her productivity, her morale, and her chance of survival may be low. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers in 2001, and the publication in the newspapers of the pictures of the several hundred firefighters who had lost their lives, had revealed that the New York firefighters were almost entirely white and male. For a considerable time thereafter, the sadness for those lost and the respect due to their sacrifice prevented any remark on the near-monopoly of white males, which the pages of the victims’ photographs had revealed. However, in 2003 the New York Times ran a story about a widow of one of the lost firefighters who wanted to become one herself; it also reviewed some of the unsavory history of the Fire Department’s personnel practices. Spurred by a lawsuit attacking sex discrimination, the Department had hired 50 women in 1982. However, harassment and ostracism by male colleagues had plagued the women firefighters, and more than half had since left. The hiring of women had been allowed to lapse—of the 5,000 firefighters the New York City Fire Department had hired between 1990 and 2003, only 9 were women.9

Unions’ Complicity Women who hold jobs in workplaces that have union contracts make higher wages and enjoy more fringe benefits than their counterparts in nonunionized workplaces. On this basis, some make the claim that unions are good for women. But unions sometimes play a role in excluding women (as well as African Americans) from better-paid work opportunities.10

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We see from the carpenter’s story that women can have difficulty getting into construction craft unions, which provide access to the better jobs. Apprenticeship programs administered by construction unions give all the training slots to male relatives of members, who are mostly white males. Meat cutting apprenticeships in supermarkets have also been restricted to males. Needless to say, the systems that accomplish this are informal ones. Employers may recruit workers from unions-run hiring halls, which do not welcome women. The waiters who serve at catered meals and parties at hotels in large cities get jobs that way. In some cases, the seniority systems that effectively prevent women and black employees from entering into types of jobs from which they have historically been excluded have been enshrined in contracts negotiated and signed by unions. These contracts contain provisions that make seniority in the traditional black and female jobs non-portable to the white male jobs. So an already employed woman who shifted into the predominantly white male occupations would lose her seniority, and would be first in line for layoff. This keeps applications for transfers to such jobs by women low to nonexistent.

Sexual Harassment One definition of sexual harassment is any attention of a sexual nature in the context of the work situation which has the effect of making a woman uncomfortable on the job, impeding her ability to do her work or interfering with her employment opportunities. It can be manifested by looks, touches, jokes, innuendoes, gestures, epithets or direct propositions. . . . [by a] direct demand for sexual compliance coupled with the threat of firing if a woman refuses . . . [by] being forced to work in an environment in which, through various means such as sexual slurs and/or the public display of derogatory images of women . . . a woman is subjected to stress or made to feel humiliated because of her sex.11

Surveys reveal that a large proportion of women workers experience sexual harassment. Among women workers for the federal government, 42 percent reported having been sexually harassed on the job in the two years previous to the survey.12 Women in traditionally female occupations often suffer sexual harassment by superiors. The male boss pressures the female underling for sexual favors, sometimes as a condition of holding the job. He wants the favors, partly for their own sake, and partly for their demonstration of his superior status, and his ability to get her to do what he wants.13 Sometimes the sexual harassment of a woman in a typically female job is done to show her and her coworkers that she is always a sex object, and so cannot be a serious competitor to men. It has the function of keeping her off-balance and cooling out any hopes she might have of moving into a job like the harasser’s. Here is the experience of one young woman, a student of mine,


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working in the accounting department of a carpet company: When I first came to this company, I was introduced to the rest of the office workers as well as the salesmen. When introduced to the head salesman, for whom I do some work, one of the first things he said was, “Oh good, she’s got big boobs.” As this was said in front of many of my co-workers, comments about me regarding this physical characteristic are very common. Once another salesman came up behind me, unzipped his pants, and poked a blunt object in my thigh. This incident was also witnessed by many of my co-workers, and my audible reaction was the topic of conversation for many months. I believe actions like that have caused me to be held back from promotions and raises. The reason is that many times when I am trying to make a point to one of the salesmen, he might interject with a comment about my physical attributes that has nothing to do with the work. I feel that these comments are timed to be used whenever I am beginning to take control of a work situation and the male co-worker feels threatened. This type of comment takes away from my credibility and “puts me in my place.”14

Some sexual harassment against women can probably be classed as merely recreational sadism on the part of the men who carry it on. But some have a more practical aim. Women who get jobs that male workers think should be occupied only by men get sexually harassed as a way of making them want to leave. The sexual harassment of women with jobs in maledominated occupations—for example, mock propositions to engage in sex—is basically a series of insults to their dignity. Such behavior wounds and embarrasses the woman, demonstrates the men’s contempt for her unfeminine behavior in invading their territory, and shows her that they will not accept her as “one of the boys.” They hope she will be made sufficiently uncomfortable to abandon the job. This kind of behavior has occurred on construction sites and on the premises of coalmines. It has also been complained of in less macho contexts—by federally employed air traffic controllers and by women professionals at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.15 A complaint that was filed in a suit against six CBS-affiliated television stations in the year 2000 alleged sexual harassment of broadcast technicians. As is the case in many sexual harassment complaints, the female technicians claimed the company had also discriminated against them with respect to salary, overtime, training, and promotion.16 Women in the control tower at J.F. Kennedy Airport were harassed while they were directing aircraft movements. Their employer retaliated against the women when they complained.17 If men who harass are allowed by employers to operate with impunity, even a small percentage of the male workforce can make women’s work lives hellish. The automobile manufacturing companies started giving women factory jobs in the in the 1970s, but some male workers and supervisors in the industry still resent the presence of women, want to prevent their acceptance as legitimate workmates, and would like to drive them out.

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“We’re a microcosm of society in general,” said Kathleen Barclay, the top human resources executive at General Motors. “As long as there is an existence of harassment and discrimination in society overall, it will be brought into the workplace. Regardless of what industry you’re in, or what company you’re in, it will be there.” It is certainly true that many men arrive at the workplace with feelings of superiority toward women already formed. But that does not imply, as Barclay seems to suggest, that employers cannot control men’s harassing and discriminatory behavior within the workplace and must be complacent about it. On the contrary, employers have an obligation under the law to prevent and punish such behavior. The automobile industry has had a poor record of doing that. Linda Gilbert was proud of being the first woman in Chrysler’s Jeep Cherokee plant in Detroit to land a job as a millwright, installing and repairing plant machinery. But Gilbert was not allowed to do her job in peace—she was harassed with obscene epithets and demeaning cartoons, which depicted her in a sex act with a coworker. The case resulted in a $21 million verdict against the company in 1999.18 The same year, Ford Motor Company paid out $18 million in damages to settle a class-action case. In Mitsubishi Motors’ plant in downstate Illinois, sexual harassment was apparently a way of life—hundreds of women workers were harassed by male coworkers. Their complaints were ignored by the management and by their union representatives. One woman expressed the disgust and stress this behavior caused: Not only did they touch me. They used their wrenches and their air guns inbetween my legs. They’d pretend like they were extensions of themselves. That was one thing they really liked doing because we have very large wrenches there, good-sized wrenches, and they just thought that was hilarious. And that was just, in the front of my mind, I knew that they were going to be doing something when I got there and will I make it through this day or, how am I going to make it?19

The women working in the Mitsubishi factory had limited education, and the jobs they had there were far better than the jobs they could get outside the company. One woman remarked that she had gone from a $5 an hour cashier’s job to taking home $50,000 a year. There was fear among both the male and female workers that the bad publicity and a boycott organized by the National Organization for Women might drive down the sales of Mitsubishi cars, and cost workers their good jobs. That turned some of the women workers against those who had complained, making their situation particularly bitter. The company was set at first to resist the charges the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) had filed. In a bizarre episode, the company provided the plant employees with box lunches, t-shirts with the company logo, a fleet of 40 buses, and a paid holiday so that they could travel up to Chicago and stage a rally protesting the charges in front of the EEOC office. The company soon realized that the whole affair was a public relations disaster, and ended up settling the


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complaints for a total of $44 million and a promise to take steps to address the problem.20 Harassment of any kind, whether it has a sexual aspect or not, which is done with the purpose of making women uncomfortable, threatening them, interfering with their work, and forcing them to abandon a “man’s job,” is a common way of maintaining occupational segregation. The likelihood that putting women and men into the same job category will lead to harassment promotes the continued existence of occupational segregation. The anticipation of this kind of trouble, for which they will be held responsible, must surely deter employers from integrating all-male occupations within their establishments. The cost of lawsuits that might result from the harassment is probably not the worst of their worries. These kinds of behaviors and the reaction to them on the part of the victims destroy good feelings, cooperation, and discipline in the workplace. So, under present conditions, if employers feel they can get away with keeping each job for one sex or the other, they will do that. This will go on until it becomes part of standard managerial behavior to impose severe discipline, including dismissal, on workers who commit harassment and on managers who tolerate it. If that were to happen on a regular basis, the general male population would become aware that there are serious penalties for that kind of behavior in the workplace, and it would become more rare. Unfortunately, many of the settlements of sexual harassment complaints do not provide for the establishment of such discipline. They do not even prescribe any action against the particular employees who committed the offenses that brought on the complaint being settled.

Promotional Opportunities on the Job Economists have dubbed the structure of promotion opportunities and wages within a workplace the “internal labor market.”21 The internal labor market has formal and informal rules of operation that establish who can make a serious bid for each of the jobs above entry level. In most large work establishments, the possibilities of promotion depend on the job a worker has. From some jobs, relatively long “promotion ladders” lead upward, with possibilities of promotion to the highest echelon. Still other jobs have either short promotion ladders or are dead ends. Jobs typically assigned to males tend to have longer ladders than typically female jobs, and at least some of the male jobs lead to the upper echelons, while no female jobs may do so. Even if a woman has a job of the type from which men can be promoted up the ladder, the rules operating in the internal labor market in the place she works may make her ineligible for further advancement. Up to World War II, it was not unusual to read of a man who had reached the headship of a business enterprise after starting work for the company as a clerk. Now it is rare, because clever and ambitious men have not had to take clerical positions in any numbers for decades. Yet a recently serving president of the New York Stock Exchange had started at the Exchange as a

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clerk. (His career moves got publicity when he was fired in 2003 because he got an overly compliant board of directors to agree that he be paid $217 million in a year.) A progression from a clerical position to a high executive position has not been available for female employees, because their jobs were and mostly still are dead end. At Wal-Mart, two-thirds of the current store managers started with the company as hourly “associates.”22 Promotion from within provides new hires with long promotion ladders, but the men in entry-level positions at Wal-Mart climb those ladders far more often than do the entry-level women. Some companies allow women to be promoted to low-level supervisory positions where their job is to supervise other women. However their chances of going still higher is poor, and their pay relative to that of male supervisors is low. As a result, the women supervisors will quit more often than their male counterparts. Paradoxically, this kind of setup may sometimes result in a higher rate of promotions for the women than for the men in the company, although the jobs the women are promoted into will be dead ends.23

Allocating Jobs to the Male and Female Territories Given that we have occupational segregation, what determines the sex identity of each job? How and why does the assignment get perpetuated? One idea, put forward by those who see no harm in the present situation and oppose government intervention to change it, is that women themselves have chosen certain occupations as particularly advantageous for them.24 The advantage alleged is that many of the typical women’s occupations, although low paying and lacking in promotional opportunities, are those a person can exit and then reenter without having to take a deep cut in pay. The contradictory nature of this argument—that women have chosen the very worst occupations for their own economic advantage was exposed by sociologist Paula England.25 She showed that a person who drops in and out of the workforce would get no advantage from choosing the typical women’s occupations for the simple reason that the pay in such jobs is so low. Granted, the pay in these occupations does not drop when a person leaves the labor force and reenters; it is low regardless of a person’s service record. Sociologist Valerie K. Oppenheimer, writing in 1969, suggested that women are assigned to jobs and assign themselves to jobs that are reminiscent of the tasks they do as housewives.26 There is certainly an element of truth to this hypothesis. The idea that women were suited to care for young children surely facilitated their entry into elementary teaching assignments. Nursing was something that women had done on an amateur basis in the home. The detachment of the clerical occupation from the realm of male jobs, which occurred in the late nineteenth century, may have been facilitated by the evident ease of refashioning it from a management trainee job into a dead-end helpmeet job.


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The shift of clerical jobs from the men’s side to the women’s seems to have been triggered by the introduction of a mechanical device—the typewriter. The housewife analogy does not do a very good job of explaining the shift of the bank teller occupation; it was previously thought that male tellers were necessary to give an air of financial substance and expertise to the bank staff.27 Nor does the assignment of many restaurant cooking jobs to men seem consistent with it. Another of Oppenheimer’s suggestions is that women lack motivation. Still another of her suggestions is that women’s occupations are those in which the employer has a “need for cheap but educated labor,” but cannot attract qualified men who will work for low wages.28 This argument is based on the mistaken idea that wages are fixed in each occupation by some unspecified process, after which employers sit back and wait to see whether men turn up for the job. As we shall see below, it is the assignment of a sex identity to each job that determines its wage, not the other way round. If an employer decides to let women into certain jobs that have been occupied by males, the wage will be reduced. Another set of explanations listed by Oppenheimer is probably closer to the heart of the matter. Employers avoid having women in jobs where they are supervising men, in mixed groups, or which might be expected to lead to supervisory positions over men. The key to this set of explanations is the unequal social relations between the sexes in society at large, which carries over to inequality in the workplace. A major reason for occupational segregation by sex is that employers tend to reserve jobs with on-the-job training opportunities for men.29 The common rationalization is that women have greater turnover, and that an employer’s investment in a woman’s training is more likely to be lost, as she is more likely to quit. However, the perceptions of differences in turnover behavior between men and women appear to be false. Studies of turnover rates have shown that if women and men in similar jobs with similar wages are compared, women have turnover rates little different from those of men.30 Before the Home Depot case was settled, at a time when the company was still determined to fight the charges, an op-ed column sympathetic to the company’s stance on its assignment and promotion practices was published in the Wall Street Journal: As it turns out, Home Depot has a simple explanation for the gender disparity in its ranks. Most women job applicants have experience as cashiers, so that’s where they go. Men, on the other hand, often express an interest and aptitude for carpentry, plumbing and other crafts. So that’s where they go. The plaintiffs dug up an “expert” to pronounce that this makes Home Depot guilty of reinforcing “gender stereotypes.” This egg-head proclaims that Home Depot’s hiring managers wrongly assume “that the prevalence of ‘masculine’ traits among women and ‘feminine’ traits among men is rare.” So Home Depot stands guilty: guilty of running the company to make money (and create jobs), instead of trying to create a hitherto unknown society in which gender differences are nonexistent. It apparently doesn’t much matter that many of Home

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The Economic Emergence of Women Depot’s women employees aren’t anxious to breakdown “gender stereotypes,” either. A number of female workers have filed sworn statements in which they attest that they voluntarily turned down promotions because they liked the more regular hours of cashier work, which allowed them to engage in such stereotypical activities as child-rearing. Tough luck, ladies. You’re going to get more “rewarding” work whether you like it or not.31

Training Prerequisites Some jobs require formal education or training in school prior to starting on the job. If women don’t get such training they can’t present themselves as credible candidates for these jobs. Prior to the enactment of Title IX of the Education Amendments in 1972, schools refused admission to many wellqualified women applicants, and discouraged applications from many others. Elite medical and law schools have behaved in this way until relatively recently. Quotas on women students have in recent years been relaxed and outright exclusions repealed, but it is likely that some discriminatory exclusions continue. The undergraduate class admitted to Harvard in the fall of 2003 was the first to contain as many women and men. On most college campuses, women still distribute themselves differently among majors than men do, although the differences are lessening. However, the importance of specialized training can be exaggerated. Most male-dominated jobs that recruit college graduates do not require a specific college major. Accounting and engineering constitute the bulk of the maledominated jobs that do have such a specific schooling prerequisite. Women are currently getting more than one-third of undergraduate accounting degrees. Engineering, which employs 7 percent of the country’s working college graduates and accounts for 2 percent of the full-time labor force, remains overwhelmingly male. Women have increased their participation in engineering from almost nil in 1960 to 11 percent in 1982, and to 18 percent in 1999.32 Women’s participation is far lower in engineering than it is in undergraduate mathematics, medicine, dentistry, or law. Perhaps part of the problem is that engineering is the only college major set up so that a student cannot try out an introductory course, and then shift in as a sophomore or a junior. One must make a total commitment in high school, at a time when many female students have no information about the field, and are under intense social pressure to act in a conventionally feminine way. Jobs that require formal apprenticeships appear, to all intents and purposes, to be closed to women. Where employers designate which workers are to be given training, they exclude women disproportionately if not entirely. Where unions are involved in apprenticeship programs, they appear to be particularly resistant to women. Upper limits on the age of apprentice candidates serve to exclude women, many of whom do not awaken to their need for a job with a “family wage” until their late twenties or early thirties. While the law, medical, and business schools of the United States have


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enrolled considerable numbers of women students in the last decade, highschool industrial arts teachers and administrators have managed to keep their student bodies preparing for the male-dominated crafts jobs remarkably free of women. These teachers are sometimes called on to propose candidates for apprenticeships, and women do not get referred through such channels. In 2002, a study by the National Women’s Law Center found a high degree of sex segregation in the nation’s system of high-school vocational education.33 Over 90 percent of the students taking training in carpentry, automotive repair, and plumbing in vocational high schools are males. The females are mostly training for low-paid jobs as cosmetologists, child care workers, and health aides. The Center found that guidance counselors steer young women students toward the female-dominated courses and away from vocational programs in the male-dominated trades, based on sex stereotypes. One teacher in Boston instructed a female student not to choose a male-dominated vocational program “because she would be taking a boy’s spot.” A mostly male vocational school in New York City recruited students for its automotive repair program with the motto “Builds Mechanical Men.” It is probably fairly easy to steer girls who are in their early teens and bound for vocational schools toward traditionally female occupations. It would be less easy if the counselors gave the girls information on the consequences of their occupational choices on the their earning power. If it was brought home to them that cosmetologists earn $8.49 an hour, and child care workers $7.43, while the vocational students who are being prepared for male-dominated jobs in the skilled trades can expect to earn $20 an hour, more girls would opt for the latter, and the sex segregation would lessen through time. However, counselors typically do not pass on this kind of information. Further, the study found that those brave girls who do choose to enroll in nontraditional classes suffer sexual harassment and that the vocational schools do a bad job of controlling it.

Consequences of Occupational Segregation Occupational segregation affects the demand and supply of labor to each occupation, and therefore affects wage levels in the women’s jobs. However the consequences of occupational segregation go beyond money, important though that is. Having a majority of the job titles effectively off limits to half the population has costs in terms of human expression and dignity. Some of the means used to enforce occupational segregation also rob women of their dignity. Occupational segregation means that certain talents and aptitudes do not get expressed; that some people have to spend their lives doing things they hate, when a chance to compete for jobs they would have liked better should and could have been open to them. It reinforces the very system of female subordination that motivates it. Women’s situation apart from the workplace

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is made more difficult because of the reduced options that occupational segregation entails. Productivity considerations have an important part in the generation and maintenance of occupational segregation. If and when a significant proportion of the nation’s establishments are induced make an effort to break the tradition of men’s jobs and women’s jobs, there may be short-run losses in productivity. However in the longer run productivity should improve. The wastage of women’s talent will diminish, and fewer jobs requiring discretion will be in the hands of relatively less able men. The remedy for occupational segregation is affirmative action—a conscious program undertaken by employers to end the reservation of certain jobs for men. After looking at the effects of occupational segregation on wages, we shall turn to a discussion of the problems and promises of affirmative action.

6 Setting the Pay for the Jobs Women Hold

The labor market, through the workings of supply and demand, awarded women with full-time secretarial jobs an average of $496 a week in 2002. Women with jobs selling radios, television sets, and similar appliances were awarded less pay—an average of $435.1 The wage paid in any job is influenced by the skill and knowledge it requires. Jobs that require higher skills—more “human capital” acquired through training and experience— will tend to pay more than jobs that require less or none. So one might conclude that the skills secretaries need were worth 14 percent more than the skills television salespeople need. But skills are only part of the wage story. Men who held jobs selling television sets averaged quite a lot more than female secretaries—$622. Could the jobs of television salespeople who are men require skills that are worth 43 percent more to employers than the skills required of the television salespeople who are women? (If so, how come women don’t acquire such skills?) Or might we suspect that the employers who choose to hire men for their TV sales jobs are willing to pay them 43 percent more than comparably skilled women because, for some reason having nothing to do with skills, they want men for the job, and not women. Supply and demand don’t sound as though they have anything to do with gender. But the demand for labor, after all, is not an impersonal force. It is not “untouched by human hands.” It is in the hands of the people responsible for hiring, for placing the newly hired in particular jobs within a workplace, and for deciding who gets promoted. And many if not most of those people, when they think of what kind of worker is needed for a particular job, include the sex of the worker as one of the characteristics to be considered. In other words, they discriminate by sex. Your sex determines whether you are in demand for certain jobs. Or to put it another way, your sex (and your race) may determine whether an employer, looking to fill a particular vacancy, sees you as part of the supply of candidates worthy of consideration.

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Job Characteristics and Pay Levels In order to make a good guess about the wage a particular job pays, you would have to know the amount of education one had to have before getting that job, and the degree of specialized knowledge, talent, and intelligence needed to perform it effectively. If you knew all of those obviously important things about the job, but only them, you would still be likely to make a big mistake in guessing the wage. To be sure of making a really good guess, you would have to know in addition whether the job in question was occupied by a man or a woman. The human capital the job requires—the value of the qualifications— does affect the pay of a job. But it is not the sole determinant. An examination of weekly wage rates by occupation and by sex reported in table 6.1 bears this out. The table lists 18 occupations in which women are paid less on average than are women secretaries. We can infer that the occupations toward the bottom of the list require less human capital than the occupations at the top of the list. An examination of the titles certainly suggests that. For example, a worker who sells furniture does not need the typing skills or literacy of a secretary, her organizing ability, her tact, her ability to learn some aspects of the job of her boss. In fact, people who sell furniture perform duties that require about one-half hour to learn. So the differential between the woman selling furniture and the woman secretary can easily be understood as a payment for the human capital of the latter. Table 6.1 Weekly earnings of full-time workers for occupations in which women earn less than women who work as secretaries but men earn more Occupation Secretaries Stock and inventory clerks Material recording, scheduling, and distributing clerks Data-entry keyers Records processing, except financial General office clerks Sales workers—furniture and home furnishings Miscellaneous administrative support occupations Truck drivers Sales workers—radio, television, hi-fi, and appliances Motor vehicle operators Bus drivers Printing machine operators Precision workers—assorted materials Electrical and electronic equipment assemblers Machine operators—assorted materials Machine operators, assemblers, and inspectors Operators, fabricators, and laborers Machine operators and tenders, except precision

Women

Men

$496 495 487 477 477 474 469 460 443 435 434 431 428 425 423 399 386 385 374

$544 520 518 502 547 521 555 545 604 622 595 527 608 555 499 511 520 511 509

Source: Household Data Annual Averages for 2002; median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by detailed occupation and sex.

Setting the Pay for the Jobs Women Hold

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The occupations listed in table 6.1 are quite narrowly defined. For this reason, we can be fairly sure that the male workers in them have jobs that have similar duties to the jobs the female workers have. Thus the men’s jobs probably require about the same human capital as the women’s under the same job title. All the men in the occupations listed in table 6.1 average more pay than the women secretaries. Even when we look at jobs toward the bottom of the table, which have human capital requirements considerably lower than those of the secretarial job, the men in such jobs get more pay than women secretaries. Why is that? The pay scales reported in table 6.1 would certainly make some people suspect sex discrimination. But those who resist that explanation might suggest others. Perhaps the men have more experience than the women. They probably do, on average. But most analyses have shown that differences in length of experience account for very little of the pay gap between men and women.2 Moreover, with a few exceptions, we would not expect workers in the occupations listed in table 6.1 to become more productive with prolonged experience. After a week or so on the job, a person selling furniture is not going to be less productive than the salesperson who has been on the job for five or ten years. Thus we would not expect workers in those occupations to differ much in pay as a result of differences in experience. (Those workers who progress in pay with experience are those who progress to higher-level jobs than the ones listed here, jobs with supervisory responsibilities, for example.) More women than men work part time. But that cannot account for the sex differences shown in table 6.1, since the table reports wages only for full-time workers. Nor can differences in overtime. Studies have shown that women’s voluntary restrictions on hours account for very little of the pay gap between men and women.3 By the year 2002, the mothers of young children, who might be the most likely to restrict their hours or job location, or otherwise sacrifice pay for time at home, did not on average have lower pay than other women with similar characteristics.4 Perhaps the men are working in higher-paying businesses, or are union members. But then why aren’t the women there right along with them, unless discrimination is keeping women out of the higher-paying businesses and out of the unionized shops? Solomon Polachek conjectured that the sex gap in wages is due to women’s choice of jobs which are easy to leave and reenter without loss of pay, because the skills they require do not “rust” when a person leaves the labor force for a number of years.5 Those jobs, he says, happen to be lowpaying. But that conjecture does not help us much in explaining the differences in pay between men and women in the same occupations reported in table 6.1. A job as driver of a truck is probably easy to drop out of and return to. Very little human capital is likely to rust during the break in service. But it is hard to believe that women coming back to work after having a baby purposely look for the truck driving jobs that pay $443 rather than the ones that pay $604. Yet it is the lower paying ones that they end up in.

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Gary S. Becker has conjectured that differences in pay between men and women are in considerable part due to housework differences between the sexes. That does not work too well here either. Women workers, he says, are tired from doing all the family’s housework, while men come to their jobs fresh from their rest and recreation.6 It is hard to believe, though, that men who are truck drivers make $161 a week more than women who are truck drivers because the men, being less tired, do a better job of driving their truck. A far better explanation of why men with less valuable qualifications than female secretaries—less human capital—get more pay than them is that men and women are not competing (i.e., selling their human capital) in the same market. Except in the case of physicians, lawyers, and other highly credentialed professions, men and women are selling themselves and their human capital in segregated markets—a separate market for each sex. Supply and demand in the men’s market decree one set of wages whereas supply and demand in the women’s market decree a whole different set of wages, very much lower.

Wages and the Segregation of Markets The key to the low wages attached to women’s jobs is the occupational segregation within a high proportion of workplaces. Many jobs are open just to men, and many others are open just to women. Some jobs, a slowly increasing number, are open to people of either sex. Even in occupations enrolling both sexes, some jobs are earmarked by employers as only for men, others as only for women. Want-ads in newspapers were sex segregated until 1972, when the practice was declared illegal. The research of Bielby and Baron suggests that as of the late 1970s more than 90 percent of jobs were still earmarked for one sex or the other.7 In 1989, a survey by Donald Tomaskovic-Devey showed that 70 percent of women had no male colleagues sharing their job type in their workplace.8 We can see from Appendix table A.1 that much segregation has persisted into the twenty-first century. Almost a quarter of male workers have jobs in occupations that contain 5 percent or fewer women. Because such a high proportion of jobs is open only to people of just one sex, it makes sense to talk of a market for male labor and a substantially separate market for female labor.9 In any market (whether we are talking about the New York Stock Exchange, or the market for eggs, or the market for men’s labor), the commodities that cater to a certain kind of demand are sold, and supply and demand on that market set the price for those commodities. The market that caters to the demand for male labor fills all the jobs open only to men, and dictates the wage for those jobs. Similarly, women workers sell their labor in the market that fills all the jobs open only to women, and sets the wages in those jobs. (The relatively few jobs that are genuinely open to people of either sex will be discussed separately later.)


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The jobs in the occupations that are all-male are filled, obviously, in the male labor market. These include vast majority of the jobs in occupations appearing at the end of Appendix table A.1—mechanics, drivers of heavy trucks, the construction trades, supervisors of men in mostly male occupations. But there are jobs in other occupations that are earmarked for men, and filled in the male labor market. The occupation “waiters and waitresses,” which is 69 percent female, presents an obvious example. Most of the 245,000 males in this occupation are employed in restaurants that have never hired a waitress.10 That pattern of sex typing each job applies to a high proportion of jobs in occupations, throughout the list. In virtually all occupations some jobs are filled exclusively in the male labor market. Within the men’s market, wages get set that equate the supply of men with the demand for men’s labor in jobs reserved for men in each occupation.11 Within the women’s market, the same process is worked out. Within the men’s and the women’s labor markets, human capital requirements affect the supply of labor to jobs in each occupation. The markets for workers of each sex set wage levels independently of the other, at least in the short run. The workings of supply and demand in the men’s and women’s labor markets put very different wages on jobs requiring similar human capital, as the wage rates in table 6.1 show. Those jobs filled in the women’s market are assigned markedly lower wages. But why does the women’s labor market ordain such low wages for the jobs open to women, and for the human capital women bring to the market? The answer is that job segregation is by no means a neutral and benign division of economic functions between the sexes; we are not dealing here with a case of “separate but equal.” Rather, there are forces that reserve for men a disproportionate share of the jobs that take talent, and are therefore well paid, have interesting duties, and confer power, independence, and status. Part of the problem is tradition—certain jobs are seen as masculine in nature. Another part of the problem is misogyny—the desire on the part of some men to keep women in an inferior status, and therefore out of jobs that would make them the equal or superior of male employees. Still another part is that women entered the market for paid work at a time when almost all jobs, except that of servant, were “men’s jobs.” The opening to women of the kinds of jobs previously occupied only by men is difficult for employers, has been resisted by male workers, and is still far from complete. As a result, women are fenced off from a disproportionate share of what we might call “labor market turf.” The turf assigned to them tends to be relatively overcrowded and of low quality, as compared to the male share of the turf. That translates into restricted demand for labor in the women’s labor market, and lowers the wage levels in the jobs that are filled there. It makes the wages low in the traditionally female occupations. It also lowers the pay of the jobs that women hold in occupations that are mixed-sex and mostly male. The law of supply and demand does affect men’s and women’s wages. But the supply and the demand in the markets for men’s and women’s labor are

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powerfully affected by discrimination. It is discrimination that keeps the men’s and women’s labor markets separate from each other. The exclusion of women from a big share of all of the jobs in the economy is what creates two labor markets where there should be only one. So the fact that supply and demand affect wages does not prove that wages are fair, or even economically sensible. The wage differential that discrimination engenders does more than force women to have to sell their labor at a low price. It cuts down the efficiency of the economy. The overcrowding of the women’s jobs reduces the productivity of women’s labor. Discrimination reduces the size of the traditionally male occupations, because it makes labor artificially expensive to hire for those occupations. By the same process, the traditionally female occupations have been enlarged, because labor is artificially cheap in the women’s labor market. A single sex-blind labor market would allocate labor more efficiently throughout the economy, and productivity would be higher on average.

The Story of the Reluctant Secretary While many women just try for jobs that are obviously open to women, there are women who would like to sell their labor on the men’s labor market and make active efforts to do so. A few succeed, but many fail to connect with a job there, and get shunted back into the women’s market. Through court records, we can see the defeat of the efforts of one such woman. Alice Howland applied to a Sears store for a job selling on commission. At Sears, most of the commission sales jobs are held by men, and the pay they take home is commensurate with the pay in the men’s market. Most of Sears’ noncommission sales jobs that pay straight hourly salaries are held by women. Their pay is commensurate with wage scales in the women’s labor market. Sears was accused by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) of discriminating against women by disproportionately assigning them to the hourly noncommission jobs. Sears said in its defense that it had few women in commission sales because very few women were interested in such jobs. But Howland, whose application showed considerable experience in commission sales, was not even offered an interview by Sears. Here is an excerpt from a statement she wrote about it: If Sears had called me in for an interview, I would have told the interviewer that I was available for full time work. Since I needed a job, I might have taken whatever was offered, but my preference definitely would not have been to sell women’s clothing. It is boring and there is little to learn, and I know that there is not much money to be made in those departments. I would have preferred a commission sales job: if I am going to put in the hours, I want to be compensated as much as possible for them. I also would have preferred a commission compensation arrangement to straight salary because I do not like to have to depend on another person’s


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decision to give me a raise for the work I have performed; I would prefer to control my earnings through my own effort. I have been informed that at Sears such products as furniture, carpeting, drapes, storm window and door and other installed home improvements are sold on commission. I would have liked to sell any of those products. I would not have objected to making sales calls at customers’ homes at all; I do not believe that working nights and having a rotating schedule would have been a problem . . . If I am going to work I might as well earn more money rather than less. I have been informed that Sears states that women generally do not have the capacity to compete with each other or men for sales. As far as I am concerned that is ridiculous. I like competition. The job I ultimately found . . . was as a secretary . . . I took it because that was what was available, not because I love secretarial work. In fact, I found secretarial work to have its own pressures—mostly because it is difficult to always be submissive and catering. Sharpening pencils and making coffee for people was certainly not my preferred career. One does not always have a choice, however.12

Male salesmen in the kind of work Alice Howland was hoping to get averaged $602 in 2002, as compared with a secretary’s $496. Howland would have liked a chance to join a mostly male sales crew. She was confident that she could do as well as they if she were allowed access to Sears’ customers on the same basis as they and if she were paid the same commission rate. Alice Howland evidently did not become part of the supply to the women’s labor market because she preferred the kinds of jobs there. She was forced there by her lack of success in landing one of the jobs filled on the men’s labor market, and by her need to avoid a long period of unemployment and get work. (She and her husband were supporting seven children.) Despite her testimony, and plentiful statistical evidence, the federal judge who heard the case ruled that Sears had not discriminated. When women like Alice Howland are forced to go into the women’s labor market, the wage level in that market is lowered because of the forcible increase in supply. Every woman now on the women’s labor market who is allowed into a job in the men’s market helps to reduce the pay gap between the sexes, pushing the wage scales in the two markets toward equality.

Crowding Based on Exclusion—A Simplified Example At this point in the discussion, we want to explore carefully the connection between wage levels and the segregation of each sex into its own labor market turf. The crucial point is this: if a group is segregated and furthermore is crowded into a relatively narrow segment of labor market turf, its members will as a result be less productive, and their economic rewards will be lower. The line of argument will be made clearer if we resort to a simplified example. Consider an island inhabited by two tribes of people—the Pinks

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and the Blues—both of whom make their living gathering berries. We shall assume the gatherers of both tribes to be more or less equal on average in talent and energy. If all gatherers were allowed to range over the whole island, individual gatherers’ yields would vary with their talent, energy, and luck. Given our assumption that the two tribes have equal average talents, the average yield per gatherer would be the same in both tribes. However, suppose the island’s territory was partitioned between the tribes, so that gatherers were allowed to pick berries only in the territory assigned to their tribe. Were each tribe assigned a share of the territory about proportional to its size, and of equal average quality per acre, then again the yield per gatherer in the two tribes should be about the same. However, consider what would happen if the Blue tribe were to be assigned exclusive possession of a disproportionately large share of territory. In that case, the work of members of the Blue tribe would on average bring in a greater yield than the work of members of the Pink tribe. If the land the Blue tribe got had more berries per acre than that of the Pinks’, the latter’s disadvantage would be greater still. The Pink and Blue workers in our example have, by assumption, identical productive potential because their personal characteristics and behavior patterns are taken to be identical. However as a consequence of the uneven division of the territory, the Pink workers would have to exploit their territory more intensively. They would have to work on less-accessible and sparser berry patches. This extra difficulty would reduce their per-person take; so the Pinks would have lower productivity than the Blues. The way things are arranged on our mythical island, no one says to a Pink worker, “Because you are a Pink, we will see to it that you get less than a Blue.” The mechanism that arranges for the Pinks to get less is a set of rules about who may work where. As long as everyone follows the rules, and all hands keep to their place, the Pinks will average less production per person than the Blues, and will take home less “pay” for their efforts. The restriction of the Pinks to a relatively small territory reduces the efficiency of labor in the island as a whole. The total number of berries picked on the island would rise were the territorial restrictions on the Pinks relaxed. If some Pinks were allowed into the Blues’ territory, it would relieve the overcrowding in the Pinks’ part of the island. Labor would be transferred from less-accessible berry patches to more-accessible ones. (In our example, a person’s income is the berries they gather, so the low productivity the Pinks suffer because of territorial restrictions translates directly into lower income. In a money economy, people work in “berry patches” owned by others in return for money wages. There, low productivity also results in lower wages. This occurs when workers’ low productivity is due to their lack of human capital. But it can also happen when workers are confined to a low-productivity activity, as in the case of our berrying example. In a money economy, the process is somewhat more roundabout than in the case of the simple economy of our example, but the principle at work is the same.)


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If a boatload of social scientists were to visit the island portrayed in our example, they might hear from theoreticians belonging to the Blue tribe that its success was a sign of innately superior talent and greater attention to business. If, however, these social scientists observed the segregation of the two tribes, and the relative smallness and low quality of the territory assigned to the Pinks (by surveying berry bushes per capita in the two territories), they might very well come to the conclusion that the inequality of rewards was connected to the segregation. (Some rebellious readers may be thinking, “How about hunting? Surely the reason for the Blues’ higher income is that they have a talent for hunting while the Pinks can only gather. Perhaps also, the Pinks engage in timeconsuming activities that have not been mentioned, but that distract them from effective berrying.” The rebellious reader wants, in short, to construct a different example about two other tribes, and to dispense with the assumption of equal abilities and energies. Obviously, everyone is free to make up examples, and the making up proves nothing. The example of the Pinks and the Blues certainly does not prove anything about women and men, and provides no evidence about them. Its function is to clarify the notion that unequal partition of the opportunities leads to unequal reward for work. The evidence about actual women and men is found in the court testimony taken in discrimination cases and in the statistical study presented in chapter 5.)

Productivity in the Sex-Segregated Labor Market The partitioning of the island between the Pinks and the Blues in our example is intended, of course, as an analogy to the sex segregation of the labor market. Lots of women in the labor market stick to the jobs marked out in everyone’s minds as “women’s jobs.” But there are women like Alice Howland who do seek the better income and the more interesting work that some jobs in the men’s territory provide. Some do succeed. But some are turned back to the women’s territory by the exclusionary practices of employers, and some are rebuffed by the harassment of male coworkers. On our partitioned island, the number of berries that are picked in the two territories depend on the number of people in each territory. The more crowded a territory, the more intensively will the less-accessible berry patches, which take more work to exploit, be utilized. Analogously, in the labor market, the number of jobs that actually materialize in each of the two labor markets under each job title is not fixed. The more people available in a market, the more jobs will be created, and the more people who can be accommodated with employment. In our island, the Blues could restrict their attention to relatively productive berry patches. On the other side of the dividing line, the Pinks were forced to work the less-accessible berry patches as well as the better patches allotted to their territory. That has the effect of lowering the Pinks’ productivity. The extra women penned into the women’s labor market must work at lowproductivity tasks if they are to be absorbed at all. To induce employers to

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expand the number of employees, and assign them to low-productivity tasks, wages have to be relatively low in the women’s jobs.13 The secretarial occupation provides a good example. The number of woman secretaries is not absolutely fixed by technological necessity. Within limits, every establishment has a choice as to how many secretaries to keep on the payroll, and as to what duties they are to perform. If women secretaries are very cheap, then the organization can have secretaries on the payroll to perform some relatively low-priority duties. Extra secretaries can be hired for purposes of decoration or to increase the prestige of their bosses. They can be kept on tap doing relatively little, just in case they are needed during busy periods. A secretary in a job with low wages and low-priority duties has low productivity, not because she has low potential, but because she has been penned into the secretarial pool by exclusion from other jobs she might have filled. The more intelligent and talented women are not allowed to compete with the more intelligent men for many of the leadership jobs and the other jobs conferring power, scope for talent, and high pay. These women swell the numbers competing for jobs requiring less talent. Similarly the women who are excluded from skilled crafts jobs as carpenters or electricians swell the ranks of those competing for work in child care. The presence of these extra people competing for these jobs lowers the wage in these poor-paying jobs from what it would otherwise be. So the crowding hurts the untalented workers who would, even in the absence of discrimination, still be in a deadend low-skill job.14

Women Outside of the Typically Female Occupations The jobs in the traditionally female occupations are filled, of course, in the women’s labor market. Another set of jobs filled there are those in traditionally male-dominated occupations that have been earmarked for women. Most firms that hire women in a particular occupation will not hire any men at all in that occupation. A third group of jobs are those truly open to workers of both sexes. The wage level for a particular job title in a particular establishment is set after the employer decides whether those jobs are to be earmarked exclusively for men, exclusively for women, or whether they will be open to candidates of both sexes. If the firm fills a job title only with men, then the employer must pay something approximating the going wage for men in that job, namely, the wage set by the men’s labor market. If the firm decides to fill slots in an ordinarily male-identified job only with women, it can take into consideration that fact that the a women’s major alternative is to get a low-paying “woman’s job.” Thus, when women get employed in occupations outside the traditionally female-identified jobs, their wages are set in the same labor market in which women compete for female-identified jobs.15 Thus the firms that hire only women for job titles typically held by men pay those women workers considerably lower wages than what men


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get in other firms for similar jobs. When employers decide on the sex they want to hire before they decide on a job’s pay, they are, of course, engaging in sex discrimination, both as to access and pay. When men get into female-identified jobs, they have to be paid wages that are commensurate with the relatively high pay set in the male labor market for males’ human capital. That is why male workers earn more than female workers in virtually all occupations. Men by and large do not compete for the traditionally female jobs because even the few men in them get lower pay than what men of similar human capital get in other jobs. Those few men who do take jobs in predominantly female fields view themselves and are viewed by their employers as in line for supervisory or administrative positions.16 A male clerk, librarian, or teacher is viewed as promotable, while a woman in such a position is viewed as a perpetual underling, at a dead end. Men higher up in the organization will keep a lookout for opportunities to promote a man out of a typically female job, because his position seems to them to be a disgrace from which he needs to be rescued.17 The relatively few jobs that an employer has not earmarked for one sex or the other present a problem, and that is probably one reason there are not more of them. In the cases where both men and women perform the same function for the same employer, the employer is in something of a quandary about how to pay them. The men have to be paid the male-level wage, or qualified men would not be interested in the job. But employers know that it takes less pay to get and keep a woman aboard, and don’t enjoy paying women more than is necessary. When and if a very well-qualified woman candidate shows up, the employer may want to offer her the job, but be reluctant to pay her what the men in that job are getting. Employers frequently give in to the temptation to give the women lower pay. However, there are dangers to the employer in such an approach. The employer is open to a lawsuit charging discrimination if the woman employee finds out that she has male colleagues in the same type of job who are being paid at a higher scale. Lawsuits on such grounds are far more common than suits filed by women who don’t get hired or don’t get promoted, and such suits fare better in the courts. Employers who have both sexes performing the same function, and who pay the men more than the women, have to try to avoid lawsuits by creating slight differences in the jobs of men and women to justify the higher male rate or by keeping the pay of individuals confidential. In many situations, as in the professions, where men and women are employed under the same job titles, the men are frequently given higher ranks, and higher pay in the same rank. In such cases, wage rates for individuals are usually not tied to a rigid formula depending on rank and length of service, but fixed at the discretion of superiors, and wide differentials between similar individuals are allowed. The employer does not make available to employees information about the pay assigned to colleagues. People tend to be inhibited about asking fellow employees what they are being paid, so it is difficult for them to make direct comparisons, and for women to find out whether they have been systematically disfavored.

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At the Boeing Corporation, Patti Anderson was a manufacturing engineer. Her father, her brother, and her husband, all had the same job title. So, understandably, the confidentiality broke down. When she discovered that she was being paid less than they were, she joined 37 other women in filing a suit for discrimination. In 1999, the company had done a study, which it had kept highly confidential, and which showed that “gender differences in starting salaries generally continue and often increase as a result of salary planning decisions,” and that eliminating them would take more than $30 million annually in salary adjustments. Yet the company allocated only $10 million. The women’s lawsuit against Boeing, being tried in the spring of 2004 as a class action covering the situation of 28,000 women, may cost the company more than $1 billion in back pay. That is the amount over the years that pay differences cost the women employees.18 The University of Maryland is a public institution and its budget, which includes individual salaries, is, by state law, a public document. However, the only copy of the document open to the public was kept at the state capital many miles away from the campus, and nobody was allowed to make xerox copies. Huge discrepancies in the salaries of male and female professors were only revealed when reporters on the student newspaper laboriously copied the salaries by hand, and the newspaper published them by name. The University then instituted a procedure it claimed would address gender differences in pay, but over several decades, systematic differentials were not wiped out. The experience of Maryland’s women professors has not been atypical. At American universities and colleges in the 2003–2004 academic year, the average female professor’s salary was 88.4 percent of the average male salary at the full professor level, 93.0 percent of it at the associate professor level, and 92.3 percent of it at the assistant professor level. These percentages have been remarkably stable over the past 15 years.19 In part, these differences are due to the fact that women are rare in some departments, and salaries in those departments are higher than in the departments more hospitable to women professors. That in itself may be caused by discrimination—it may be difficult for qualified women to get jobs in departments such as chemistry and economics, and administrators tend to establish a higher pay scale for the mostly male departments. There have been a considerable number of universities where it has been demonstrated through court proceedings that male professors have been paid more than females in the same department with the same number of years of experience. In a peculiar (and almost, but not quite, laughable) inversion of human capital theory, there have been cases where the difference in pay between women and men has been justified on the grounds that women are required to have higher or additional qualifications. The nurse–supervisors in Denver’s municipal hospitals were paid less than male executives with similarly responsible management duties. The difference in their jobs was, according to the Denver personnel director, that the nurse–supervisors had to be nurses.20 The female jail guards in the county of Washington, Oregon,


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were paid less than the male jail guards. One of the reasons given was that the women guards had to do a small amount of typing, something most of the male guards were incapable of.21

Are Women’s Occupations Crowded? The existence of occupational segregation, which is still a commonplace in our society, does not by itself prove that the jobs territory earmarked for women is disproportionately small. It would be theoretically possible to have the jobs split between the two sexes in such a way that each labor market segment contained equivalent (although not identical) opportunities, with the result that equally qualified people in each segment would make equal wages. However, the same factors that enforce segregation also lead to relative crowding in the women’s sector. The split of jobs between the sexes is not the result of a process of equitable sharing but of exclusion and relegation. That is by no means a process that takes due and fair account of the relative numbers of men and women in the labor market. Many male workers are interested in keeping as many of their coworkers as possible males, and in keeping women restricted to clearly separated and subordinate positions. While not all men feel that way or act on such feelings, it is in the interest of males as a group to keep as much labor market turf as possible for themselves. It not only raises their wages above what they otherwise would be, but reserves the more interesting duties for male-identified jobs.22 Men act to maximize their own labor market territory, and this puts a pressure on the boundaries of the women’s preserves, which serves to restrict the number and richness of the opportunities open to women. (In India, the occupations assigned to those castes lowest in social status yield below-average incomes. If the economic situation changed and those occupations started yielding above-average incomes, we might expect to see members of the more powerful upper castes contriving to occupy those economic niches.) Whenever jobs previously restricted to males are opened up to workers of both sexes, women workers move into such jobs. Women like Alice Howland, who was turned down for a Sears job selling appliances on commission, are there ready to respond to opportunities like that. So the supply of workers to jobs previously earmarked for men increases, and the supply of workers to jobs previously earmarked for women decreases. Wage rates change, and the wage gap between men and women is reduced. The movement of the Alice Howlands to jobs previously earmarked for men decreases the crowding in jobs still in the female work ghetto. Some economists do not believe that occupational segregation—that secretaries are mostly women and carpenters mostly men—lowers women’s pay on average. When women do get into mostly men’s occupation, their pay is lower than that of the men in that occupation, as we have seen. In the finely defined occupations in table 6.1, women’s pay ranges from 42 to 88 percent of that of corresponding men. So, it is argued, the desegregation

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of occupations would not serve to close the pay gap. Women would just be moving from a low-paying job in one occupation to a low-paying job in another. By this line of reasoning, occupational segregation is of no harm to women, and ending it of little concern.23 Such a view ignores the causal connection between occupational segregation and the assignment of wage rates to jobs by the market. Segregation creates the market conditions leading to low pay in female-dominated occupations, in which most women hold jobs. The pay that women get in jobs in the male-dominated occupations is low because employers know that women’s alternative job possibilities are the poorly paid traditionally female jobs. Segregation ends up affecting the pay in all of the jobs women hold, whether they stay in the traditionally female jobs, as a high proportion of them do, or get the jobs earmarked for women in the traditionally male occupations. If occupational segregation were to end, and women and men were to compete in the same market, women’s wages would rise in all occupations. Moreover, occupational segregation prevents many women from accumulating human capital—training and experience—which would allow them to earn better wages. A woman carpenter, with a carpenter’s skills, even if she earned less than a male carpenter, would earn more than a woman cashier. Transferring women from cashiers’ jobs to carpenters’ jobs would reduce the overall wage gap, and would also tend to reduce the wage gap between male and female carpenters. Some writers have argued against the idea that the women’s turf is relatively crowded by pointing out that although women are excluded from many men’s jobs, so are men excluded from or exclude themselves from women’s jobs.24 The unstated implication of such arguments is that the exclusions on both sides should balance out. To argue this way, however, would be as fallacious as arguing that the tourist class passengers on a plane have accommodation as roomy as those of the first class passengers because the latter don’t apply for seats in the tourist section of the plane. The idea that there ought to be higher and lower class passengers on the plane results in the separation of the classes. It also results in the devotion of a disproportionate amount of the plane’s space to the first class passengers. In the labor market, men’s lack of interest in taking low-paying jobs in the women’s turf does not balance out the exclusion of women from relatively elite roles.

A Desire to Maintain Pay Differences Promotes Occupational Segregation So far we have been arguing that occupational segregation is part of the mechanism responsible for pay differences between men and women. Sometimes the causation goes the other way—a desire to maintain pay differences between the sexes gives employers an incentive to segregate them into different jobs.


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In reading the evidence in discrimination cases, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that pay differences between men and women workers sometimes arise because some men simply resent seeing women get salaries as large as those of men. Claudette Bourque, applying for a promotion from a secretary’s job to a buyer’s position, was told by her supervisor, “I will not pay a woman, any damned woman, the same money that I will pay a man for that position. That’s how I feel. I don’t care if it leaves me open for a suit or not. Now you can have the position, but you will have it at the pay that you are presently making.”25 Marriage or potential marriage as a reason for not paying women higher salaries appears in a large number of cases that have been brought to court. Betty Lou Strecker, who worked for a state agency in Grand Forks, was told by Clarence Ohlsen, the agency’s director, that her husband made a good living and so she should not worry about additional income. Ohlsen told a woman supervisor in the agency that he would not want to pay her more money than what her husband made.26 One of the plaintiffs in the case against Wal-Mart, under litigation in 2005, found out that a male in the same managerial job was being paid more. When she asked about it, she was told that the man had a family to support. She was a single parent, supporting a child, but that apparently did not count. Whatever the causes of the sharp difference in wages for men and women workers, employers who want to have both men and women on their staff, and pay them differently, have an incentive to segregate. An employer who permits newly hired women a choice of which entry-level job they are to go into, will have a difficult time filling the low-paying female slots. Thus there is an incentive to track women entrants into the female slots by steering and by veiled threats that they will get no job at all if they try to promote a sexinappropriate assignment for themselves. Once an employer decides to allow women to fill certain types of job, there is a tendency to discontinue hiring men for that category of job. First of all, the employer has to pay men a great deal more. Second, there are the problems of social interaction when women and men have to interact as peers, as discussed in the last chapter. Third, employers are barred by law from paying men and women doing substantially identical work different pay scales. Even in the absence of such a law, openly paying men more would be bad for the morale of the women workers, and they might be inclined to stir up trouble. So employers, when they do decide to allow women into a particular job category tend to rotate the men in those jobs as rapidly as possible to other jobs.

Moving Jobs from the Male to the Female Preserve In our example of the Pink and Blue tribes, the lower income of the Pinks depended on the location of the boundaries drawn separating the two tribes’ territories. In the labor market, the continued crowding of the sector of the labor market to which most women are confined could be relieved in two

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ways. Employers might simply stop segregating and earmarking jobs by sex. Alternatively they could continue to earmark jobs for one sex or the other, but earmark more of the jobs for women. The low wages for which women can be hired must constitute a continuing temptation to turn over groups of jobs to women whenever that can be done with ease. Any rise in the wage differential can be thought of as making employers more attentive to niches within their organization where women might substitute for men.27 However, there are a number of substantial difficulties facing the employer who tries to make the switch: an awkward period during which males and females have to be mixed, the problems connected with the training of the new women by men who are likely to resent their presence, the uncertainty as to how to recruit suitable women, the lack of experienced women in the applicant pool, the uncertainty as to how relations between the new female employees and males in other kinds of jobs with whom they have to interact in the productive process will go. All of these problems and uncertainties slow down the transfer of jobs from the male to the female labor markets. An organization’s health and profitability depend crucially on its personnel decisions. Employees whose presence causes trouble, even if they are innocent victims of other employees’ bigotry, are bad news to the enterprise, and the possible cause of heavy losses. Personnel problems can cause a wide range of serious problems: sabotage of the production process, damaging the records, alienating customers, the quitting of other valuable employees, the loss of a cheerful and spat-free work environment, continuing friction. It is no wonder then that managers are conservative in their employment practices, and are not quick to overturn an assignment system that is working passably for one that may cause the establishment to unravel. Even if substantial savings in payroll might be made, managers like to stick with what works. The rise in women’s labor force participation over the years has meant, of course, that the supply of women’s labor has increased relative to the supply of men’s. We would expect that if no other factors were operating, the crowding of women in their segment of the labor market would have worsened and therefore the differential between women’s and men’s average wages would have widened. This has not happened, and it is worth our while to ask why. One way in which the additional supply of women has been accommodated without deterioration in their relative wage has been that, as we have seen, certain large occupations have been turned over to them. The most important set of occupations in which this has occurred has been the clerical jobs. In 1900, about one-quarter of the clerical jobs were held by women; in 2003, women had 76 percent of such jobs. Women have also taken over many of the sales jobs. They had 17 percent of such jobs in 1900 and almost 49 percent in 2003. The clerical and sales job categories in which women have been accepted have also had rates of growth that far exceeded the average growth in overall employment. Total employment grew less than 5-fold between 1900 and 2003, while clerical employment grew 22-fold in the


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same period for both sexes and 70-fold for women alone. Sales occupations for both sexes grew 12-fold, and for women alone, 34-fold. During World War II, bank teller jobs were turned over to women. (On the other side of the ledger, domestic servant jobs, which in 1900 consisted of about 30 percent of all jobs held by women workers, have sharply declined, and in 2003, employed about 1 percent of women workers.)28 The growth in white-collar employment has facilitated the absorption of women under traditionally female job titles, and has reduced the pressure to detach additional large occupations from the men’s segment of the labor market. But the increase in the number of women in the labor market does and will create economic pressure to enlarge the borders of the ghetto of jobs open to women. That economic pressure works counter to the social pressure to keep the borders fixed. One interesting case is the switchover of veterinarian from a mostly male to a mostly female occupation. In 2004, about 80 percent of the students in schools of veterinary medicine were female. Once a certain set of jobs has been opened to women by a substantial number of employers, then many of the inhibitions which kept women out of those jobs fall to the ground. Attitudes of employers, male workers, and women job entrants change, and what might have seemed strange and wrong now seems quite natural. There gets to be a pool of experienced women workers in the field which employers can rely on.

As Segregation is Reduced If discrimination were to end, more women would be in jobs now considered to be “men’s jobs”; the crowding in the “women’s jobs” would be relieved, and under new conditions of supply and demand, the market would dictate wages that better approximated the economists’ ideal marketplace. Human capital would be rewarded more equally, whether embodied in men or in women. As more women are welcomed into what has previously been the men’s preserve, the crowding in the women’s occupations should be relieved by a flow of women into the higher paying jobs in the men’s turf. The wages in the formerly male-identified job titles and the wages in the formerly femaleidentified job titles would tend to converge, probably through slower growth of the former and more rapid growth of the latter than would otherwise have occurred. The current job territory occupied by the women’s labor market has two deficiencies. First, it is relatively small. Second, because the more interesting, challenging, and prestigious jobs have traditionally been reserved for men, the women’s labor market is a place where human capital and talent are less in demand than is true in the men’s territory. So some of women’s potential for occupying such jobs goes unrewarded. If wages are to reach substantial equality, both of these deficiencies would need to be relieved, either through integration of occupations, or reassignment of still-segregated occupations

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However, for this to happen, it is by no means necessary that all or even a substantial majority of women be willing and able to take jobs in what formerly were male-identified occupations. The traditionally female territory would not have to be entirely abandoned; wages there would rise to the point where persons of equivalent talents and education working in the formerly male-identified segment and the formerly female-identified segment would get an equal return on their human capital—their education, experience, and skills. As women’s wages have advanced since 1980, men’s wages in constant dollars have for most of that time been stagnant, and have even declined in some intervals. While this is sometimes deplored, it is entirely to be expected as part of the orderly process of the elimination of the gap between men’s and women’s wages. Moving the female/male wage ratio from 78 percent toward 100 percent without infringing on the nonwage share of national income can occur when a relatively large share of any gains in wages resulting from productivity gains is allocated to raising women’s wages. If men and women both were to receive wage gains in line with productivity advances, and if in addition, women’s wages were to rise relative to men’s, the nonwage part of the national income would be reduced considerably. Having explored the connection between occupational segregation and wage levels, we are now in a better position to understand and assess the policy measures designed to counter women’s still-low estate in the labor market. This is the subject matter of the next chapter.

7 Government Action Against Discrimination

The U.S. government took action against discrimination in employment for the first time in June 1941. The country had not yet entered World War II, but the Roosevelt Administration was engaged in maximizing the production of armaments and keeping up an adequate flow of consumer goods while millions of male workers were being drafted into the armed forces. A. Phillip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of black male railroad workers, was incensed by the exclusion of blacks from the new jobs in the defense plants, and saw an opportunity to advance the cause of racial justice. He threatened the Administration with a march of black people on Washington if something was not done about discrimination against blacks in employment. In response President Roosevelt, bypassing the Congress, issued Executive Order 8802, which declared it to be “the policy of the United States that there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” Federally sponsored training programs were to be administered without discrimination. Contracts for defense production were to contain a provision obligating the contractor not to discriminate on account of race. A Committee on Fair Employment Practice was set up to receive complaints and “take appropriate steps to redress grievances which it finds to be valid.” Roosevelt’s order did not address employment discrimination against women, although there were voices at the time saying it should. Even so, the order was a major step forward for women because it testified to the existence of discriminatory labor market practices, labeled them unjust, and established government action as the way to deal with them. It became a precedent for later action. Inevitably, sex discrimination came to be included in the list of unjust practices that federal contractors were required to avoid. The Order currently in force, issued by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968, requires firms that sell any kind of product or service to the federal government to formulate and implement affirmative action plans for getting women and minority persons into jobs from which they have been excluded. Women

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and minorities are to be represented in all occupational groups in accordance with their availability in the labor force. This has been the major impetus behind the implementation of affirmative action plans by employers. The second major step against labor market discrimination was again the result of a campaign by African Americans for equal treatment. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed by the Congress and signed by President Johnson, resulted from a bitterly contested crusade against racial injustice led by Martin Luther King Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, and Clarence Mitchell. The final campaign which led to its passage was sparked by the refusal of a black woman, Rosa Parks, to give up her seat in a public bus to a white man, as local law in Montgomery, Alabama required her to do. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that it shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer—(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.1

The paragraph just quoted was originally drafted without the word “sex.” The initial proposal to include it was put forth by a white supremacist member of the House of Representatives, who hoped to harm the prospects for passage of Title VII. As a result, the legend that sex discrimination was outlawed as a result of a trick gone awry has grown. However the Congress gave ample and specific consideration to the issue of barring sex discrimination in employment.2 Under the leadership of Rep. Martha Griffiths, a Democrat from Michigan, the word sex was voted into Title VII.3 Under Title VII, workers who believe they have been injured by sex discrimination on the part of an employer can bring a lawsuit and collect damages if the court decides discrimination has occurred. Class-action suits, brought on behalf of groups of employees, allow large damage awards in cases where there has been a consistent pattern of discrimination against the group. The Civil Rights Act set up an independent agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which receives and investigates complaints of discrimination. It attempts conciliation, and may bring lawsuits against employers. The Commission also issues guidelines concerning the legality under Title VII of a host of personnel practices, which may, however, be challenged in the courts. The activities of the EEOC and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Policy (OFCCP) have been responsible for considerable improvements in the labor market status of African Americans and women since 1964. As we have seen, however, they have not come anywhere close to fully exterminating discriminatory practices in American labor markets. An essay reviewing

Government Action Against Discrimination

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EEOC’s history carried on the agency’s website in 2004 contains the rather wistful observation that although it had “made many significant strides in combating employment discrimination, many challenges remain. Indeed, the agency’s single-minded mission of achieving equal opportunity in the workplace for all workers remains elusive. The Commission continues to receive charges of discrimination in record numbers.” This chapter reviews the activities of the EEOC and the OFCCP and the courts in defining what constitutes discrimination under the law and countering it. It suggests reasons why achieving their mission has “remained elusive.” The following chapter takes up the pros and cons of affirmative action and the possibility of pay equity.

What Practices are Discriminatory? The laws passed by Congress are usually broadly drafted, and Title VII is no exception. It has been left to the EEOC, subject to review by the courts, to define what behavior is discriminatory and what is not, and to set the nature of the evidence to be required as proof of discriminatory behavior.

(a) Bona Fide Occupational Qualification Title VII generally prohibits employers from classifying people according to sex, race, religion, or national origin, and treating them differently for those reasons. There is, however, an exception. The framers of the Act recognized that the sex, religion, or national origin (but not race) of employees might in special circumstances be a legitimate concern of an employer. For example, Congress did not want to force a group of Catholic nuns running a religiously oriented girls’ school to hire men or non-Catholics as teachers. The language of the Act gives an exception to the requirement of nondiscrimination in “instances where religion, sex, or national origin is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise.”4 The interpretation of the bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ) by the courts was clearly of crucial importance to the application of the Act. It is easy for an employer to come up with reasons why men might be better suited than women for any job that had in the past been limited to men. If an employer were able to declare the male sex to be a BFOQ for most of the typically male jobs, then the Act could not be of much help to women. In a landmark case, Claudine Cheatwood charged that her employer, South Central Bell Telephone, had discriminated against her by refusing to consider her or any women for the post of commercial representative. The main duties involved visiting cutomers’ premises and dealing with financial matters, complaints, and delinquencies. The representative also occasionally had to collect coin boxes from pay telephones, which typically weighed 60 pounds, but could weigh up to 90 pounds.

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The company argued that being male was a BFOQ for that job. In the course of the representative’s work, the company said, tires on the company car might occasionally have to be changed, and the representative would have to enter bars, poolrooms, and other such locations. Restrooms might be inaccessible. Much was made of the weight-lifting requirements of the job, and medical testimony brought forward concerning problems women might have in doing that. The Court rejected the company’s claim that maleness was a BFOQ allowed by Title VII for the job of commercial representative, and said that the company had committed discrimination in failing to have considered Cheatwood’s application.

(b) “Statistical Discrimination” In ruling for Cheatwood, the Court also took a stand against statistical discrimination, which occurs when an employer uses suppositions or even facts about women’s average ability as compared to men’s in coming to decisions about the hiring, assignment, or promotion of individual women.5 The employer in such a case is looking at statistics about women as a group rather than relying on the individual’s characteristics, or the individual’s actual performance. Economists have pointed out that if women really do have a relatively poor track record in performance in some particular function, and if testing of individual candidates is impossible, unreliable, or expensive, then turning away candidates on the basis of their sex might reduce costs and improve efficiency for an employer. Some economists endorse, or at least excuse, any behavior conducing to higher efficiency. However, the courts have characterized such behavior as a violation of Title VII. In Cheatwood, the Court imposed on the company the requirement that it consider candidates individually, rather than relying on its view, which the Court assumed to be correct, that women were on average less qualified for the job of commercial representative than men. (From the present perspective, it is difficult to take at face value, as the judge seems to have done, the issues raised concerning rest rooms, pool halls, and tire changes. It would not be surprising if the company simply thought it appropriate that its commercial customers be dealt with by male employees, and wanted to continue employing only men in that capacity.) In deciding for Cheatwood, the Court said: A thorough consideration of the evidence makes clear that it is “rational” rather than merely capricious, for the employer to discriminate against women as a class in filling this position, i.e., on the average, men can perform these tasks somewhat more efficiently and perhaps somewhat more safely than women . . . [But] it appears to this Court that it will not impose a hardship on this Employer to determine on an individual basis whether a person is qualified for the position of commercial representative. On the other hand, it is


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manifest that the use of this class distinction deprives some women of what they regard as a lucrative and otherwise desirable position.6

Under the judicial interpretation of Title VII, exclusions are not permitted even if an employer’s contention about women’s lesser abilities on average is true. People have the right to be considered on their own merits and not to be disadvantaged by their membership in a group that on average performs relatively poorly.

(c) Pensions Some employers were running pension plans under which the monthly payments to retired women were as much as 20 percent lower than those to men with equivalent service, on the ground that women on average live longer than men. Employers argued that if they were forced to make equal monthly payments to women and men, women on average would collect more than men between retirement and death. Lower monthly payments to women, it was claimed, would equalize average lifetime payouts for the two sexes, and were therefore not discriminatory. The president of TIAA-Cref, a large provider of pensions to academic institutions, said he thought that it would be immoral to provide women and men with equal monthly payments. It would be stealing from the men, he said, and he didn’t want to do that. (TIAA-Cref provides life insurance as well as pensions. At the same time as it was providing unequal pensions based on men’s higher mortality, it was providing men and women with equal insurance benefits for equal charges, despite the fact that men’s higher mortality made it more expensive to insure them. This certainly suggests that it was not a desire to avoid immorality that caused the company to give women lower pensions than men.) Some women die soon after retirement, while some men live into their nineties. Whatever the age at which a retired man dies, there are women dying at the same age who had been forced to live on a lower pension income just because they were women. In fact, using information on death rates by age, one can show that 80 percent of retired men and women can be paired up as dying in the same year.7 However, 20 percent of the men die relatively early, and 20 percent of the women die relatively late, which is what causes the difference in average costs by sex. One way to look at the rights and wrongs of the issue is to ask who should bear the financial burden of supporting the long-lived old ladies. Should that burden lie exclusively on the shoulders of people with the same sex organs, or should it be shared by people of both sexes? Similarly, should the benefit from not having to support the early dying men accrue only to those with the same sex organs? The Supreme Court accepted the women’s argument that individual women were being disadvantaged by the assumption that they were like the average woman in terms of mortality.8 Employers are now required to

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give equal pension checks to women and men with equivalent service at equivalent pay.

(d) Customer Preferences Employers accused of discrimination have argued that they should have the right to exclude women from certain jobs on the grounds that their customers or their other employees would rather have men on the job, and that their business would be hurt if they were forced to hire women. The courts have ruled consistently against such a contention. An employer’s plea of “business necessity” has been rejected unless the business could show that it would fold if women were employed. In one case, a hotel claimed that people giving receptions preferred to have male waiters serving them, a defense that was disallowed by the court.9 Two of the key cases have involved the rights of men to jobs usually performed by women. Hospitals do not have the right to refuse to assign male nurses to female patients.10 Males cannot be excluded as flight attendants despite surveys showing that passengers prefer women in that role. The Court said: While we recognize that the public’s expectation of finding one sex in a particular role may cause some initial difficulty, it would be totally anomalous if we were to allow the preferences and prejudices of the customers to determine whether the sex discrimination [practiced by an employer] was valid. Indeed, it was, to a large extent, these very prejudices the Act was meant to overcome. Thus, we feel that customer preference may be taken into account only when it is based on the company’s inability to perform the primary function or service it offers.11

(e) Protective Legislation In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the states passed so-called protective laws, which forbade women from working at a long list of jobs or working long hours or at night. (Nurses, of course, were excluded from the prohibition of night work.) The principal supporters of laws restricting the use of women’s labor were male-dominated labor unions, who wanted to exclude women’s competition for jobs that men wanted. The National Women’s Trade Union League followed the male leadership and also advocated them. Such laws were also favored by so-called social feminists, who believed that women had needs, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities different from men, and that keeping women out of unhealthy or unsuitable work took precedence over treating them equally.12 A key decision came in the case of Leah Rosenfeld, an employee of the Southern Pacific Railroad, who wanted a job assignment that would have required her to lift 50 pounds and work over 10 hours per day at peak periods. California labor laws prohibited giving a job with such requirements to a woman. The court concluded that such laws conflicted with the policy of nondiscrimination mandated by Title VII, and declared them all invalid.13


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The demise of protective labor legislation opened up new job opportunities for women. For example, women now outnumber men in bartending, an occupation that had been closed to women by law in many localities.

(f ) Tests or Requirements for Employment The courts have severely limited the right of employers to make candidates pass tests or require them to have specified characteristics as a condition of employment. Title VII has been interpreted to mean that unless a test is expressly and closely related to the duties of the job in question, an employer cannot use it if it has the effect of excluding a disproportionate number of women or black candidates. This is true even if the test is seemingly sex- or race-neutral. The key decision came in a lawsuit against the Duke Power Company, brought by a group of black workers. The Company had openly practiced occupational segregation by race until the date on which Title VII became applicable. After that, the company instituted a requirement that a worker, whatever his race, had to have a high-school diploma and take a written test to be eligible to move into a job that was previously all-white. Since few blacks seeking those jobs were high-school graduates, the requirement preserved those jobs for whites. In its decision striking down this requirement as not permissible under Title VII, the Supreme Court noted that whites who were not high-school graduates had performed well when the job was segregated, showing that the requirement was not closely related to success on the job. The Act, the Court said, did not preclude testing or measuring procedures, but required that the tests “must measure the person for the job and not the person in the abstract.”14 The Duke Power case was important for women, because it would have been extremely easy for employers to invent tests or requirements that screened them out of any particular job almost entirely. As the Duke Power record showed, such tests sometimes were devised to take the place of overt discrimination. Other times, employers erected requirements without discriminatory intent which disproportionately eliminated women without careful validation that such requirements were necessary or even desirable from an efficiency standpoint. In particular, the Duke Power decision cast doubt on height and weight requirements, which had had the effect of excluding many women from male-dominated jobs such as that of a police officer. Employers were forced to validate such requirements as strictly job related, and if they could not do so were forced to abandon them.

(g) Seniority Systems Title VII of the Civil Rights Act contains an explicit permission for employers to treat employees differently if such treatment is based on a “bona fide” seniority system. Such systems have caused women workers considerable disadvantage. Some seniority systems limit credit to service

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in a particular department or subset of jobs in an employer’s establishment. People who change departments may be required to relinquish all seniority. Such systems were probably set up that way so as to inhibit a move by women or blacks to better and higher-paying jobs in which white males predominate. Lawsuits attacking them have had poor success. Unless it could be proved that the particular seniority system involved was designed with discriminatory intent, the courts have accepted them as bona fide. In some cases, blacks and women have filed lawsuits asking the courts to void their dismissals on the grounds that prior discrimination had prevented people like them from accruing seniority. But the courts have declined to remedy the low seniority of women and black employees as a group, even if it resulted from the unlawful exclusion of people like them. Only individual employees who applied during the period of exclusion and were unlawfully turned away would be entitled to a boost in their seniority, the courts have said.15 Seniority systems have had adverse effects on black and female employees who had been hired under affirmative action plans, which were instituted after decades of discriminatory exclusion. Subsequent layoffs, concentrated on those with the least seniority, have in numerous cases restored the monopoly of white males.

(h) Sexiness on the job The courts have generally been unsympathetic to employers (at least those not in the business of directly selling sex or entertainment) who have required that women employees look attractive and available to male customers—be young, unmarried, and good-looking—while making no such demands on males in similar jobs. For example, they invalidated Northwest Airlines’ policy of requiring women but not men to wear contact lenses rather than eyeglasses and be monitored for weight maintenance.16 Airlines used to require that female flight attendants give up their jobs at age 30, but may no longer do so. The Hooters Restaurant chain hires waitresses with large breasts, and puts them into revealing clothing. But it can’t be accused of requiring them to do anything it doesn’t require of men because it hires only women for that job. The EEOC apparently thought it could get around that by bringing a suit against the company in 1995 on the ground that it discriminates against men by refusing to hire them. The company’s president testified that “the guiding principle of the system has always been vicarious sexual entertainment to customers.” After a billboard campaign featuring the line, “Washington, get a grip,” and a Hooters Girl March on Washington, the EEOC retreated in disarray and dropped the case.17 Apparently, if selling sexual titillation to heterosexual men is the main activity of a business, then being a woman with big breasts is a legitimate BFOQ. The chicken wings Hooters also purveys are just a side dish.


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(i) Sexual Harassment A male boss making unwanted sexual demands on female employees is older than the Old Testament, but the key to getting the U.S. government to do anything about it was to define it as unlawful discrimination. Lawyer Catherine A. MacKinnon led a campaign to get that done, and in 1980 the EEOC issued a ruling declaring it to be a violation of Title VII.18 The courts have gone along with the reasoning that it happens to a woman in the workplace because she is a woman, and is therefore being disadvantaged in her job on account of which sex she belongs to, in a way that a man would not be. Subsequently, the same logic led to rulings that a heterosexual woman harassing a man or a gay or lesbian harassing a person of the same sex constitutes discrimination. (On this logic, harassment by a bisexual person would not violate Title VII.) The most obvious target was “quid pro quo” harassment, which took the form of “have sex with me or you’re fired” or “have sex with me and I’ll get you promoted.” However many women suffer from harassment with a sexual content that lacks the element of a threat of harm or a promise of benefit, but which creates what is called a “hostile working environment.” As a unanimous 1993 decision judgment of the Supreme Court put it: When the workplace is permeated with “discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult,” that is “sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment,” Title VII is violated . . . Conduct that is not severe enough to create an objectively hostile or abusive work environment—an environment that a reasonable person would find hostile or abusive—is beyond Title VII’s purview . . . [W]hether an environment is “hostile” or “abusive” can be determined only by looking at all the circumstances. These may include the frequency of the discriminatory conduct; its severity; whether it is physically threatening or a mere offensive utterance; and whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance.19

( j) Nonsexual Harassment Women workers have been afflicted with many forms of harassment on the job that do not involve sexuality, including acts designed to cause injury and even death. The salience of sexual harassment has distracted attention from this problem, and even caused some judges to declare that harassment must have a sexual content for it to violate Title VII.20

(k) Pregnancy In the past, the treatment of employees who became pregnant was a grave source of disadvantage to women. Some employers routinely terminated any employee who became pregnant. Others have required prolonged leaves without pay, with little or no guarantee of reinstatement to a comparable job. Pregnant employees have been denied the use of paid sick leave during

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their period of disablement and of health insurance coverage for their medical bills related to the pregnancy. Some employers even maintained health plans that excluded benefits for women employees who became pregnant but included pregnancy coverage for the wives of male employees. Provisions of this type had been negotiated by some unions. The first legal attacks on employers’ pregnancy policies were brought by teachers in public schools who were being required to retire from the classroom upon discovery of their “delicate condition.” The motive of the school authorities was probably to protect the innocence of the pregnant teacher’s pupils, and keep them from having to confront the indelicate result of their teacher’s participation in a sexual act. However, the school boards chose to defend their policy on the grounds of the protection of the health and welfare of the pregnant woman and her baby. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court struck down these policies.21 Some employers had structured sick leave, disability or health insurance plans to cover any health problem, with the sole exception of disabilities deriving from pregnancy and birth. Women sued on the grounds that omitting pregnancy from coverage discriminated against women employees, by definition the only ones who could become pregnant. Employers responded that pregnancy was not illness, that it was voluntary, that covering it would be expensive, and that their plans denied to women no coverage available to men. In Gilbert v. General Electric Company, the Supreme Court declared that disability related to pregnancy and birth was in a class by itself, and therefore not something that had to be treated by employers the way they treated other disabilities. This decision dismayed women’s rights advocates because of its immediate effects on the economic condition of pregnant women employees. The complainant, Gilbert, was a single mother with a new baby whose electricity had been turned off because, lacking sick pay, she had gotten behind on her bills. They were also concerned at the possibility that the Court at some future time might choose to allow “people who became pregnant or might in the future get pregnant” to be picked out on that basis for disadvantageous treatment. Responding to the decision in Gilbert, Congress in 1978 passed the Pregnancy Disability Act specifically requiring employers who provided sickness and disability benefits covering medical care for all other conditions to include coverage for pregnancy and birth in their benefit plans. However, the concern about the future use of pregnancy to women’s disadvantage remains, and remains a leading motive for the desire on the part of women’s rights activists for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Federal legislation of the 1970s designed to protect workers from health hazards on the job brought to the fore concerns that pregnant employees might be subject to conditions injurious either to the woman or the fetus. Some firms required that women get themselves sterilized in order to be allowed to hold certain jobs. A company that manufactured batteries barred


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all women who might become pregnant from working on jobs where they might be subject to exposure to lead. A case brought against the firm by the union reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that such a “fetal protection policy” violated Title VII, since it denied to fertile women and to women who were actually pregnant a choice given to fertile men “as to whether they wish[ed] to risk their reproductive health for a particular job.”22 The Occupational Health and Safety Administration requires employers to keep lists of toxic substances present in the workplace, and make this information available to workers. The most sensible course of action for a truly concerned employer would be to offer to temporarily reassign a pregnant worker to a job where the problem did not exist.

(l) Mandatory Arbitration In the course of the 1990s, an increasing number of employers sought to avoid having to defend lawsuits alleging discrimination. They did this by requiring as a condition of employment that applicants sign an agreement that they give up their right to pursue such claims in court, and instead agree to submit them to binding arbitration.23 In 1997, the EEOC issued a policy statement characterizing such agreements as “contrary to the fundamental principles of employment discrimination law” on the ground that such “employer-designed arbitration systems” lack public accountability.

Enforcing Title VII Title VII lawsuits and the contract compliance activities of the federal government have been responsible for some of the improvements in the position of women and minorities.24 But they have not by any means eliminated the problem of discrimination, and it remains common. Currently antidiscrimination remedies are difficult to administer, expensive, work very slowly, and not infrequently produce inadequate results. An important task which lies ahead is finding ways to make faster progress. The EEOC is the official registrar of discrimination complaints. The EEOC itself can bring a lawsuit against an employer. However, its resources have been quite limited, and it can pursue only a very small proportion of cases brought to it. Individuals and groups who have registered their complaint with EEOC can bring a lawsuit privately against an employer or a union. However, this is an extremely expensive and time-consuming process. Costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars and time spans of a decade have not been uncommon. Even when an employer loses one of these suits, the costs to the employer are frequently not large enough to deter future violations or to cause other employers to consider changing their personnel practices. The deterrence effects are biggest in class-action suits, in which the complaint is made on behalf of a few named individuals and of all of similarly situated individuals who suffered from the employer’s pattern and

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practice of discrimination. These are the suits that can produce judgments or settlements of many millions of dollars covering thousands of women. They make headlines, and presumably have an exemplary effect. The EEOC does not concentrate on such suits, and in years when conservative Republicans control the Executive Branch, class-action suits tend not to be brought.25 (When Clarence Thomas was head of the EEOC, he openly declared a policy of no class actions. During his confirmation to a seat in the Supreme Court, most attention was paid to allegations that he had committed sexual harassment of a minor sort, while his far more consequential behavior with respect to the policy of the EEOC got little attention.) An employer adjudged to have discriminated may be ordered to pay the legal fees and other expenses of the case for the complaining employee. This has encouraged lawyers to take and pursue cases that promise large damages without collecting fees in advance from the complainant. In practice, this has meant that some victims of discrimination have been able to have recourse to the courts. The enforcement strategy chosen for Title VII might be called a complaintoriented strategy—responding to complaints that come into the EEOC, as a police department responds to the burglaries and murders that the public brings to its notice. The alternative is an investigative strategy, perhaps on the model of tax enforcement. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does not depend entirely on complaints. On its own initiative, IRS performs continuous surveillance of very large entities, makes investigations of taxpayers it suspects are in violation of the law, and randomly selects taxpayers for audit. Presumably, it prioritizes action for cases involving large-scale violations and those that would have the biggest exemplary effect in inhibiting unlawful behavior. While a complaint-oriented enforcement strategy might be the only possible one against burglary or murder, there are a number of reasons why it turned out to be a poor choice for an agency like the EEOC, charged with mounting a legal fight against discrimination. A relatively small part of the population commits burglary or murder, while a high proportion of those in a position to commit sex discrimination in employment actually do so. This means that little will be accomplished if the agency pursues a strategy that would suffice for netting a relatively small number of lawbreakers. Rather, its job is to change a culture that accepts as proper forms of behavior that were declared illegal over 40 years ago. Even if the enforcement agencies had far more resources than they do, there are other reasons for not relying on a complaint-oriented strategy. Many, indeed most, people who are victims of discrimination may be unaware they are being discriminated against. People who apply for a job and are turned down are in no position to judge whether or not the refusal has been based on their race or their sex or merely represents a fair judgment on their qualifications. Sometimes the news of job openings does not get to anyone but members of the race–sex group already incumbent. Rejected job applicants are not in a good position to get together to organize


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a lawsuit. Yet such cases, were they brought by an enforcement agency, might be among the most useful in setting patterns of fair behavior for employers. Black civil rights organizations have been able in some cases to bring suits on behalf of blacks totally excluded from employment at a particular establishment. Women’s rights organizations have not played as prominent a role in this regard, probably because the total exclusion of women from a workplace is a rare phenomenon. They are welcomed in subordinate support positions. The exclusion of women from particular functions within an establishment is more difficult to detect from outside than total exclusion. Even when it is detected, it has historically been more difficult to arouse indignation and to gather plaintiffs on behalf of women than in the case of racial exclusion. People already employed by a firm who are excluded from certain assignments and promotions may have a very poor idea of what constitutes discrimination under the law. Since occupational segregation is so prevalent and seemingly so universally accepted without complaint, many women are unaware that it is unlawful for their employer to bar them from any job within the establishment on account of their sex. Workers who are aware of their rights may surmise that a complaint of discrimination will end any chance of further advancement, and indeed may result in termination. In short, an enforcement strategy that relies on complaints will miss most of the important cases of discrimination. EEOC’s enforcement actions have been meager in number, primarily because of the low budget of the agency, but also because of its inefficiencies. It has not concentrated to the extent it should have on large and important employers showing a pattern and practice of discrimination. In the fiscal year 2003, EEOC received 81,293 complaints but brought only 393 lawsuits, many of them for single plaintiffs. That year, its activities won $87 million for victims in Title VII cases, a trivial fraction of the billions women and minorities lose in pay due to discrimination each year.26

Enforcing Federal Contract Compliance The OFCCP, an agency of the Department of Labor, is charged with enforcing the Executive Order barring firms that discriminate from selling goods and services to the federal government. The OFCCP adopted a strategy of enforcement more promising than that of EEOC, at least on paper. It requires each federal contractor with more than 15 employees to formulate an “affirmative action” plan.27 At the heart of such a plan, as specified in OFCCP regulations, is a set of numerical goals for the utilization of groups protected from discrimination. The goals are formulated to give each race–sex group (e.g., black females) a share in each type of job equal to its share in the pool of persons available for that job in the labor force. “Availability” is broadly construed in the regulations; employers are not allowed to plead that the current paucity of

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women truck drivers, for example, means that their availability for that job is very low. To do that would allow employers to perpetuate the current level of exclusion. On the contrary, employers were supposed to reach out and try to recruit women and blacks for jobs that were nontraditional for them. Where it was reasonable, employers were to set up training programs to remedy the past lack of opportunities for women and blacks. The regulations specify that timetables are to be established for fulfilling the goals. Firms doing more than $50,000 worth of business with the federal government are required to report annually to OFCCP their utilization of women and minority workers by major occupational group, and to compare that utilization with the availability of such workers. This requirement is supposed to keep the attainment of goals from receding indefinitely into the future. Unfortunately OFCCP is understaffed, has few weapons at its command, and has lacked vigor. OFCCP might have mounted a vigorous and welltargeted program to promote integration by race and sex; it is not limited to responding to complaints as is the EEOC; it can take on a proactive role.28 OFCCP could choose to concentrate on the most egregious offenders among the large corporations, where the most impact might be made. The agency’s potential has largely been unrealized. OFCCP is scheduled to spend $82 million and have 749 employees in 2005, down from the 918 employees it had in 1995.29 It has never had anywhere near a staff capable of its task of supervising nondiscrimination in the 150,000 workplaces of contractors who together employ 28 million people—one-quarter of the nation’s workforce. It makes about 4,000 reviews of compliance a year, which means it might get around to each workplace it supposedly supervises once every 38 years. While its activities have probably been somewhat more influential in changing corporate practices than those of the EEOC or those of individual plaintiffs bringing lawsuits charging race or sex discrimination, the OFCCP has been of distinctively limited effectiveness. Its only sanction is the debarment of a corporation from the approved list of federal contractors. Only 41 firms were debarred between 1972 and 1995, out of the thousands with long-term unsatisfactory performance. Most of those were small firms, which had neglected to file an affirmative action plan. Of the companies debarred, only four were large corporations: Prudential Insurance, Firestone, Uniroyal, and Timkin Roller Bearing. All were debarred during the four-year Democratic administration of President Carter. None of those debarments lasted very long; all four were reinstated within three months.30 Debarment virtually ceased during the Reagan–Bush Administration. During the Clinton Administration, eleven firms were debarred.31 Debarment is too severe to be used very often. In the case of defense contractors, a corporation may be the only source of a product that the Pentagon wants. The debarment of a very large corporation would exact considerable political costs. We can judge the effectiveness of OFCCP by looking at how well large firms—all of them government contractors—have done in integrating their


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workforces by major occupational group. Different industries treat women very differently, and within industries, companies differ considerably. Data by firm collected by EEOC, and made public through a Freedom of Information request by the Wall Street Journal, show that the automobile industry had made very little use of women managers. But within that industry, General Motors had almost three times as many women managers as Ford. In the oil business, Mobil and Atlantic Richfield had twice as many women managers as Union Oil. Manufacturers of food products, whose customers are mostly women, had done relatively little to allow women into management roles; within the food group, George A. Hormel and Company was an outstandingly bad performer. Financial firms and banks, on the other hand, had allowed women considerable representation as managers.32 All of these firms had affirmative action plans. There is no innocent reason why their utilization of women managers should be very different one from another. Many managerial functions are broadly similar from one industry to another, and women are now well represented among business school graduates everywhere in the country. What the company data confirm is that prior to the Clinton Administration, OFCCP had done very little by way of enforcement. Firms had been allowed to do pretty much what they felt like doing. In the private sector, affirmative action had been largely voluntary. Some firms made considerable progress, but others chose not to do very much, and had not been called to account. During the Clinton years, OFCCP paid considerable attention to the so-called glass ceiling, and to the gender pay gap. It instituted a series of “corporate management reviews” to look at systematic barriers to women’s promotion to the upper echelons of management. Some cases of pay discrimination were also addressed, and some back pay was awarded as a result. As Clinton left office, a significant change in reporting by government contractors was instituted. They were required to report hirings and promotions by race, sex, and occupational group, and to submit information on wages.

Summing Up All told, the verdict must be that government enforcement of prohibitions against discrimination and encouragement of integration has made some positive difference in corporate behavior, but there are many workplaces where government impact has been limited or nil. Probably the major impact of government activity in this area has been to familiarize the management of large corporations, if not the population at large, with the idea that no race or sex group has a legitimate monopoly on any set of jobs, and that a corporation that allows any set of jobs to be monopolized by white males looks bad. Bad as is the record of some of the larger firms, progress is slower or nonexistent in most smaller firms. In those firms, the informality of procedures tends to lead to a continuation of recruitment from segregated sources.33

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There are 6.2 million places of work in the United States, excluding government agencies. Of these, 6.0 million have fewer than 100 employees; these small workplaces employ 56 percent of those working for private employers.34 A program that would attempt to hasten an end to gender and race segregation in such workplaces would have to emphasize education of their managers and their customers rather than enforcement through sanctions. Government enforcement efforts should obviously be concentrated on those of the larger firms that have not allowed women and blacks into management and crafts jobs in reasonable numbers. Integration of the larger firms would provide a seasoned and experienced workforce balanced by race and gender, some of whom might eventually find their way into employment in the smaller firms.

8 Affirmative Action and Pay Equity

If women are to achieve a position in the labor market on a par with men’s, the inclusion of women workers into all occupations in fair numbers is vital. A continued failure to achieve full integration by sex in all jobs would continue to rob young women of a chance to choose from a full range of occupations the one most congenial to their talents and have access to jobs with fair pay. Only when women have a fair share in the roles that men occupy within each workplace will men and women have the habit of interacting as equals. The achievement of integration of job titles will change the duties and improve the status of women workers. Affirmative action is a technique of personnel administration which creates a plan for integration—a plan that includes goals and timetables. It was originally developed to try to get African Americans into jobs from which they were excluded. Similar techniques have been applied to achieve racial and ethnic diversity in college admissions. Women began to be included in workplace affirmative action plans after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Condemned by opponents as “racial preferences,” and used as a wedge issue by right-wing politicians, affirmative action has proved unpalatable to a considerable part of the population. In the Supreme Court it has several times barely escaped a death sentence at the hands of conservative justices. Politicians agitating against affirmative action have stressed its application to race, and largely ignored its use in integrating employment by gender. They have been avid in exploiting the disinclination of many whites to give up their privileged position in the workplace. But they may sense that agitation against a program pushing workplace advances for women would be unpopular with an electorate that is half female. Widespread successful application of affirmative action would reduce the gender pay gap by transferring women from low-paying jobs into higher paying ones, and by reducing the labor available to the traditionally female occupations. Those who advocate a push for “pay equity” adjustments to wages argue that the application of affirmative action plans has brought

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only slow progress. They advocate direct action to raise the pay of the many women who will remain in the traditionally female occupations. The wages in many of those occupations do not have pay that reflects the human capital—the skill and education—required to perform successfully in them. Affirmative action and pay equity are not mutually exclusive. Together with lawsuits under Title VII and the activities of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Policy (OFCCP), they constitute the major tools available to fight the discrimination that continues to afflict women workers.

Why We Need Affirmative Action The chief argument in favor of the use of numerical goals and timetables for hiring and promoting is that without them women and blacks are likely to be excluded from many of the better jobs for years to come. Occupational segregation and the discrimination that enforces this segregation derive from management’s racist and sexist ideas about who should have the better jobs. Occupational segregation is also motivated by a desire to avoid the social discomfort generated when normally dominant white males are asked to act on the job as the equal or subordinate of other kinds of people. Hiring and assignment procedures are commonly designed to insure that the people who will work together are socially compatible, and that the roles they are asked to take are comfortable to all concerned. If a workplace contains even a few men who would not be willing to accept a woman as their equal, much less as their superior, then the management may cater to their prejudices, rather than risk costly dissention. Discrimination deriving from this source is self-perpetuating, unless some new procedure forces change. The lack of women as colleagues reinforces men’s feelings that women are inferior outsiders, which in turn makes it difficult for employers to have men and women working side by side in the same job as equal colleagues. Affirmative action enforced by a government agency offers a way to break the vicious circle—the firm’s management is forced to institute selection procedures that short-circuit individual managers’ and workers’ prejudices. Since the employer’s hand is forced, the male workers can be told that the firm has no alternative but to integrate. The power of low-level employees to veto candidates on the basis of race or sex is reduced. The hostility generated by the integration is displaced from the employer to the government. The welcome that affirmative action has received from some employers probably derives from this source. When the Reagan Administration threatened to abolish goals and timetables for government contractors, the business community protested, and the administration was forced to back down.1 The imposition of numerical goals and timetables is the only way that has been found to hold firms accountable. In the absence of numerical goals, the enforcing agency gets to be in the business of collecting from employers inevitably vague promises “not to discriminate.” Such qualitative promises are essentially worthless because evidence as to their fulfillment cannot be

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efficiently gathered or assessed. Where an employer’s way of judging candidates has failed to procure the hiring or promotion of even one woman or one minority candidate for a particular kind of job, the suspicion must arise that the procedure is discriminatory, whether intentionally so or not.

Affirmative Action in Promotions The application of affirmative action to promotions is far more difficult than its application to hiring. After a promotion, the rejected candidates remain with the organization. If they are brought to believe that the process of selection was in any sense unfair, and if they sense that the promoted person is in a weak position because of his or her race or sex, their resentments can create difficulty both for the organization and the person promoted. Yet promotion processes, even when not on their face discriminatory, tend to have features to them that favor in-groups. There may be positions from which promotion is impossible, regardless of the qualifications of the incumbent. There may be an elaborate grooming process for favored people, which virtually assures their recognition as “most competent.” Cynthia Epstein, who has studied professional careers, has found that young men considered to be on a fast track to a good position in the hierarchy will be given varied work assignments and good opportunities of demonstrating their competence.2 There may also be formal or informal requirements for promotion, such as frequent geographic moves and no breaks in service, which are unrelated to performance in the higher job, but serve to put barriers in the way of the promotion of women employees.3 The process of selecting who to promote almost always involves rankings of the candidates. Affirmative action plans for promotion require that these rankings be removed as the sole arbiter, and this is one of the reasons why such plans are particularly likely to arouse a seething resentment in the disappointed candidates. Another is that the person promoted may become the direct supervisor of the rejected candidates. Intensification of already present sexism and racism, and a determination to withhold cooperation from the new boss may be the result. (It is interesting in this context to note that in family businesses, where modestly talented relatives of the owner are the beneficiaries of a wellunderstood “affirmative action program” calling for them to be pushed to the top, virulent resentment, if it exists, does not surface, as it does in cases of affirmative action. Perhaps the difference is that in a family business, the special status that defines the beneficiaries of a nepotistic affirmative action plan adds strength to their position, rather than indicates weakness and poor bargaining position. Perhaps even more importantly, nonfamily employees know that their gracious acquiescence is a condition of their continuing to work for the company. This certainly suggests that affirmative action programs succeed best if the top brass take a genuine interest and if measures for punishing resisters are in force and well publicized.)

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Fair promotion processes are vital to the economic future of women in the workplace. A look at the representation of women in the upper ranks of most organizations shows that a great deal remains to be accomplished. In the federal government, women hold 50 percent of the jobs, but only 25 percent of the top management “supergrade” jobs.4

Drawbacks to the Beneficiaries An allegedly important drawback of affirmative action from the point of view of women and minority people is that those selected to be hired must face the suspicion of their workmates that they are not competent. This suspicion is particularly galling to those women and blacks who feel (whether correctly or not) that they were hired on the basis of their perceived merit, and would have been hired had no such plan existed. Such people, who may themselves have come to believe the argument that affirmative action inevitably means the hiring of incompetent people, feel that the affirmative action program has ruined their career by causing them to be labeled incompetent. Even those who know that they owe their job to an affirmative action program find the prized job somewhat tainted by the attitudes of colleagues toward those people brought in under affirmative action. While these attitudes are regrettable, the beneficiaries of affirmative action are better off than if they had never been hired at all. Some of the expressions of hostility put down to affirmative action may result from racism or sexism of their colleagues. That may diminish as their colleagues come to know them as individuals, something which might never have occurred in the absence of affirmative action. In the past, in the days before affirmative action for women, any woman who achieved any kind of success in the workplace was likely to be the object of remarks such as “she slept her way to the top.” In those days, sexual harassment was common, as it remains today. The people who made such remarks were not deploring the exaction of sexual favors by those with power to promote. Those exactions were an accepted fact of life, about which “casting couch” jokes were made. Rather, those who made such remarks were maligning both the morals and the competence of any woman who advanced. Those abusive remarks undoubtedly made life and work more difficult for the women subjected to it. The people who made such remarks were not happy about women’s success in the workplace or even neutral about it. Many of the men and the women who said such things held sexist attitudes, were jealous, and intended the remarks to be damaging and hurtful. They were looking for a way to tear down competent women, reduce respect for them, reduce any authority they might have, make them fail in their jobs. Now affirmative action has been seized on as a way to disparage women or blacks who get promoted, with similar motives. When people make remarks about women sleeping their way to the top, or claim that people hired through affirmative action are all incompetent,


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they are expressing their resistance to change, and trying to fix it so that the beneficiaries of affirmative action do fail. This kind of behavior, assuming that it is widespread, certainly reduces the benefits of affirmative action to its intended beneficiaries. In the absence of affirmative action they would be spared those particular ill-natured comments, but they would most likely have far lower wages, less-interesting work, less chance at promotion. It is the sentiment and behavior of people who make such comments that makes affirmative action necessary in the first place. Their misbehavior is not a valid argument that nothing should be done to counter the effect of their prejudices.

A Case History The records of court cases allow us to look in at what goes on in segregated workplaces, see some of the devices used to keep them segregated, and look in on how affirmative action works, and size up the fairness of the results. The facts of a case which went all the way up to the Supreme Court illustrates well some of these on-the-job realities. Diane Joyce had been working for four years as an account clerk at the Santa Clara County Transportation Agency, whose mission is to maintain county roads. When a higher-paying position as road dispatcher opened up, Joyce applied for it.5 Dispatchers assign road crews, equipment, and materials, and maintain records concerning road maintenance work to be done. That dispatcher job was one of 238 positions in the Agency classified as Skilled Crafts Worker. Not a single one of those positions had ever been held by a woman. The Santa Clara Transportation Agency had an affirmative action plan, but up to that point not much had been done to desegregate a workplace that was highly segregated by sex. Joyce was told she was ineligible for the dispatcher position because she had not served as a road maintenance worker. There were 110 road maintenance jobs in the Agency, and none of them had ever been held by a woman either. Joyce was allowed to take a job in the road maintenance crew. Her first supervisor was apparently not inclined to make her welcome. Male workers on that job were routinely provided with coveralls to protect their clothing, but none were given to her. After four occasions on which her clothing was ruined, she filed a formal grievance. The next day, before the grievance could be formally processed, Joyce was issued the four pairs of coveralls that men were routinely given. Joyce served on road maintenance crews for almost five years. On most days, she was the one chosen to wave a sign to oncoming traffic, rather than being treated as a regular member of the crew. During that period, she filled in temporarily as a road dispatcher on a number of occasions. When a regular job as a road dispatcher opened up again, and she applied for it, she was turned down in favor of a man, Paul Johnson. Diane Joyce sought the help of the Transportation Agency’s affirmative action officer. He recommended to the top management that the job go to

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her, and she was placed in the job. Paul Johnson sued the Agency, charging that he had been kept out of the job on account of his sex, and that what had occurred should be viewed as sex discrimination. The federal district court found for Johnson, but the Court of Appeals overturned that verdict. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court as Johnson v. Transportation Agency of Santa Clara County. By a 5–4 decision, the Court upheld the Agency in placing Joyce instead of Johnson in the job.

What an Affirmative Action Plan Can Accomplish The case of Diane Joyce stands as an object lesson in the difficulties in breaking down occupational segregation by sex, even in a government agency, even in the presence of an affirmative action plan. Joyce’s request for a crafts job came two decades after the passage of Title VII. By then, not a single woman worker in the Transportation Agency was to be found in any such job. The Transportation Agency’s affirmative action plan prescribed as a goal that women be placed in 3 of the expected 55 openings per year in crafts jobs—not a very ambitious rate of desegregation. An affirmative action plan formulated by an employer is not a guarantee of action. A plan in the employer’s drawer, complete with goals and timetables, may satisfy a formal administrative requirement for decades without any actual progress being made. In the case of this Agency, the history makes it clear that the affirmative action officer cannot have been very active in integrating by sex the Agency’s occupations. It took a gutsy woman to force the issue. Yet we cannot say that the existence of the plan was of no consequence. In the absence of an affirmative action plan and the affirmative action officer who was appointed to administer it, Diane Joyce would not have been allowed to become a craft worker. So we have to conclude that affirmative action plans enable but by no means guarantee progress. It takes pressure from people who had been excluded to make them operational. Many employers of crafts workers are required to have affirmative action plans, either because they are government contractors or government agencies. Unfortunately, the data on employment of women in crafts jobs in the first decade of the twenty-first century suggest that people with the courage, endurance, and willingness to take on “the boys,” which Diane Joyce displayed, are uncommon.

The Issue of Merit It is often said that merit alone should decide who gets which job, and that affirmative action results in the assignment of less-qualified people. Was merit disregarded when Diane Joyce was placed by the affirmative action officer in the dispatcher job? Joyce was one of nine applicants for the position who were deemed “well qualified.” Paul Johnson, who originally was awarded the dispatcher job, had had a career with the Agency similar to that of Diane Joyce.


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Thanks to the court records, we can look at the Transportation Agency’s assessment of merit. The candidates were called to an interview with a twoperson board. After an informal evaluation, this board gave the candidates numerical scores, all of them between 70 and 80. Paul Johnson was tied for second with a 75, while Diane Joyce was next with a score of 73. The last and decisive interview was with a three-person board of Agency supervisors. One of the members of this board was the supervisor who had behaved antagonistically toward Joyce when she joined the road maintenance crew, and against whom she had been forced to file a grievance. A second was a man with whom she had had a disagreement in her capacity as chair of the Safety Committee. He had called her a “rebel-rousing, skirt-wearing person.” The three supervisors recommended that Paul Johnson be the one promoted to the dispatcher’s job. Surely, such a procedure gives little basis for confidence that Paul Johnson was in truth more meritorious than Diane Joyce. In thinking about affirmative action, people frequently assume that there is only one obviously right way to define merit, one right way to measure it, never any error in doing the measuring, no malice or discrimination biasing the measurement, and one right way to use measurements of merit in making decisions about giving jobs (or school admittances) to people. We also tend to assume that those obviously right ways of doing these things are everywhere in current use. It isn’t necessarily so, of course. Other erroneous assumptions are made by those who argue against affirmative action—that for each job vacancy, there is among the candidates one person who is unambiguously the best; that the identity of that best candidate is unerringly revealed by the process of selection the employer uses; that the process of evaluation is not unfairly affected by sex, race, ethnicity, age, disability. They also assume that the candidate designated as “best” is head and shoulders above all the others, so that the substitution of the one judged third or fourth instead of the one judged first would make a great difference to productivity. However, none of these assumptions is realistic in many or even most cases. The process of selection in most cases has important subjective elements. This allows plenty of room for making mistakes, as well as a lot of leeway for discriminatory behavior on the part of those doing the choosing. That was arguably the case in deciding whether to award Joyce or Johnson the dispatcher job. Thus it is wrong to assume that the candidate chosen without affirmative action being brought into play is invariably better than the candidate put into the job by affirmative action. It is wrong to assume that a woman (or a minority male), not crowned with the title of “best,” but nevertheless judged to be quite adequate, and put into a vacancy under an affirmative action plan, will not perform the duties as well as the person who might otherwise have been selected. Measurements of merit for a job or for a school admission, then, are dependent on the methods used, are subject to error and subversion, and may not differentiate among candidates with any great accuracy. A process of assessing merit that has cut out all but white males may mask purposeful

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discrimination, or may contain hurdles that female and black candidates, for no job-related reason, find particularly difficult to get over. An interviewer whose method of measuring congeniality is to chat with candidates about football is not going to be giving very many female candidates high grades for congeniality. If we have a way of measuring merit that has been used in the past, is it fair to make changes that might cut out fewer women? The established procedure may not be maximally fair and efficient. If the established method has eliminated most women, then conscious or unconscious bias is certainly a possible reason. A foe of affirmative action might respond as follows: “Certainly if the method of judging merit has flaws, then by all means change it. All I ask is that it not be changed for the sole purpose of increasing the representation of the previously excluded groups.” By this reasoning, it would be legitimate to change the method of judging merit to reduce the employer’s cost of making the selection among candidates, or to shorten the time the selection might consume, or for the convenience of those doing the judging, but it would not be legitimate to change it for the purpose of ending segregation by sex or race. In practice, institutions, firms, and individuals do make changes in the way they judge merit to reduce cost and inconvenience. Such alterations are not generally treated as unfair to the people who would have been winners under the old system, but were losers after the system changed. In considering the importance of using merit, however measured, as the sole or main determinant of who gets which job, it might be argued that there is a positive value attached to having race and sex diversity in any sizeable crew. Leading a segregated on-the-job life makes workers less fit for life in a community where respect for all groups is the rule. All-male crews sometimes encourage misogyny, and all-white crews sometimes encourage racism. Diversity in occupations also reduces income disparities between racial and ethnic groups. In the case of women, the continuing exclusion of lone mothers from better paying blue-collar jobs contributes to a high rate of child poverty.

Passing Over the “Most Qualified” In the Santa Clara County Transportation Agency’s process of choosing who should get a dispatcher job, Paul Johnson had come out tied for second in the original ranking. The fact that he was preferred to the male candidate originally ranked first was not considered by anybody as dishonoring the principle of merit. It was only the displacement of the person tied for second by the person just behind him in the ranking that was contested. If that person had been Danny Joyce instead of Diane Joyce, the award of the position to him would not have been protested. There are times and places when it is ethically right to pass over the person judged most qualified and take instead a lesser qualified person who will add diversity. With care and energy in recruiting promising female and


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African American candidates, these cases should be the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, where the measurement of merit produces rankings that are at best approximate, or where the candidates are very close in merit, and where diversity serves important purposes, attention to the achievement of diversity might produce a more ethically valid situation for the institution involved or for society than would a mechanical adherence to rankings of merit. One might argue that this should never be done on the ground that diversity has no value, and therefore nothing good should be traded off for it. An alternative ground is the principle that race and sex should never affect the way people are treated. Still another is that the principle of considering only merit is so ethically important that it cannot be traded off for any other consideration, such as diversity, even if diversity is judged to have value. If it were generally agreed that it was ethically important to consider nothing but merit (in the technical sense of the predicted ability to perform the major function for which the person is being selected), then we would not have veterans’ preferences, or the preferential admissions of the children of alumni to Harvard. Or at least there would be a protest movement against these practices. They are tolerated and never protested against; so the unfairness of considering only merit cannot be a principle that is universally considered inviolable. Nobody seems to care very much about such things. Those who advocate non-attention to race and sex as an inviolable principle would enshrine something that is impossible under present labor market conditions, unless employers start hiring people without interviews. The degree of segregation that exists in the labor market shows that sex and race are noticed—to the detriment of women and blacks—when most decisions are made as to who should be hired and into which jobs they should be placed. The idea that we could, starting next week, make people switch off their perceptions of people’s race and sex, and switch off their ideas about who belongs in which job, is ludicrous. One might just as well, in the interest of hiring the handicapped, decree that no attention at all be paid to handicap, only to the technical abilities of all candidates, handicapped and nonhandicapped alike. The people who have been noticing sex and race to the detriment of women and blacks will go right on doing so unless they are trumped by people empowered to notice race and sex of the candidates for the purpose of dismantling the system of segregation. The argument that measurements of merit are all that should ever count rests on very weak foundations. This does not mean that the value of increased diversity should overrule merit in all or even most cases. It does mean that attention has to be paid to the importance of both merit and diversity.

The Issue of Fairness In his dissenting opinion in Johnson v. Transportation Agency, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that Johnson was treated unfairly. Scalia portrays

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Johnson as an underdog victim of sex discrimination. In addition, he argues that relatively unskilled people like Johnson are members of the nonfavored groups least likely to have profited from societal discrimination in the past . . . A statute designed to establish a color-blind and gender-blind workplace has thus been converted into a powerful engine of racism and sexism . . . The irony is that [the Johnsons of this country]— predominantly unknown, unaffluent, unorganized—suffer this injustice at the hands of a Court fond of thinking itself the champion of the politically impotent. I dissent.6 (Italics in original)

The alleged “sexism” of affirmative action that Scalia complains of disadvantages members of the male sex. Scalia calls blacks and women “favored groups” and whites and males “nonfavored groups.” In Scalia’s view, when the affirmative action officer overrode the results of the regular promotion process in the Santa Clara Transportation Agency and put Diane Joyce into the dispatcher slot instead of Paul Johnson, the white male “group” as well as Paul Johnson the individual were being treated unfairly. The staffing pattern in the Transportation Agency was that members of the male sex had possession of all of the 238 skilled crafts positions, and members of the female sex had possession of not a single one. That staffing pattern does not suggest that the Agency was already the “gender-blind workplace” that Scalia suggests the statute was designed to establish. When Diane Joyce was put ahead of Paul Johnson, the male sex’s fraction of those jobs was reduced to 237 out of 238. The argument that the male sex was placed in a “disfavored” status by the Transportation Agency’s plan would only be valid if one believed that the lack of merit of females is so universal for such not-very-demanding jobs that males would obtain 100 percent of them under a fair hiring system. Males did have their advantages reduced by the plan. What the plan did was reduce the degree of favor which had allowed them up to that point to retain a complete monopoly of certain jobs. That was its whole point. But how about Paul Johnson, the particular individual who missed out on the dispatcher’s job? What can we say about him, and the fairness he deserved, and possible violation of his rights? Paul Johnson was chosen for the dispatcher vacancy under a system with large elements of subjectivity, which gave great scope for the personal predilections of the decision makers to influence the result. That system had not allowed a single female ever to occupy such a job. Paul Johnson had no right to the continuation of such a system. It is certainly reasonable to argue that the complete absence of women in all of the 238 jobs in this category calls for the appointment of a woman when a good candidate shows up. A long delay would have wasted the chance for Joyce to serve as a role model, to demonstrate that one didn’t have to be a man to do the job well. Appointing a well-qualified woman to the skilled crafts group at the first opportunity brought nearer the day when segregation by sex would be a thing of the past.


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Paul Johnson was not guilty of setting up the original arrangements that effectively barred women. But his lack of guilt does not entitle him to have those original arrangements continued. His exclusion from the job is not a punishment for anything he or his ancestors may have done. Rather, the exclusion results from the Agency’s changeover from a system of selection that excludes women in certain jobs to a system that doesn’t. If Joyce had been judged better than he, his exclusion would have harmed his material interests to the same degree. The exclusion of the man who would otherwise have gotten the dispatcher’s job results from one thing: the Agency’s decision to allow the very first break in its sex segregation of workers. Our judgment of the morality of that act cannot depend solely on the merits of the candidates who were on deck to compete for this particular vacancy, or the difficulties encountered in their childhood, or their guilt or lack of it. Breaking the tradition of segregation affects all future candidates. Joyce’s groundbreaking appointment gave women a chance to hold crafts jobs like that one. Allowing women a chance to break the total segregation is not an immoral act. Without the denial to Paul Johnson, or some future Paul Johnson, they would have no chance, and an unfair situation would be continued.

Pay Equity Congress passed an Equal Pay Act (EPA) in 1963, a year before the Civil Rights Act. It requires an employer to give men and women employees “equal pay for equal work.” Unfortunately, the courts have interpreted this legislation to mean that pay need be equalized only among those men and women doing virtually identical work for the same employer. For example, in one case a judge decided that a department store paying women selling women’s clothes less than men selling men’s clothes was not in violation of the EPA. Even on this narrow interpretation, millions of dollars worth of claims have been paid under the EPA. However, because of pervasive occupational segregation by sex, few women do perform work that is identical to that of any man working for the same employer. For this reason, the EPA is of minimal help in closing the salary gap. Even had the courts interpreted the phrase “equal work” more broadly, the EPA could not have been used to attack the pay differential between women and men working for the same employer in occupations that are very different, such as secretaries and truck drivers. A considerable part of the sex gap in wages is due to differentials of that sort, where women in mostly female jobs get considerably lower wages than men in jobs that require a similar degree of skill or even less. Lawyer Winn Newman put forth the idea that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits “sexbased pay discrimination,” could be construed to require that men’s and women’s jobs that were very different but required similar degrees of skill and responsibility be paid comparably. The principle Newman enunciated, that equal qualifications deserved equal pay, became known as “pay equity”

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or “comparable worth.” In effect, he was asserting that in the absence of discrimination people in different jobs that required similar amounts of human capital should get similar pay, something economists had long been arguing was actually the case.7 A systematic method for measuring the human capital required in each of an employer’s jobs does indeed exist, and has frequently been used by employers to rationalize their wage structure. Large employers, including state and local governments, had for decades employed a procedure called “job evaluation,” by which jobs were awarded point scores depending on their requirements for “knowledge and skills,” “mental demands,” and “accountability.”8 In that way, very different jobs could be compared. One such study by a leading practitioner in the field awarded secretaries a total of 197 points and truck drivers 97 points.9 Yet in 2002, full-time workers who were secretaries averaged pay of $496, while those who were truck drivers averaged $604.10 Typically, the employers who have made use of such studies have been paying women considerably less than men in jobs with equivalent scores, and have wanted to continue doing so. This was accomplished by an evasive maneuver. The jobs included in the evaluation were grouped into all-male and all-female clusters. One job in each cluster (called a key job) would be assigned a market wage, and then the remaining jobs in the cluster would have pay assigned according to the relation of their scores to the score of their cluster’s key job. Since widespread discrimination results in market wages for women’s jobs that are low relative to the skills required, the jobs in the female clusters get assigned lower wages than jobs with the same point score in the male clusters. The proponents of pay equity argued that an employer who did this was importing the effect of discrimination reflected in the market wages into its own establishment, and was itself committing sex discrimination. In one of the first lawsuits brought under this theory, the nurses employed by the city of Denver argued that their pay was lower than that set for males with lower levels of qualification.11 For example, the city paid nurses, who had a professional education and had responsibility for human lives, less than tree trimmers, who did not need a high-school diploma. Supervisors of nursing, with management functions affecting the life and death of patients, had lower pay than low-level administration jobs filled by males in other parts of the city government because the nurse supervisors’ jobs were in the same low-pay job cluster as the nurses. The city of Denver responded that it made periodic surveys of nursing salaries in the Denver area. It paid the nurses in its own hospitals at the market rate indicated by the survey. With respect to the nurse supervisors, the city personnel officer admitted in court testimony that their duties were comparable to those of male administrators paid considerably more. However, because the nurse supervisors were nurses, they were included in the cluster of nurse jobs. The extra qualification required for the nurse supervisor job over that required for other supervisory jobs thus became in effect a justification for paying those women less.


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The judge who heard the case expressed the view that paying market wages could not be defined as discrimination under Title VII. He extolled the free market as a way of setting wages, and deplored the difficulty that he would be in if he himself were required to step in and take charge of wagesetting for the employees of the city of Denver. The judge threw out the charges of discrimination the nurses had brought, and that decision was upheld on appeal. In a second case, the employees’ union sued the state of Washington under Title VII on behalf of women employees asking for realignment of pay scales.12 The state itself had commissioned a job evaluation study. The study showed that the jobs with mostly male employees were paid as much as 50 percent more than typically female jobs with the same ratings. An appropriation to finance pay raises for women’s jobs was removed from the state budget on the grounds that the realignment would be too expensive. The lawsuit was brought after a decade of inaction on the part of the state. The federal judge hearing the evidence ordered the state to realign its pay scales and awarded the women back pay, but the decision was reversed in the Court of Appeals. A case of this sort has never reached the Supreme Court. However, Washington and other state and local governments did come under political or union pressure to make wage realignments to ensure pay equity. Legislative bodies have commissioned job evaluation studies, and proceeded to appropriate funds to raise the pay in the female job titles. The failure of pay equity to make headway in the courts has prompted efforts to achieve it through federal legislation. A “Fair Pay Act” introduced in 2003—a successor to many previous failed legislative attempts—would establish the principle of equal pay for equivalent jobs. The term “equivalent jobs” is defined in the bill as “jobs that may be dissimilar, but whose requirements are equivalent, when viewed as a composite of skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions.” It would require employers to submit to the EEOC information on wages for each job title, and the sex, race, and national origin of employees at each wage rate in each job title, and it provides penalties for violation. The passage of such a bill into law would require a considerably more liberal composition of the federal legislative and executive branches than is now the case. Another possible avenue for pay equity realignments would be the issuance by the U.S. Department of Labor of a set of pay guidelines. Compliance for government contractors might be made compulsory. Opponents of pay equity adjustments enjoy frightening the business community with the nightmare of a large and stupidly run federal agency, which would fix by administrative fiat the wage rate for every job in every business in the country. Such an inclusive approach would be expensive, unwieldy, and intrusive. However, an agency might set up minimum wage recommendations for the largest of the typically female occupations—secretary, retail sales clerk, child care worker, teacher, social worker, librarian, nurse. This is the approach taken by Australia, and it has worked effectively to raise women’s wages, apparently without adverse economic consequences to the

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women or to the society in general.13 Another approach would be for EEOC or the Labor Department to evaluate a group of common male and female occupations, and recommend wage ratios for them. For example, the recommendation might be that secretaries be paid x percent more than truck drivers. The observance of such ratios might be required of government contractors, along with affirmative action.

Affirmative Action and Pay Equity in Women’s Economic Agenda Affirmative action has never really been seriously tried on a large enough scale and with a severity of enforcement sufficient to make a big dent in the problem of discrimination. Under slack enforcement, progress is not easy to make in this field because of the inherent difficulties of planning and administration of what essentially amounts to a social revolution in the workplace. More rigorous enforcement would require that political leaders push antidiscrimination initiatives, something that has not occurred even under political regimes whose rhetoric appeared to favor them. Under Democratic administrations, ostensibly committed to the achievement of fair employment practices, the agencies charged with fighting employment discrimination have been inept, unimaginative, inefficient, and short of resources. Republican administrations have tended to be openly hostile, if not to the ideal of fair employment practices, then to any and every instrument that might be used by the government to promote that goal. Women activists have not succeeded in pushing the politicians to do better. They may have assumed that affirmative action should or would be applied principally to get access to jobs for blacks—an assumption entertained by the enforcement agencies for a considerable period. Perhaps they have themselves internalized the appropriateness of sex segregation of occupations. They may feel that an affirmative action program, even an effective one, could bring relatively little help to those many women workers already committed to the traditional female occupations. Yet pay equity under Title VII, which would help those women, has been stymied by the courts, and attempts to get legislation or executive action to mandate it have not gotten far. The sad truth is that activists for women’s rights have shown little energy and have had little success in pushing measures that would lead toward equality in the workplace. Rather they seem to concentrate the biggest portion of their energy on issues such as abortion rights and paid parental leave. Yet the importance of conquering employment discrimination for improving women’s lives and status can hardly be overestimated.

9 The Occupation of Housewife

To be a housewife is to be a member of a very peculiar occupation—an occupation like no other. The nature of the duties to be performed, the method of payment, the form of supervision, the tenure system, the “market” in which the “workers” find “jobs,” and the physical hazards are all very different from the way things are in other occupations. The differences are so great that one tends not to think of a housewife as belonging to an occupation in the usual sense. It is commonly said that a housewife “doesn’t work” and that she “is unpaid.” The truth is, of course, that a housewife does work and does get recompense. Like other workers, she can quit or be fired. One dictionary defines an occupation as “an activity that serves as one’s regular source of livelihood.” Being a housewife is an activity that gets one food, clothing, and a place to live, and that certainly meets the dictionary’s definition of having an occupation. By tradition and by law, the housewife is not counted as working for an “employer,” and the reward she gets for her work is not legally defined as a “wage.” This arrangement has implications for her status, her sense of independence, and her participation in planning the family budget. She has never been taxed as other workers. Her old-age support is not arranged on the same basis as that of other workers. In some respects, housewives are gravely disadvantaged. In other respects, families with housewives are given extra advantages that families with two earners are denied. In the era when all women were expected to spend their mature years as housewives, when almost all married men maintained housewives, and when divorce was uncommon, none of this was thought to merit comment or considered a problem. But the proportion of adult women who reported themselves as engaged exclusively in keeping house dwindled throughout the twentieth century. Currently, the husband is the sole worker in 17 percent of married-couple families. He is the sole worker in 30 percent of marriedcouple families with children under 18.1 Although much diminished, the housewife occupation is still one of the largest.

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A housewife—a married woman who works exclusively within the home performing services for her own family—usually relieves other family members from contributing much or any of their time, effort, and attention to child care, food preparation, housecleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, and a host of other chores and errands. Many if not all of these services will be performed by a family member whether the family maintains a housewife or not. However a family that maintains a competent person devoted full time to performing these services generally benefits from having them performed well and carefully and in a timely manner. A one-earner couple has a much higher standard of living than a two-earner couple with the same money income because of the family’s greater enjoyment of high-quality services, and because they do not need to divert money to buy child care. While the advantages of having a housewife in the family are considerable, so are the disadvantages. Most obviously, the family loses the money income that the person serving as housewife might contribute to the collective budget. There are other disadvantages, which are concentrated on the shoulders of the person playing the housewife role. A housewife works alone, or with only the company of small children, and as a result many are extremely lonely. The husband of a housewife, the only spouse with direct access to money, has the opportunity to be tyrannical. He may be violent. He may desert, leaving a wife unprepared to earn a good living. For all these reasons, the housewife occupation is one of the most problem-ridden in the economy. Being a housewife is no longer a lifetime vocation for most women. Many of the women who tell the census taker they are not in the labor force because they are “keeping house” are taking a temporary spell in the housewife occupation. The shorter the time an individual spends as a housewife, the less severe the problems are likely to be. The long-term housewife’s occupation is one of the riskiest—both physically and financially. But even short spells as a housewife can produce severe disadvantages. The housewife is usually thought of as outside the economy—housewives’ services are not included as part of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But there certainly is an economic side to the housewife role. The nature and value of the productive services delivered by the housewife, the nature and value of the pay, and how these get set are of considerable interest. While there has been some agitation for including housewives in the GDP and for paying them cash wages, the important issues of public policy with respect to housewives lie elsewhere. One set of important policy questions is the treatment of the housewife and the employed wife in matters of taxation and Social Security. Present laws favor the housewife-maintaining family in important ways, and treat the couple with an employed wife less well. Another issue concerns the wisdom of encouraging women to assume the housewife role after the birth of a baby, by instituting generous maternity leave policies. Still another is the treatment of the “displaced homemaker”—a person who has been a housewife for a long time, but whose “job” has ended through separation or divorce.

The Occupation of Housewife

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The Duties of the Housewife “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,” goes one attempt to persuade women that they should rest content with being housewives. At the other extreme, John Kenneth Galbraith has called the housewife a “crypto-servant.”2 Both of these are irritating ideas, and intentionally so. Many of the housewife’s duties are indeed those of the servant, and the servant job is the one closest to the housewife’s in the money economy. Unlike the servant, the housewife is a family member, and therefore partakes to some degree in whatever deference is due to the bank account, class position, and occupation of the husband. She also partakes, as a servant does not, of whatever luxury the husband’s salary affords in living space, food, clothing, and entertainment. She does have more discretion than a servant ordinarily has, and may have the management of the family’s finances in her hands. In some respects, the housewife’s working conditions are more onerous than the servant’s: she works seven days a week and is on call 24 hours a day for the service of the whole family. Personal relations are important in all jobs, but they are a particularly important part of the housewife’s job. The children she takes care of are her own. The housewife’s relation to the husband, including their sexual relation, is a factor in her ability to keep her position as wife. Of course if the housewife and her husband love each other, that may make the performance of this part of her work “a labor of love.” Yet sexual relations are notoriously changeable in their tenor. If they go sour, the housewife may lose her position. The connection between the economic and the sexual means that the housewife’s economic security is hostage to personal whims—whims of her husband and herself. Female servants in the nineteenth century, and probably throughout the course of history, had sexual duties to the father of the house and possibly to the postadolescent sons as well. This was certainly true if they were slaves or indentured servants. These days, good servants are rare and if they receive unwelcome attentions they can quit and go elsewhere. Only the prostitute and the housewife now have jobs in which a requirement to engage in sex relations is part of the duties. In any other job, the imposition of such a requirement is considered sexual harassment, and outlawed in the United States under the Civil Rights Act. The sexual part of the housewife’s job has become more crucial with the advent of easy and frequent divorce. Where marriage was understood to go on until death, falling out of love, or meeting someone you liked better was considered no excuse to end it. In the present era of no-fault divorce, even an excuse is unnecessary. There are some other jobs besides the housewife’s where a person performing competently in the technical aspects of the work will be displaced because the boss develops a sexual desire for another person. But surely, the best ones do not have that characteristic. A great deal of what we are saying about the housewife also applies, to some degree, to many of the wives who have paid jobs. They also may do

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housework seven days a week, in addition to their paid job. The majority of them have wages that are considerably lower than their husbands’. For a woman in that situation, the continuation of the marriage allows her to have a far higher standard of living than she could achieve independently. In this sense, she, like the housewife, gets part of her livelihood by being her husband’s wife, and doing whatever is necessary to maintain that status.

The Housewife’s Mobility Problems The housewife has problems in moving from one job to another which exceed those in other jobs. For most people, it is easier to move from one job to another within the same occupation than to change occupations. But the housewife, unlike nurses or carpenters or secretaries or economists, cannot search overtly for other vacancies of a similar type while occupying her present “job.” For that matter even after it has ended she cannot search overtly for another “meal ticket”; her search must be presented to herself and others as a search for love. If anything, her experience as a housewife is a hindrance in finding a new spot in the same profession. She now counts as second-hand merchandise, with some expensive appendages—her children by her previous husband—trailing after her. She is no longer as young as she was. In short, gaining another housewife berth with a new husband is not easy. A survey by the Census Bureau found that by five years after their divorce, almost half of divorced women had not remarried.3 The odds against remarriage have been lengthening. The likelihood of remarriage within five years after a divorce has diminished since 1975 by a fifth for white women and a third for black women.4 If the housewife wants to move into another occupation, namely a paying job, the similarities between the duties of the housewife and the duties of the servant create difficulties. Most employers apparently do not consider the experience of the housewife to be valuable in performing paid jobs. Of course this attitude may grow out of sexism. An equivalent set of duties attached to a man’s job might well be thought valuable experience, possibly for some managerial jobs. The nature of the financial arrangements of housewife-maintaining families create difficulty for the housewife if she wants to “quit her job” by quitting the marriage. It may be difficult or impossible for her to accumulate a cash reserve which would carry her through until she finds some other source of livelihood, usually a job in another occupation. If she can make such an accumulation, it may have to be done by stealth. The “live-in” feature of the housewife’s job increases the difficulty of quitting by increasing the size of the accumulation needed to change jobs. In most other occupations, a person who quits a particular job does not have to move out of his or her living quarters at the time of the quit. Such a person can usually live for a while on the goodwill built up with the landlord and on the stocks of staples in the kitchen.


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To the financial difficulties of quitting a marriage must be added the formidable logistic difficulties—finding new residential quarters and arranging to move there. A housewife’s lack of credit in her own name may also create difficulties at such a time. The longer term prospects are not good either, principally because most of the high-paying jobs are marked off for men.

Physical Hazards Large numbers of women experience intentional violence from husbands and other partners. A survey sponsored by the Department of Justice found that almost two million American women had suffered violent attacks in the previous year from a person with whom they were intimate. When asked to look back over their lifetime, a quarter of all women surveyed said they had experienced a violent attack by an intimate.5 About half of those who said they had been victimized did not report the crime to the police. In only 7.3 percent of cases was the intimate perpetrator of a physical assault prosecuted, and convictions were obtained in 3.5 percent of all cases. Only 1.2 percent of such perpetrators were sentenced to jail or prison.6 A case in a Washington, DC suburb in the year 2003 illustrates the situation: Numerous times, Tyrone Dyson choked, beat and threatened to kill the women in his life. In 11 years, Anne Arundel County authorities filed more than 20 charges against him stemming from assaults against six women. Yet again and again, prosecutors made deals with Dyson in which he pleaded guilty, sometimes to lesser charges, in exchange for little or no jail time … several weeks after being jailed for allegedly assaulting his wife, Ernestine, and threatening to kill her and himself, Dyson, 32, made another deal, this time with Prince George’s authorities. He promised to stay away from his wife, and in return [the prosecutor’s office] agreed to suspend prosecution of him. If Dyson did not commit any crime in the future, the charges were to have been dropped. Ernestine Dyson, 32, consented to the deal. About 24 hours later, Tyrone Dyson fatally shot Ernestine Dyson in her Oxon Hill home and turned the gun on himself.7

Obviously many police officers, prosecutors, and judges consider the prevention and punishment of household violence a low priority, if they consider it a crime at all. If called to a home on a complaint of violence, many police officers apparently consider that the appropriate course of action is to conciliate the matter, rather than to arrest the husband and charge him with a criminal offense. Many men, including some police officers, believe that men have the right to beat their wives. Even an injury requiring treatment in an emergency room visit does not necessarily entail an arrest. The only thing that increases the likelihood of an arrest is damage to a car in the course of the incident. A housewife will lose her economic support if her husband has to spend time in jail, and this makes judges reluctant to jail battering husbands. Beaten-up wives themselves worry about this. A housewife will often refuse

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to press charges, or withdraws them if they have been pressed. Even separated wives or ex-wives sometimes do this, as in the Dyson case. This kind of behavior reinforces police officers’ reluctance to make arrests and prosecutors’ reluctance to spend time on such cases. There has been considerable speculation about why many wives continue to live with violent spouses. Some have argued that such wives derive a masochistic enjoyment from being hurt, or feel that they have deserved punishment. Whether this is true or not, there is very likely an economic aspect to the wife’s behavior, especially if she has no job. An abused housewife will have no immediate way to make money. She is likely to have young children whom she feels she must keep with her, and whom she would have to feed and shelter. She may not have relatives in the same city with extra space and money which they would be willing to put at her disposal. To such a woman, the difficulties of leaving a violent husband may appear insurmountable. There is literally no place for her to go. Feminists have opened up an offensive against wife battering by bringing lawsuits against municipal authorities in cases where the police have failed to protect women from their batterers. Where permanent and serious injury has been sustained, some multimillion dollar judgments, which have had to be paid out of a city’s treasury, have been obtained, and these have motivated the authorities in some jurisdictions to indoctrinate police officers to behave more aggressively against batterers than they have been wont to do in the past. Feminists have also organized shelters for battered women in many cities throughout the United States. These serve as a place of resort for a woman and her children with nowhere else to go. From the shelter, she can apply for welfare, look for a job and a place to live. The shelter movement has received some financial help from the federal government. The shelter movement has been attacked by the religious right wing on the grounds that shelters are antifamily, and have even been characterized as “rest and recreation centers for tired housewives.” Those who attack shelters want to shore up the husband’s authority in the family, and apparently believe that the right to administer physical punishment is necessary or helpful to the maintenance of that authority. The Southern Baptists have declared that a wife should submit herself to her husband. The Violence Against Women Act, first passed in 1994 with funding of $3.3 billion over five years, provided training grants for police officers and prosecutors designed to improve law enforcement in battering cases, funding for shelter services for battered women, and funds for legal assistance for women. The Act makes it a felony for a batterer who has been put under a restraining order to own a gun. The Act has been opposed by antifeminist groups, such as the Independent Women’s Forum.8

Measuring the Economic Value of the Housewife The housewife’s activities (and the household work of job-holding people as well) result in the production of a great many excellent things: meals on the


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table, clean rooms, clean clothes, children cared for, and so on. We can arrive at measures of the value of the housewife’s services by drawing on the obvious parallels between her activities and similar productive activities in the market economy. However, there is more than one way to arrive at a measurement, and each is problematic. There is no housework task that does not have analogies in the commercial economy. For food preparation and cooking, there are commercially prepared food, as well as restaurant and takeout meals. For housecleaning, there are paid cleaners. For transportation of family members, there are taxis and chauffeurs. For child care, there are paid providers. There are commercial laundries. Such services, when performed for pay, are covered in the U.S. government’s tally of production and income—the GDP accounts. Yet the productive value of the same services by family members is not covered. Why is that? The accounts were first assembled for the United States in the 1930s and 1940s when the major public policy concern was a shortage of paid work for men. Certain productive activities which were not traded for money did get included, such as the food grown by farmers that is not sold, but is eaten on the farm. But housework services by family members, a far larger item, was not among them. If the economists who originated the accounts had been challenged to justify their exclusion of housework, they might have replied that the amount of housework performed didn’t change much from one year to another, so we didn’t need to track it, and that in any case housework lacked relevance to public policy. However, considering some of the nontraded items that room was found for in the accounts, it is likely that sexism— causing disregard and disdain for women’s activities—also played a part. If the value of housework is to become part of the GDP, difficult valuation problems must be faced. No less than three alternative methodologies suggest themselves for valuing housework, and they produce estimates that vary quite widely. One way to estimate the value of the housework performed by a housewife would be to equate it to the salary of a full-time servant. However, a major purpose of putting housework in the GDP is to add dignity to the status of housewives, and such a methodology would hardly achieve that objective. A second method of valuing the housewife’s productive contribution lists the activities of a housewife, and finds the specialized occupation in the money economy that is closest to each one. The list that proponents of this kind of measure get together includes cook, dishwasher, chauffeur, cleaner, child care worker, and so on. The housewife’s time at each activity is then valued at the appropriate specialist’s pay scale. This “specialist-replacement” method is the favorite of those giving expert testimony concerning the value of a housewife. Such testimony is commonly offered in divorce cases where alimony is at issue, or in cases where a widower is suing someone responsible for his wife’s accidental death, claiming reparation for the loss of her economic services. On such occasions, the estimate may be enlarged by including occupations such as

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chef, interior designer, child psychologist, financial planner, and so on. Some of these occupations are mostly male, and some high paying. Housewives work long hours; so this method can easily produce an estimate that is higher than the average male salary, and two to three times as high as the average pay of a woman working at a job full time. A third methodology equates the value of housework to the wage the housewife herself could earn on a full-time job. This “opportunity cost” method gives a widely different value to the housework of the college graduate and that of the high-school dropout, despite the fact that they may be doing identical housework. It has been estimated for Canada that including the value of household labor would raise that country’s GDP by 34 percent for the servant method, by 43 percent for the specialist-replacement method, and by 54 percent for the opportunity cost method. These estimates show that any way it is figured, household labor certainly provides a substantial share of a nation’s production of goods and services, even in a developed economy. In an undeveloped country, that share is far greater. Including household labor has been estimated to raise the GDP of Nepal by 170 percent.9 While we may deplore the slowness of the statisticians who compile the national economic accounts to include in them the value of household labor, the real benefit that would result from such an inclusion should not be exaggerated. The damage done to women because of the exclusion of their activities from the GDP accounts is nothing as compared with the damage done them by their exclusion from job opportunities on account of discrimination, by the failure of governments to force absent fathers to send child support payments that are owed, or by the failure of the judicial system to punish and deter domestic violence. The absence of unpaid household labor in the GDP is not a cause of women’s problems and those problems will not be alleviated when it is corrected. That absence is a mere symptom of women’s continuing low status, from which their really important problems spring.10 Up to this point, I have emphasized the similarities between housework and services available for purchase in the money economy. A word ought, however, to be said about the differences. Oscar Wilde rightly spoke against those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. What is it worth to have one’s own mother cover and kiss one at nap time? On the other hand, what is the true cost of living for and through others, of giving up for a lifetime the possibility of achievements outside the home? Accounting for such benefits and costs by putting price tags on them would not do them justice. However, they need to be in our consciousness as we think about the housewife, and form our opinions about whether we should be happy or sad that hers is a dying breed.

Pay for Housewives The housewife, despite the productive work she does, receives no sum of money she can call her wage. This lack of a wage has struck many people as


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an important injustice, which they say ought to be remedied.11 Perhaps what is most galling is that while the housewife’s duties resemble those of a servant, the financial arrangements she has with her husband arguably resemble those of someone even lower down on the status ladder, namely the slave. Slaves get no sum of money designated as a wage, but do get room, board, and clothing. The impunity with which the husband has been able to physically chastise the wife has reinforced the slave analogy. The slave who ran away might be captured and brought back by law. The housewife was constrained to stay by the poverty of the economic and social alternatives open to her. In some cultures, the bridegroom buys the bride for a considerable sum from her father. The truth of the matter is that both the housewife and the slave do receive recompense for their work. The slave is at the mercy of the master for the amount of the recompense and for his or her very life. By contrast, custom constrains the husband to allow the wife a standard of living similar to his own, and at least in westernized countries, he is most often punished if he kills her.12 Unless the husband has expensive vices (gambling, drinking, and resorting to other women are the classic ones), the wife cannot generally complain that the share he accords her is unfair. It is not the lack of recompense, but the form it takes that creates practical and psychological problems, especially if the spouses do not have an amicable relationship. The housewife’s contributions to the family and the return she gets for making them are both obscured by legal and popular ideas that the spouses are each unilaterally rendering duties to each other rather than making an exchange of economically valuable services. A husband is seen as having a duty to support the wife, with no conditions specified. The wife is seen as having a duty to keep the house, again unconditionally. The connection between the husband’s monetary support and the wife’s housework is further obscured by the fact that the standard of living of the wife in general does not depend on the amount of housework she does. Those wives who do no housework whatsoever, because their husbands’ income allows them to employ servants, enjoy the highest standards of living. The wives of the richest husbands, who have servants to do the housework, get a pure grant of their living expenses from their husband. Their situation is certainly not typical, but seems to have set the pattern for thinking about the economic relations of all husbands and wives. Husbands are thought of as contributing support as a pure grant. If servants cannot be afforded, the wife “has to do the housework.” The fraction of wives exempted from housework has always been small; nowadays it is miniscule. The monetary contributions of the husband are in most situations connected to the performance of the housework by the wife, in the sense that the continuance of the marriage depends on her continuing to do the housework. When the husband works, he helps his employer to produce an output, and is paid by that employer in money. His income is embodied in his paycheck. Presumably, all of that paycheck becomes the family’s income and goes into

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the family budget. It is consumed when the dollars are used for family members’ expenses. The husband’s recompense from his employer gets converted into consumer goods for him, consumer goods for other members of the family, and some that are enjoyed jointly, such as the family living quarters. The housewife’s productive activities also contribute to the family’s ability to consume, and it is not far fetched to call that contribution an addition on her part to the family income. That contribution is as real as the monetary contribution out of the husband’s paycheck. As we have seen, there is more than one way of valuing the housewife’s services, but they are real and substantial nonetheless. The income contributed by the wife is consumed almost as it is being produced. By contrast, the income contributed by the husband may linger a bit in the bank before melting away in consumption. Is the housewife paid? The value of her housework services constitutes an income that she has earned. Granted she immediately and automatically contributes that “income” to the family. But many husbands contribute all of their income to the family too. (Seventy years ago, my mother’s definition of a good husband was one who put his unopened pay envelope on the kitchen table every Friday night.) Husband and wife share the money income he produces and the service income she produces. The recompense of each for their exertions is their shares in both kinds of incomes. The recompense of the housewife includes a share in the goods and services purchased out of the family’s cash budget—clothing, a roof over her head, participation in family vacations, travel, medical care, trips to the movies, and so on. She also benefits from her own services, as when she partakes of a family meal she has cooked, or gets satisfaction from the development of a child she has nurtured. She ends up with a certain total level of consumption—and whether we call that her share or her pay should not matter much. What then do the “pay for housework” advocates complain of? In the usual American household, it is attitudes they are complaining of more than material deprivation. The husband’s money contribution seems more real or important than the wife’s service contribution. His contribution is more visible and seems more concrete. Psychologically, a sum of money is perhaps more easily comprehended than a multitude of actions which constitute housework. The nature of the husband’s contribution renders him more powerful in the family and creates the impression that he supports her with no return, and that she is parasitical. If she too had money to contribute to their joint budget, she would have a higher status, perhaps. If the husband wants to he can keep control of all the money and dole it out to the wife at his pleasure. She may have no fixed sum that is given to her for her own needs or for household expenses. She may be in the humiliating position of having to continually ask for small sums. Informal surveys over the years among my students whose mothers were housewives suggest that about 20 percent of them have been in that situation. The opportunities for petty tyranny in such an arrangement are endless.


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Suppose it became common practice for the husband of a housewife to render up to her some fraction of his cash wage and acknowledge that he was paying her a wage for housework. Each spouse could not go off and spend the money under their control independently. On the contrary, both the husband and the wife would have to put up almost all of that money for food purchases, the rent or the mortgage, car expenses, and so on. Perhaps the wife would feel more proud and freer to buy things for herself or the children, but this is far from clear. Another possible source of a cash wage for housework would be the government. But where would the government get the funds? One possibility would be to put a large special tax on the husbands of housewives. The money collected, with a suitable subtraction for administrative expenses, might be sent by the Internal Revenue Service to the housewives. The housewives’ self-esteem might be enhanced by the receipt of the government checks, but the benefits added to the average family’s income would presumably be equal to the taxes that would be subtracted. Another scheme, one which would make a real financial difference, would be to send government paychecks to housewives out of the ordinary revenue of the government. Presumably, there would have to be a tax increase to finance it. The additional taxes would be paid by housewifemaintaining families, as well as by single people and two-earner couples. However, the latter two groups would receive no benefit from the extra taxes. The net effect would be a transfer of purchasing power from the pockets of single people and two-earner families into the pockets of families that maintained housewives. But single-earner families are already better off in terms of living standards than two-earner couples of identical cash income. Sending the former a check for the wife’s housework, financed in part by taxes of the latter, would be asking the less well off to contribute to the more well off. Such a scheme would also have the effect of encouraging women to become and remain housewives. To sum up this discussion, those who have sought to put pay for housewives on the feminist agenda appear to have made a mistake.

Maternity Leave Most women who enter the housewife occupation do so on the occasion of having a baby. Not all new mothers leave their jobs. Perhaps half of the women currently giving birth to babies leave work for only a very short time, and by the child’s first birthday, about 58 percent are in jobs or are looking for work.13 There has always been some sentiment for allowing long paid maternity leaves for employed women, with the job held open for the woman’s return. Lengths of three months, six months, a year, even several years have been proposed. Such leaves would allow women with jobs to be housewives for considerable periods, and with pay to boot. Since they would be keeping one foot in the labor market at all times, the appearance of dependency

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would be avoided. Women in dead-end, boring, arduous jobs would no doubt welcome such leaves, and others might also. The leaves might be considered as society’s contribution to the raising of children, making the life of the mother easier, and allowing her to devote herself to the child entirely. A policy requiring employers to give and pay for such leaves has important disadvantages for women’s status and work opportunities. If the employer must pay a women’s salary for a long maternity leave, the cost must be recouped. Employers will have a further incentive to keep women out of the high-paying fields. Even if the government pays for the leaves, employers will have more incentive to confine women to jobs in which the duties are an easily learned routine, in which one person can easily be replaced by another. In such jobs, the pay would be lowered to make up for the costs imposed by the maternity leave. More women will take long maternity leaves, and every woman who has a baby will be under social pressure to take the maternity leave, at possible damage to her career. Another disadvantage of paid maternity leaves for women is that they reinforce the idea that child care and the other family service chores, which women do when they stay home, are women’s work. Sweden has made efforts to counter this effect, with little success. Both parents have the right to take paid leave when a baby is born. To encourage fathers to participate in child care, some of the leave has to be given up if the husband does not take any of the couple’s allotment. Even so, perhaps 40 percent of new fathers take no leave, and those fathers who do take leave take much shorter ones than do mothers. In all, only 10 percent of the days of leave are taken by fathers.14 Long paid maternity and child-raising leaves are really another version of “pay for housewives.” The rhetoric in this case emphasizes the welfare of the child rather than the worth of the mother’s services. But in economic terms, the two are the same. In 1993, Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). It required employers with 50 or more workers to allow employees to take unpaid leave of up to 12 weeks during any 12-month period. The leave can be taken because of the employee’s own health problem, or to allow the employee to care for a newborn or a newly adopted child. Leave can also be taken to care for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious health problem. At the end of the leave, the employer is required to take the employee back into the same or an equivalent job. Many workers have not been able to make use of the leave that the FMLA provides because they cannot afford to go without pay. In 2002, the California legislature passed a bill mandating leave for six weeks at 55 percent of the employee’s pay. The program will be financed by a $2.10 monthly deduction from each employee’s pay. The limitation to six weeks and the method of finance will most likely minimize employer discrimination against those deemed likely to take the paid leave, in most cases women.


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The Displaced Homemaker The major problem for the long-term housewife, apart from the possibility that she may not enjoy the duties (including the personal part of the duties) of the housewife job or have aspirations beyond it, is the possibility that the financial flows she gets through the marriage will be terminated or substantially reduced. This might happen through separation or divorce. It might also happen if the husband becomes mentally or physically disabled, becomes an alcoholic or a drug addict or a compulsive gambler, is a failure in his job or profession, becomes permanently unemployed, is sent to prison, or dies before retirement, leaving little provision for her. None of these events reducing or ending her income can be ruled out. In fact, such events do occur in the lives of a substantial number of women. As a result, the housewife’s position is very risky. Divorce and separation are now quite common. After 5 years of marriage, 20 percent of all first marriages will have been disrupted; and after 10 years, 33 percent of couples will be apart. Altogether, 54 percent of marriages currently starting will eventually end in divorce.15 Many of the women involved in divorces remarry, but especially for the homemakers among them, a longer or shorter period of financial stress is the usual case. In 1970, there were about 95 separated or divorced women per 1,000 married women; by the year 2000, their number had risen to 241 per 1,000.16 If a divorce occurs at the start of a marriage, and before a child is born, the wife will most likely not have retired from the labor market. If, however, there are young children, or if the marriage has gone on for a considerable time and the wife has not held a full-time job recently, her economic and social situation can be very difficult indeed. Her standard of living and, of course, that of any children in her custody, inevitably takes a precipitous drop. Those first marriages that end in divorce or separation last eight years on average. About 60 percent of women recently separated or divorced have children under 18 living with them.17 The difference in the economic roles of the wife and the husband in the housewife-maintaining family may be considered by the parties to be optimal while the marriage remains intact. When the marriage breaks apart, that difference becomes a source of deprivation to the wife. The husband leaves and takes with him his male-sized income-earning capacity, expanded, as we have seen, by sex discrimination operating in his favor. His income-earning capacity may also have been enhanced by the housewife’s activities. With all family care duties devolved on the housewife, the husband was free to devote to his job as much of his time as he chose, and could move around geographically whenever that would increase his earning power. The man who divorces a housewife will have little trouble in promptly replacing the wife’s homemaking services, either by purchasing substitutes or by remarrying. The former housewife, on the other hand, will have to move into the labor market, where she will find that her lack of recent

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experience, together with the limited nature of the jobs open to women, will most likely condemn her to a standard of living far below the one she enjoyed while married. A wife takes on the housewife role, and allows herself to become unfit for better-paid work under an implicit promise that she will never need to be financially independent. A divorce against the wishes of the wife constitutes a violation of that promise, and she ought to receive a sizeable indemnity for her foregone opportunities. Even if she is unhappy and wishes on her own to leave the marriage, she will suffer severely unless indemnified for her loss of earning power over the course of the marriage. The housewife’s situation was been considerably worsened by the advent in the 1960s of no-fault divorce in most states. Under the previous system, a husband could not divorce his wife in most states unless he could prove that she had committed adultery. In the absence of such evidence, his only way of gaining his freedom was to reveal or manufacture evidence of adultery on his part and get her to sue him for divorce on that ground. In order to get her agreement to do that, he had to offer her a generous financial settlement. That somewhat redressed the imbalance of financial power between them.18 Under no-fault divorce, either party can ask for and get a divorce essentially by expressing an unwillingness to continue in the marriage. This has robbed the housewife of any bargaining power to get the husband to agree to any sizeable indemnity. The child support awards which are common in divorce cases are intended only to defray a share of the costs of sustaining a child, not to sustain the living expenses of the ex-wife. Judges are unlikely to provide former housewives with any long-term continuing support for themselves from their former husbands unless the latter are very affluent.19 The rationale these judges have adopted is that we have entered an era where women have chosen independence. A judge applying such an idea to a housewife, who has specifically given up financial independence to benefit her husband and children, is punishing her for what he sees as the ideological sins of feminists. The most difficult situation is faced by women who have played the housewife role most or all of their adult lives, only to be divorced by their husbands in their late forties or their fifties. Most, especially those with high-earning husbands, did so without serious thought of the alternatives. When the divorce comes so late in life, it usually too late for such women to start on serious careers of their own, even if they had the resources, the will, and the self-confidence. They find that many of the married people they considered good friends are not willing to continue as friends. Lonely, neglected, their standard of living drastically reduced, robbed of their previous status and of almost everything that made life worth living, they eke out a miserable existence in a marginal job.20 Isabel Sawhill has described what is in essence the betrayal of older divorced women: “One view is that marriage is a partnership with a lifelong commitment to another individual and a complete sharing of economic


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costs and rewards. Implicit in the lifelong-partnership view is the idea that the risk of divorce is small and that alimony provides a kind of insurance against this risk . . . A second view of marriage is that it is a limited partnership in which husbands share their incomes with their wives, but only for as long as their marriage is intact . . . The real problem arises when women agree to marry and be homemakers under the terms of the lifelong-partnership model and later discover that the limited-partnership model is in effect.”21 Sawhill has suggested that where there are children, divorced housewives and those children who live with them should continue to share the ex-husband’s income. The income of the ex-couple should be divided so that the standard of living in the two households would be about equal. Where there are no children, or where they have grown up, Sawhill believes that housewives should receive from their ex-husbands a monthly alimony payment which would recompense them for the loss of their earning power during the marriage. The alimony payment would be the difference between the ex-wife’s current earnings and an estimate of the earnings she would have had currently had she never left the labor force. The problems faced by the displaced homemaker affect the life of the homemaker whose marriage is intact. She and her husband both know that if he were to decide on a divorce, her economic and social situation would seriously deteriorate. This realization gives the husband power to get his way in almost any disagreement which arises between them. If he is of a mind to use that power in a harsh and dictatorial way, the housewife’s situation can be made very difficult.

Tax Policy and the Housewife We turn now to the treatment of housewives and job-holding wives in matters of taxation. Table 9.1 gives examples of the federal income taxes single and married Americans have to pay. In 2002, assuming both kept their jobs, Benedict and Beatrice would have had to pay $1,524 more tax as a married couple than the two of them together would have owed as single people. In 2003, the tax schedules were fixed so that this “marriage penalty” was abolished. The tax system has always given especially generous treatment to families that maintain housewives. Current tax law reduces a man’s taxes when he marries a wife who stays at home. After the marriage, if Beatrice stays home, the tax on Benedict’s wage drops from $7,366 to $4,464, a handsome “housewife bonus” of $2,902. In our example, the tax difference after marriage between Beatrice in a job and Beatrice at home is $7,137. Most couples view the husband’s employment as beyond question, but view the wife’s employment as something on which a decision might be made either way. Thus they would tend to view the $7,137, not as a tax on both of their salaries, but as the tax on the $37,500 that she would be earning. By that way of thinking, her salary carries a 19 percent

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The Economic Emergence of Women Table 9.1 Example of the effect of marriage on federal taxes paid Income Benedict, single Beatrice, single Beatrice and Benedict, married, both hold jobs Beatrice and Benedict, married, only he holds a job Beatrice as single mother of one child

Federal income tax

$50,000 $37,500 $87,500

$7,366 $4,241 $11,601

$50,000

$4,464

$37,500

$2,564

Notes: Tax Consequences of Various Actions: 1. Housewife bonus ⫽ $2,902 (The tax saving for a man who marries a nonearner: 7,366 ⫺ 4,464.) 2. Labor force entry tax ⫽ $7,137 (Additional tax paid by the couple when the housewife enters the labor force: 11,601 ⫺ 4,464.) Source: Based on the tax code in effect for the year 2003.

average tax rate. This rate is considerably higher than the 11 percent average rate she paid as a single woman on the same salary. Moreover, “her tax” is far higher than “his tax,” even though he earns more. When Beatrice and Benedict married, they started to pay taxes based on the sum of their two incomes.22 In order to avoid switching dual-earner couples into radically higher tax brackets, a separate, lower schedule of taxation for married people was put into effect. But the separate and lower tax schedule for married people, intended to prevent a marriage penalty on dual-earner couples, has the effect of creating the housewife bonus. One obvious solution to the heavy tax on employment for wives would be to allow married people to file as individuals and pay the same taxes they would pay if they were single. On balance, there is a lot to be said for requiring people to file on the basis of their own incomes, without regard to the income of other family members, and abolishing special tax rates for married people. This is the way taxes are structured in Sweden. If there were no longer different tax rates for married couples, married single-earner couples would have to pay considerably more tax than they currently do. The present tax law, which is so generous to the one-earner married couple, is less generous to the one-earner family consisting of a single nevermarried or divorced parent and children. A single parent is not allowed to compute her taxes using the lower tax rates that married people pay. She pays at a special rate for “head of household,” which is less advantageous, although lower than that paid by singles. A radical proposal by Rolande Cuvillier would go further than getting rid of the tax break currently enjoyed by the one-earner couple.23 Cuvillier would make the one-earner couple pay extra taxes—they would be required to pay tax on the value of the services performed by the housewife. Having a housewife increases the family’s real income. Cuvillier simply carries the idea of taxation to its logical conclusion, and says the family should be


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taxed on that part of its real income consisting in housewife-performed services. Moreover, says Cuvillier, the housewife is part of the community, and public services are delivered to her at public expense. She, or her husband on her behalf, should pay her share of this public expense. Presumably, only the extra services delivered by the housewife beyond those performed by two-earner couples would be taxed. In computing taxable income, an amount equal to some fraction of a servant’s wage might be added to the cash income of couples maintaining a housewife.

Social Security and the Housewife The Social Security system, on which Americans depend for income in old age, was established in the 1930s. Each worker’s earnings are recorded, and a person’s benefits depend on that record. The rhetoric used to convince a basically conservative population that the system was not “socialistic” suggested that the benefits would be drawn from a fund that had been built up out of the worker’s own “contributions” and of contributions by the employer on the worker’s behalf. In reality, the system is set up so that current retirees are paid, not out of money previously put aside for them, but out of a highly regressive tax on earnings paid by those currently working.24 At the time Social Security was set up and the principles of the benefit formula were established, most women spent their married years out of the labor force. If they were to receive Social Security benefits, they would have to do so in their capacity of wives or widows of male workers. The solution adopted was to award to each retired couple a “spouse benefit” equal to 50 percent of the husband’s benefit. Wives who had earnings in their own right can either elect to take benefits based on those earnings or the spouse benefit, but not both. In a system constructed in this way, benefits are not proportional to contributions. A married man gets more than a single man who has made the same contributions. Many women who have paid Social Security taxes for decades end up accepting the spouse benefit, which they could have received had they never held a job and never paid any Social Security taxes. In a sense, these women receive nothing for their contributions.25 Table 9.2 shows an example of the results of this kind of arrangement. In the first case shown, the one-earner couple (Hamlet and Ophelia) can retire on a monthly benefit of $1,584, which includes the $1,056 the husband would have been entitled to as a retired single man, plus the 50 percent spouse benefit. The second couple (Romeo and Juliet) had two people in the labor force at low wages, with half of the income earned by the wife and half by the husband. They have a choice of taking the benefits each of them was entitled to on the basis of their own earnings, or taking one benefit based on earnings plus the 50 percent spouse benefit. They would choose the former, giving them a monthly benefit of $1,398. The combined earnings of the first couple are equal to those of the second couple, and the two couples would have paid identical Social Security taxes.

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The Economic Emergence of Women Table 9.2 Example of Social Security benefits for a one-earner and a twoearner couple in the year 2005 Monthly retirement benefit2 Annual wage1

Married couple

Hamlet Ophelia Total

$38,000 0 $38,000

$1,056 528 $1,584

$1,056

$528

Romeo Juliet Total

$19,000 19,000 $38,000

$699 699 $1,398

$699

$699

Widow

Divorced spouse3

Notes: 1 Annual wage prior to retirement at 65. 2 Based on Social Security Administration’s “Quick Calculator,” which assigns a wage for each year in work history, based on stated wage at end of career. 3 To be eligible for any benefits based on a man’s record, a divorced wife must have been married to him for 10 years. If the former husband is still living and retired, the divorced wife of retirement age can get a retirement benefit equal to 50% of his benefit, regardless of any benefit to any current spouse he may have. If the ex-husband is dead, the divorced spouse is treated as a widow would be.

Moreover, the second couple would have put in more work effort, and led a less comfortable life than the first, who would have had the services of a housewife. Nevertheless the one-earner couple would be awarded a benefit that was 13 percent higher than that awarded the two-earner couple. If, as is most likely, the two wives in our example become widowed, they will get very different benefits. Ophelia, who had never contributed to the Social Security system, would get a widow’s benefit of $1,056. Juliet would get much less, only $699, despite a lifetime of contributions. These examples show that the Social Security system, like the income tax system, is more generous to families with housewives than to the families of employed women. This is certainly the case if we restrict our attention to benefits going to retired married couples and to widows. But the system is generous only to those housewives who manage to stay married to their husbands. It is considerably less generous to those housewives who become divorced. Divorced women who have been married for at least 10 years qualify for benefits based on the ex-husband’s earnings. However while the ex-husband is alive, a divorced wife receives no benefit until he reaches retirement age, and then is entitled only to a payment equal to the spouse benefit. Thus if Hamlet divorced Ophelia, he and a new wife would retire with a benefit of $1,584 a month, but Ophelia would be reduced to living on $528, considerably below the poverty line. If Hamlet died, Ophelia’s benefit would rise to $1,056, the same amount as the second wife would receive. There have been suggestions that the Social Security system should add credit to the accounts of housewives for those years they spend out of the labor force taking care of children. Under another suggested scheme, the


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separate Social Security accounts of a husband and a wife would each be credited with one-half of the couple’s total earnings. When wives received benefits under such a system, the benefits would be based on the credits in the woman’s own account, rather than taking the form of an add-on to her husband’s benefit. The idea seems to have been to give housewives more dignity; their work would be recognized as worthy of social credit, and they would appear to be less dependent.26 As the number of women spending a major part of their lives as housewives has dwindled, such schemes seem less urgent and they have received less discussion. Current attention is directed to the high rate of poverty among very old women, whose Social Security benefits are based on their own low earnings or those of low-earning men of a generation back. It has been suggested that the widow’s benefit be increased from 100 percent of the husband’s benefit to 112.5 percent. This would, of course, increase the advantage the system gives the nonworking spouses of high-earning men as compared with single people or lower-wage dual-earner couples. A better solution would be to increase the minimum benefit. The retirement of the baby boom generation and the population’s increasing life expectancy will require reductions in Social Security benefits, increases in taxes, or both, to balance the inflow and outflow of funds to the system. Some (although by no means all) predictions suggest that around the year 2050, the revenues and assets of the Social Security system will not be sufficient to maintain benefit levels under the current formula for computing them. Such predictions have been used to create public apprehension that the system is in danger of collapse by those who would like to see the nation’s retirement system converted to one based on prepaid individually owned accounts invested in stocks and bonds. In actuality, relatively minor adjustments in taxes and benefits through the regular legislative process would surely occur to prevent such a catastrophe.27 The bursting of the stock price bubble of the 1990s reduced, at least for a time, the attractiveness to the public of privatization. However those financial institutions that would profit from fees levied on the private accounts have continued to lobby for it and make contributions to politicians who favor it. Women on average have fewer extra assets and less income from sources other than Social Security to cushion them in the case of the losses they might incur under privatization. So the increase in risk which privatization would bring would be likely to affect women adversely.

Feminist Thinking about the Full-Time Homemaker The role of the housewife has a major place in feminist thought. Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, which was influential in initiating the current wave of feminism in the United States, has as its central theme the disadvantages to women from assuming the housewife role.28 All feminists believe that women should not be forced into assuming it, and that alternative choices should be made available.

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There is a second strand of feminist thinking concerning housewives, which derives from the solidarity feminists feel with all women, housewives included. This solidarity expresses itself in a concern to alleviate injuries (physical, psychological, and financial) inflicted on housewives by their husbands and by the institutions of society. It also leads feminists to join in efforts to shore up the dignity of the housewife. There is still a third strand of thought about homemakers. Some people who consider themselves feminists think it would be desirable for even larger numbers of people to assume the stay-at-home housekeeper role than now do so. They see it as indispensable for the proper raising of children. They would prefer it if members of both sexes were candidates for the role, or if mothers and father could alternate. However, whether that were possible or not, they favor public policies making it financially easier for families to support a full-time homemaker. They tend to favor multi-year maternity leaves with pay. I would argue that too much of the attention of feminists has gone toward trying to help the housewife. Rolande Cuvillier, quoted earlier in connection with taxation, makes an important point when she argues that the net effect of many pro-housewife measures is not to help women at all. Rather, such measures help men to retain someone dedicated to serving them in the home, at the expense of the rest of society and the women themselves. Thus policy measures such as tax breaks for housewife-maintaining families, which encourage women to become or remain housewives, make the equality of the sexes more remote. The scarce resources of the feminist movement should not be devoted to pushing measures that have this effect. They divert support and attention away from reforms which would help the employed woman, the single mother, and the battered housewife. The disadvantages to playing the role of full-time homemaker are so great that it would prove impossible to enlist significant numbers of men to serve in it, even if there were no social penalty to be paid by a man for assuming what society types as a feminine role. If the occupation continues to exist, it will continue to be part of the female domain, and hence inherently disadvantaged. Since this is the case, equality of the sexes and women’s welfare would be better served if younger women were to avoid entering the role even temporarily and if the “option” to assume the role were to disappear. Policies that reward families for having housewives, or encourage women to assume the housewife role do harm to women, and should be avoided. After we have passed through a phase where unpaid family care services have been largely replaced by purchased substitutes, and after equality of opportunity has been established in the workplace, it will be time to consider reviving the occupation of full-time homemaker. Then we can see if it can become an honorable and safe occupation for both mothers and fathers.

10 Lone Parents and their Poverty

In most of the human societies we know about, both past and present, the male parent has been an important personage in the life of his children. Typically, he has lived with them and made substantial contributions toward the expense of raising them. Over the last half-century, we have been witnessing what appears to be a loosening of the economic and social bonds between men and their children. In the United States almost 20 million children—approaching 1 in 4 children—are being raised by mothers who do not have a husband living with them. Some of these husbandless mothers have another adult (who may or may not be the father of one or more of the children, and who may or may not be a sexual partner) as part of their household, but a large majority does not. A majority of the children living apart from their fathers in the United States get little or no economic contribution from them. The estrangement of so many men from their children results from a breakdown in the social arrangements—marriage and the extended family—which served in the past to funnel economic resources from male adults to children. The result of this breakdown is inadequate provision for an increasingly large proportion of children. Many “economically fatherless” children, together with their mothers, live in a state of extreme deprivation. Today in the United States, families consisting of these currently single mothers and their children constitute an increasing share of all poor families. Women who rear children without the financial help of a man face a difficult task in an unfriendly economic environment. For some, the best they can do is to get along for a while on a below-poverty-level welfare grant while living in a decrepit apartment in a dangerous neighborhood. Others wring what they can out of a labor market in which many of the jobs that pay a “family wage,” particularly those that do not require a college education, continue to be reserved for men. Poverty is epidemic among single mothers and their children. But even those with cash income above the official poverty line are unlikely to be comfortably off. In our society, the two-earner couple now sets the standard of emulation. A family with only a

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man’s paycheck is likely to feel financially pinched. A family with only a woman’s earnings is going to be pinched much harder. A shortage of money is not the single mother’s only problem, however. She also has an acute and painful shortage of time. A single parent must take on all of the time-consuming tasks that can be shared between parents in a two-parent family—shopping, errands, paying bills, dealing with school affairs, keeping medical appointments, and so on. Single parenthood is also an acutely lonely state. The single mother lacks another adult’s company to share both the worries and the joys of parenthood. Single parenthood presents a difficult problem for society at large. Because the traditional system of providing for children has eroded, leaving an increasing share of children out in the cold, new means of making adequate provision for these children have to be set up. The first stab at such a policy—encouraging mothers who lack husbands to stay home full time with their children on a below-poverty-level stipend called “welfare”—has been declared a failure. But the “welfare reform,” which removed the entitlement to the stipend, leaves many single mothers and their children dependent on earnings that are insufficient to buy child care and provide a decent level of consumption. Changing American policies and institutions so that children such as these may have a mainstream living standard is one of the most important tasks of public policy facing us today. It will involve the provision by government of child care, medical insurance, and other services, a radically reformed system of awarding and enforcing child support payments, and improved access for single mothers to jobs that pay a “family wage.”

The Growth of the Problem In 1960, 8 percent of American children were living with a mother without a husband. By 1980, 18 percent of all children were in this situation, and by 2002, the incidence had grown further to 23 percent. An increasing proportion of fathers are absent from the homes of their children in all population groups, but this is most advanced among blacks. Of all black children in 2003, 48 percent were living with single mothers. Among white nonHispanics, 16 percent of children were living with single mothers.1 The 12.6 million children living with husbandless mothers account for only a portion of the youngsters living apart from their biological father. About a quarter of the mothers of children with absent fathers are married to other men. In all, about 30 percent of all children in the United States are currently living apart from their biological fathers.2 The events that create economically fatherless children—out-of-wedlock births, divorces, separations—all have increased in frequency over the last half-century. Births to unmarried women were 4 percent of all births in 1970, 23 percent in 1986, and 34 percent in 2002. The proportion of births to unmarried women differs considerably by race: 29 percent for whites and 66 percent for blacks. Black women have now almost the same fertility rates

Lone Parents and their Poverty

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as white women, but more of their children are born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, who can be of any race, 44 percent of births were out of wedlock in 2002.3 Annual divorce rates grew from 3.9 per 1,000 married women in 1950 to 8.8 in 1980, but have since fallen, and were 7.4 in 2001. However, the proportion of divorced women in the female population has continued to rise, because of the reduction in remarriage. In 1950, there were 60 divorced women for each 1,000 married women, by 1980 there were 119, and by 2002 there were 204.4 In 1960, only 4 percent of single mothers had never been married. The rest were divorced, separated, or widowed. By 2000, 43 percent had never been married. Death of a spouse has been dropping as a cause of single parenthood; in 2000, it accounted for only 4 percent of single mothers.5

The Difficulties of Single Parenthood The most eloquent testimony to the economic difficulties of single mothers are the government’s figures concerning the incidence of poverty among them. In 2003, among single mothers maintaining their own households, 36 percent had income below the government’s official poverty line. Among those with a child in the household under six years, the poverty rate was 48 percent. There is a considerable disparity in poverty rates by race. Of white people in such families, 28 percent were poor, while 45 percent were poor in black families. The growth of real wages for women has made it economically feasible for some mothers and their children to exist apart from the children’s father and yet live at a standard above the poverty level. However many cannot achieve that standard. In 1983, two-thirds of single mothers were in the labor force, but 22 percent of those did not earn enough to keep their families above the official poverty line.6 In 2003, after the welfare reform of 1996, 73 percent of single mothers were in the labor force, but the proportion of working single mothers in poverty had risen to 31 percent. The official poverty-line income allows for an extremely low standard of living. The “adequate diet” it provides for is based on the assumption that the mother will prepare all of the food from raw ingredients at home, and the budget allows for no food purchased from restaurants or fast-food establishments. Research found that those who spent on food the amount called for by the minimal food budget suffered malnutrition. Even if the single mother earns a wage that puts her above the official poverty level, she and her children are likely to live at a standard far below that enjoyed by households including an adult man. The 2002 income of a single mother in the labor force, who may need to lay out money to buy child care, was on average 46 percent of that of a single-earner married couple with children, who have no need to buy child care. On average, single mothers’ income is 32 percent of that of two-earner couples, who now constitute a majority of households with children, and whose style of life sets the standard

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for the mainstream. Most single mothers and their children are firmly fixed at the low end of the income distribution, and will lack the ability to buy goods and services most other families take for granted. Single parents have demands on their time which are difficult to meet. If a single parent works full time, the time remaining apart from work is not really sufficient to accomplish the housekeeping and personal service chores parents have to do. As Clair Brown describes it, they are “time-poor.”7 Employed single parents have relatively little rest and leisure, and have few opportunities of relief from the rigors of the job, housekeeping, and child care. Even where the single mother earns a wage that is at or above the average for male workers, it is difficult for her to exchange money for services that would save her own time, and allow her more rest or more attention to her job. There are certain tasks the parent cannot delegate, such as managing the household and taking a child to visit the doctor. For the employed single parent, a child’s periodic minor illnesses can turn an already difficult life into a nightmare; loss of pay and loss of job may be threatened at each such occasion. The statistics on poverty among single mothers tend to underestimate the extent of the problem. The methodology the U.S. government uses to set the officially designated poverty line—the income the government says a family requires if it is to be considered nonpoor—is badly flawed. The cost of a minimal market basket of foods is determined, and it is assumed that a sum just twice the cost of that food is enough to take care of all nonfood expenditures at a decent level. The official poverty lines make no allowance for health care or child care. Back in the 1960s, when the official poverty lines were set up, neither married nor unmarried mothers were expected to need to purchase child care—it was assumed they would stay home with their children. So the extra expenses of a job-holding mother—out-of-pocket child care fees and the cost of transportation to work—are ignored. The medical needs of lowincome families were assumed to be met by the pro bono work of physicians and hospitals. In setting the official poverty line, taxes are ignored. The Earned Income Tax Credit, and near-cash benefits, such as food stamps or housing vouchers, are also ignored. Analysts on the right assumed on account of this that the government was overestimating the number of poor. However, a study by Trudi J. Renwick and the author found that proper accounting for all of these issues would raise the number of single mothers counted as poor by more than 20 percent.8 Currently, more single mothers are in the workforce, and the undercount of the poor among them by the official method is worse still. A revision of the way the poverty line is set so as to include access to medical, mental health, and dental care as well as child care and adequate housing would help to advance the cause of a decent policy toward lone mothers. It would reveal how many of them are suffering deprivation, and would also enable us to gauge the effect of any proposed increase in the services that the government might provide.


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Marriage and Male Provision for Children The traditional two-parent method of providing goods and services for the young calls on the child’s biological mother to donate services to the child and to the father, and for the child’s presumed biological father to donate money to buy sizeable quantities of goods for the use of the child and its caregiver— mother. The father is traditionally exempt from the direct donation of services to the mother or children. It is commonly taken for granted that this traditional method is the “natural” way of providing goods and services for human young. The two-parent method of child support probably evolved millennia ago from the single-parent method of our primate ancestors. We seem to be in the process of change back to the single-parent method. Both in the past and in the present, women have benefited from an alliance with a male who would make economic contributions to her and their children. Obviously, there are advantages that such arrangements provide to males. When we look at the customs that grew up regulating these male–female alliances, the advantages on the male side of the ledger loom very large in most cultures. Men, at least in Western cultures, have not controlled freeborn women in the way they controlled property, livestock, or slaves. But they have been able to restrict them to subservience, confinement, and low status. Those who, in Friedrich Engels’ famous phrase, speak of a “world historic defeat for the female sex,”9 do not think in terms of an alliance serving the needs of both sexes, but in terms of a war of the sexes in which males subjugated females and reduced them to a status not far above that of slaves. Whether we consider traditional marriage as an alliance for mutual advantage between a man and a woman, or as a system under which women are drafted into service for sexual and breeding purposes and as household drudges, marriage does accommodate at least some of the important interests of both sexes. Under the institution of marriage, each child would in normal circumstances be attached to an adult male who would make contributions over an extended period to the child’s economic support. Many of the institutions and restrictions of traditional society have the effect of reducing the number of children who are economically “fatherless,” that is, who are not receiving support from a man. The extended family, the institution of indissoluble marriage, a taboo on sex for unmarried women, and disgrace and deprivation for women bearing children out of wedlock and for the “illegitimate” children themselves all served the purpose of insuring male contributions to most children, and reducing the number of children lacking such contributions. Obviously, marriage is the key institution in this system. Feminist criticism of marriage understandably has focused on the features most disadvantageous and demeaning to women in traditional marriage: the traffic in women between fathers and bridegrooms, the subordination and immurement of the wife within the home, and the double standard with regard to sexual fidelity. However, granting these disadvantages, it is still possible to

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see women and children as historically having, on balance, been beneficiaries of stable marriage. Women have perforce had to tolerate those features of marriage which have been disadvantageous to them as the price they have had to pay for the benefits. That price has in turn been affected by a woman’s alternatives to staying with her present spouse—getting another husband or getting a job. A taboo on premarital sex for women was an important part of the social system minimizing the number of fatherless children. Obviously the observance of the taboo kept a woman from having children before obtaining the formalized pledge of a man’s support. Its observance also restricted the supply of sex partners available to a man, thus encouraging him to contract a marriage which would supply economic support to a woman and her children. Where a child was conceived outside of wedlock, vigorous and sometimes violent efforts were made to arrange the marriage of the mother and the father before the birth. Where a “shotgun wedding” could not be effected, the disgrace to the woman was shared by her parents and siblings, as well as by the child. In many societies, a niggardly provision was made by church or state for the support out of public funds of children born out of wedlock for whom relatives could not be found or induced to care. The societal institutions built to keep down the number of children without the economic support of a male included structures to deal with children “left over” at the end of the marriage relationship. The extended family, which included adult male relatives of the couple, took up the economic burden of the widow and her children. If the extended family structure is strong, the system which minimizes fatherless children may even be consistent with easy divorce. In Moslem countries, a husband may have a divorce for the asking; he may keep the children and send the woman back to her father or brothers. However, in the Christian West, until recently lifelong marriage has been the norm, with high barriers to divorce enforced by civil and religious authorities. Nothing can be more obvious than that the traditional institutions and mores, which have kept the preponderance of children under the economic support of a male, are on the decline. The factors responsible for that decline include a reduced taboo on nonmarital sex for women and better opportunities for them in the labor market. A possible third factor in the decline of traditional institutions is the support for single mothers and their children that has until recently been available from the government.

Birth Control and the Decline of Traditional Institutions One vital element in the decline of traditional institutions has been the development of more reliable and more easily used contraceptive devices, and increased access to them and to safe and legal abortion. Contraception and abortion must surely have been important in the genesis of the “sexual


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revolution”—another name for the atrophy of the taboo against sex for women outside of marriage. The ready availability and respectability of measures for the prevention of conception (and more recently, the right to choose to end an unwanted pregnancy) removes or at least reduces the chance that a woman will have to bear an extramarital child unwillingly as the result of any single act of sexual congress. Women’s participation in sex outside of marriage reduces the incentive for men to marry or to remain married. The reduction in the number of men who wish to marry has convinced some women that their only chance of achieving motherhood may be to have a child outside of wedlock. Such a belief leads in some cases to a decision to carry an extramarital pregnancy (perhaps due to contraceptive failure or artificial insemination) to term. Other out-of-wedlock babies are born to lesbian women, and to women who become pregnant by men whom they do not consider suitable as husbands. Black women in particular have a very low chance of being able to bring up a baby within a stable marriage, partly due to the relatively low proportion of black men who have jobs and the high proportion who are in prison, or who are ex-convicts with poor job prospects. In July 2003, only 63 percent of the black male population above 20 was employed. The comparable figure for white males was 74 percent. The availability of measures to prevent the birth of unwanted children probably reduces somewhat the numbers of children born to those married people for whom divorce is foreshadowed by the unhappiness or dissatisfaction of one or both partners. Such children are at high risk of lacking economic support from their fathers. While prevention of these births lowers the number of children per divorced mother, the number of divorces is probably somewhat increased thereby. The sexual revolution has brought greatly increased sexual activity to teenagers, but a high proportion of those sexually active don’t use contraceptives. Moreover many of the sexual partners of these teenage females are teenage males, who are not in a good position to give economic support to their children even if they were inclined to do so.

Mothers’ Rising Potential Earnings The rise in wages for women that goes on in a progressive economy is the second important factor conducive to the threatened reversion to the oneparent support system. This rise in the real reward for an hour’s labor, going on more or less steadily since the industrial revolution, has provided an increasing incentive for women’s participation in paid work. It progressively raises the standard of living of a woman who supports herself and a child independent of a man. If this process continues, real wages of both men and women will continue to rise, and as time passes it will become easier for single parents to live at any particular standard of comfort.10 At present, very few single mothers are capable, given their present labor market opportunities, of achieving affluence or even solid comfort for themselves and their

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children. Nevertheless, a life at a standard above the poverty line is currently possible for a substantial fraction of single mothers, if they work full time. In 2003, a single mother with one child below six had to earn $19,367 in pretax income to pay for a child care center (about $5,760), and to have enough money left over to maintain a standard of living above the governmentdesignated poverty line. Of single mothers, 57 percent earned that much or more. A single mother with two children needing day care would have required about $30,030. About 37 percent of such mothers earned that much or more.11 Each marriage or relationship has disadvantages for each party, and each party has alternatives to remaining in the relationship. The willingness of a woman to tolerate whatever disadvantages a marriage involves is conditioned by her economic alternatives, and the kind of life she and her children could have outside of the marriage. The more a woman can hope for in the way of earnings, the more likely she is to leave a husband with whom she is unhappy. The data on husbands’ violence toward their wives certainly suggest that a considerable number of wives have ample cause for unhappiness. As the possibilities of economic independence for women continue to increase and the standard at which they can expect to live improves, we can expect that more of those women who suffer spousal violence, as well as more of those with less dramatic grievances will elect to rupture their relationships. Better economic prospects for mothers outside of marriage affect the behavior of husbands as well as wives. Knowing that their wives can support both themselves and the children reduces the guilt a husband feels when he leaves or takes the initiative to break up his marriage and fails to contribute to the subsequent support of his children. The probability that the ex-wife can eke out a living without his help also reduces the shame felt by a man who acts in this way. Conservative women, such as Phyllis Schlafly, have urged wives to spurn the opportunities to participate in the labor market and have deplored any governmental programs designed to improve the economic prospects of women outside of marriage. They want to keep men’s noses to the grindstone of family responsibilities, and believe that this is furthered by the undivided devotion of the wife to her husband’s comforts and orders, and by the lack of any alternative for her. In this view, anything tending to reduce the fidelity of men to the task of supporting their wives and children is in the long run against the true interests of women.12 There is a great deal of nostalgia for the time when the traditional family served as a stable locus of loving comfort for both adults and children. Those who feel this way regret the improvement in wives’ economic alternatives to staying home and staying married.13 They ignore the plight of many a wife in a traditional marriage, passing her life under the orders of an irritable tyrant. Some men who regret the passing of the traditional family are really mourning the passing of the historic privileges of the male sex.


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The husband of a woman capable of financial independence at a fair standard of living must, if he wants to keep her, earn by his behavior her desire to continue in the relationship, just as she must earn his. It is entirely possible that there are more happy marriages today rather than fewer, as men are less tempted to tyrannical behavior. There are men and women who believe in equality but would like to find some way to reduce for women the attraction of opportunities outside the family. They believe a child needs a full-time mother. It is up to people who think this way to show us a new kind of partnership between mothers and fathers, with built-in guarantees of long-term sharing of financial burdens and long-term commitment to maintaining the relationship. Up to now, they have not done so.

Child Support Payments from Absent Fathers If males are to bear a fair share in the costs of reproduction, fathers who do not live with their children should help to support them. Currently, a majority of single mothers do not receive regular, substantial payments from the fathers of their children. A majority of such fathers make no child support payments whatsoever. The payments that are made are likely to be small and irregular. As Irwin Garfinkel, an expert on single-parent poverty, puts it, we need a system “designed to assure that all who parent children share their income with them.”14 In many cases, the legal obligation to make child support payments arises out of a divorce. The divorcing parents may negotiate an agreement that calls for a certain level of child support payments, or the judge in the divorce proceedings may set the level of the child support award. If a man’s biological paternity is established, an award of child support can also be made for a child born out of wedlock. The nature of father’s relationship to the mother is not relevant. Whether the child results from a “one-night stand” or from a marriage lasting many years, the obligation of the father is the same under the law.15 However, in practice, support orders arising out of a divorce are more likely to result in regular payments than orders issued on behalf of children born outside of marriage. The weak enforcement by state governments of child support obligations is a long-standing problem. Repeated efforts have been made in the last quarter century by the federal government to improve the performance of the state agencies, motivated in part by irritation that the government was taking the place of fathers in bearing the expense of supporting millions of children. Federal law now calls for employers to report all new hires to a government-maintained directory, to withhold funds from an absent parent’s paycheck, and send the money to the state child support agency. The state then either passes it on to the custodial parent, or, if the family is getting welfare payments, keeps the child support payment and uses the funds to reimburse the state. The state child support enforcement agencies now help custodial parents to establish paternity and get a support order.

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There are now guidelines on the size of awards, which prevents judges from ordering trivial amounts, as some of them were wont to do. Licenses to drive and to practice an occupation can be taken away from absent parents who fail to make required payments. Willfully delinquent parents can be jailed. Despite these measures, the rate of progress has been painfully slow. (See table 10.1.) In 1983, 65 percent of custodial mothers received no support; by 2002, the percentage receiving no support had come down only to 59 percent. The percent of custodial mothers owed payments and receiving all of the payments to which they were entitled hardly rose at all—from 23 percent in 1983 to 25 percent in 2002.16 Some fathers are too poor to pay, but some of those who could pay work “off the books” in the underground economy, and evade paying. Elaine Sorensen has estimated that in the year 1996, noncustodial fathers could have paid $34 billion more than they actually did.17 More rigorous enforcement of child support obligations of fathers would make it more financially difficult for men to practice “serial polygamy”— engaging in a series of divorces and remarriages. It would also create a greater interest on the part of men in preventing births of children they have no interest in supporting financially. Now a man can have the enjoyment of sex, and whatever satisfaction might come from having offspring, and have a good chance of leaving any financial responsibilities to the mother and to the community at large. If one night’s contraceptive failure could bring in its wake a substantial probability of facing 18 years of heavy financial obligations, men’s interest in contraceptive methods which they themselves use and control should increase. If the extraction and delivery of child support payments are made more routine, the relations that separated fathers have with their children will undoubtedly be affected in many ways. As things are now, the financial Table 10.1 Custodial mothers’ child support awards and payments received, 1975–2002 Percent of all custodial mothers who:

Year 1975 1983 1991 1994** 1998 2002

Number of custodial mothers

Received no child support

4,922 8,690 9,918 11,505 11,872 11,291

74.7 65.1 62.4 60.9 59.6 58.9

Had award

Received some or all payments

Received all payments owed

* 46.0 49.2 58.0 59.6 63.0

25.3 34.9 37.6 39.1 40.4 41.1

* 23.2 25.7 18.9 24.8 25.0

* data not available. ** questions changed; prior data not fully comparable. Sources: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P23–84, P23–141, P60–187, P60–225.


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problems are intertwined with the emotional problems in a way that complicates both. Many fathers probably experience guilt on account of their failure to keep up payments, and lose or evade contact with their children as a result. Children may become embittered because of their father’s failure to send payments, and custodial mothers may deny fathers visits with their children. On the other hand, many fathers claim to be withholding financial payments as punishment for their ex-wives in denying them visitation with their children. The poor state of child support enforcement has made the custody of a child a financially punishing experience for women, and their lack of access to high-wage jobs has compounded the problem. Yet most women want custody. They have been the one in the family who has been responsible for almost all the child care, and in most cases that has served to attach them strongly to their children. It has been an article of faith that a good mother would never want to give up her children, while a good father would want to allow the children to stay with their mother. As a result, giving up custody of a child to the father has been repugnant and shameful to most women. That has probably changed little, if at all, in recent years. Fathers were 14 percent of custodial parents in 1991 and 16 percent in 2002.18 More rigorous enforcement of child support obligations on the noncustodial parent might well increase fathers’ disposition to request custody. When fathers request custody, they are awarded it in a substantial number of cases.19 The legal tradition that a child belongs with its mother unless her unfitness can be demonstrated is being eroded. The idea is spreading that neither parent should be presumed to be more fit for custody, and that in each case custody should be determined “in the best interests of the children.” Such a standard may in the future tip more child custody decisions in favor of fathers. Judges may count the superior financial position of the contending father as an important point in his favor. If the father is remarrying, the new wife may testify that she wants to stay home with the children. The children’s mother typically has poorer prospects of remarriage, and will have to take a job. If the judge counts all this in the father’s favor and gives him custody, a low-wage mother will end up making child support payments to her higher-wage ex-husband, while her ex-rival for his affections, now his wife, raises the children the mother has been forced to relinquish. Better administration of child support payments is indispensable if we are to progress toward a situation where “all who parent children share their income with them.” Garfinkel has proposed a system in which each absent parent would pay to the state as a “child support tax” a share of his or her gross income: 17 percent for one child, 25 percent for two, 29 percent for three, 31 percent for four, 34 percent for five or more. The tax would automatically be withheld from pay. All children with an absent parent would be entitled to a payment from the state equal to what their absent parent had paid or to a guaranteed minimum, whichever was higher. If an absent parent became unemployed, the child support obligation could be temporarily discontinued, rather than, as is now the case, causing the parent to be burdened

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with a backlog of debt virtually impossible to pay off. The government’s minimum payment would provide at least a partial substitute.20 A better child support system, desirable and necessary as that is, would by itself not go very far toward the elimination of poverty among single mothers.21 In addition to reliable delivery of child support awards, single mothers need access to jobs with a male-level wage and government-subsidized services such as health care, child care, and housing if they are to avoid a poverty-stricken life. Below, I describe a package of measures that could take us a long way toward ending deprivation among single mothers and their children.

Welfare: A Declining Resource for the Single Mother The system of federal governmental help for single mothers and their children, popularly called “welfare,” originated in the darkest years of the depression of the 1930s, when unemployment was epidemic and destitution common.22 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was originally intended to help widows and orphans until the more generous provision made for them under Social Security could be phased in.23 As widows were enabled to leave AFDC, a new and, to most eyes, less-respectable clientele came aboard. The widows, who were held to be personally blameless for their lack of male support, were replaced on the relief roles by unmarried mothers, who were commonly judged to have sinned, and by separated and divorced mothers, who had failed in their wifely duty of holding on to their husbands. The AFDC rules originally denied benefits to a mother who had a husband or any other adult man living with her. Probably the unstated theory was that a man was not entitled to get sexual and other services from a woman who was being supported at public expense. Under the “man-in-the-house rule,” investigators conducted raids in the small hours of the night on the homes of welfare recipients, looking for men in their beds. An adult male’s clothing in the closet was taken to be evidence of cohabitation with a man, and could lead to a woman’s removal from the benefit rolls. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the man-in-the-house rule in 1968. The state agencies which administered AFDC were no longer allowed to deny aid to a family if the mother cohabited with a man, as long as he did not have legal responsibility for supporting the children. This gave eligibility for benefits to a mother living with a “boyfriend,” while allowing states to deny benefits to a mother living with an unemployed husband. However, about half the states adopted programs allowing welfare benefits to families whose “principal earner,” usually the husband, was unemployed.24 The welfare system had been set up in a period when married mothers were not expected to take paid jobs, even when all their children reached their teens. Welfare was designed to allow the unmarried mother the right to choose to be a full-time homemaker—a pseudo-housewife, supported by the government, rather than by a husband. Women remained eligible for assistance as long as their youngest child was under 18. There was little encouragement


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to take a job, or at least to take a substantial one that the welfare office would find out about; any money that a welfare client earned, and that the welfare office was informed of, was subtracted dollar for dollar from her welfare check. An AFDC cash grant was an “entitlement”; under the law, the government was required to provide it to any eligible family that requested it, and appropriations kept pace with demand. Welfare beneficiaries got health insurance under Medicaid. They also received food stamps, which could be used instead of money in the grocery store or supermarket (although not in restaurants) to purchase most food products, and their children could receive free or subsidized school meals. Some of these families were provided with apartments in low-rent public housing or received vouchers which reduced their rent in privately owned buildings. Although AFDC was federally mandated, states were allowed to set their own benefit levels. Cash benefits were never high enough to keep a mother and her children at the official poverty line or even close to it.25 After the 1970s, the benefits were not adjusted to reflect inflation, and their real value was allowed to drift downward. Southern states have been notorious for low benefits. By the mid-1980s, Texas’s benefits were only 54 percent of the poverty-line income, and Mississippi and Alabama had benefits that were less than half the poverty-line income. In a typical state, the benefit in 1985 bought 37 percent less than it bought in 1970.26 They have subsequently declined in real value even further in most states. Yet many single mothers, particularly the ones with poor job prospects, felt the best they could do was to “cop out” from the rigors of a harried state of independence and go onto welfare. When they did, they accepted a sentence of extreme poverty and a pariah status in return for an assured stipend, medical care, and the time to attend to the needs of their children in a relatively leisurely way. It was very difficult for a mother to gain a better life by leaving welfare for a job. The considerable effort she would devote to working would most likely result in earnings not much larger than the AFDC and Medicaid benefits she would have to give up. Furthermore, taking a job would require additional expenses for child care, carfare, and suitable clothing. These expenses would eat into her income, and reduce the net benefits of leaving welfare. Even if she got a job yielding as much take-home pay as the cash she got from welfare plus enough to cover child care costs and the other workrelated expenses, she would still not be as well off as she was on welfare. She would have lost the free time she had on welfare. A mother who went off welfare and then lost her job had the task of reestablishing herself on the welfare rolls. Until benefits could be started again, she might be completely destitute. The incentives to stay on welfare made it into a “poverty trap.” There was considerable circulation into and out of the welfare clientele, but some considerable fraction of women on the rolls stayed there for long periods. A disproportionate number of women on welfare have been African American, although until recently they have not been in the majority. Here

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the problem of race in America interacts with sex-role problems. Past and present discrimination against blacks in schooling and employment makes their opportunities more constricted than those of white Americans. Black fathers are far more likely to be unemployed than white fathers, or to be in prison. If employed, they are more likely to have an unstable job at low wages. Black women suffer from both race and sex discrimination in the labor market. For all of these reasons, they have been more likely than white women to find the low-level standard of living that welfare provided to be the best choice among the set of undesirable prospects open to them.

Welfare “Reform” There had long been widespread realization on both the left and the right that the American system of helping poor single parents and their children under AFDC did not produce a desirable outcome for its clientele or for the country. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, attempts were made to recast the welfare system. There were a number of largely unsuccessful attempts to reduce the cost of welfare to the taxpayers by establishing paternity, better enforcing child support obligations on the part of fathers, forcing welfare clients to work off their benefits. Some modest work incentives were incorporated, some training opportunities were added, some child care provided. However, the welfare population grew, and as it did, a growing public distaste for supporting such large numbers of single mothers became apparent. Concern grew that the easy availability of welfare was eroding the work ethic and encouraging lax sexual behavior. There was concern that the children brought up by single mothers were prone to higher rates of delinquency and poor health, both of which impose costs on society at large. Researchers have not come up with conclusive evidence that children are harmed by living only with their mother. However, the poverty which frequently goes along with such a status can blight children’s health, attitudes, and mental performance. It was frequently argued that the welfare system had played a part in promoting the increase in the number of children living with single mothers. Poor and unemployed fathers were said to leave their families with the purpose of making them eligible for welfare benefits. Unmarried women could be active sexually and carry any resulting pregnancies to term, knowing that the welfare system would provide benefits to set them up in independence. For teenagers, having a baby and going on welfare was a way to emancipate themselves from their parents. Married mothers could leave their husbands, knowing that welfare would provide. Conservatives argued that the American system of helping poor single mothers was so bad that “anything” would be better. Attitudes toward mothers on welfare were affected by the change in the economic position of women since the Great Depression. Millions of single mothers do currently support themselves and their children, something that


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would have been impossible in the 1930s. Millions of married mothers are employed as well. Prior to the 1970s, it might have been persuasively argued that being home with her children was the normal place for a good and caring mother. Forcing a mother to abandon the full-time care of her children because she was poor and lacking a man’s support would have been considered cruel. However, by the late 1970s, the housewife-like position of the welfare mother no longer conformed to majority practice. The choice that so many mothers had made to take employment undermined the assumption that husbandless mothers should be allowed to choose to devote themselves full time to motherhood and homemaking at public expense. In the 1980s, the electorate’s animus against single parents without jobs, on welfare, continued to grow. It was fanned by President Ronald Reagan’s speeches about “welfare queens”—cheats who fraudulently collected benefits under multiple false names, and lazily lolled about in luxury at public expense. It was never made clear, either by Reagan or by the defenders of the welfare system, whether such extreme cases were one in a million, one in a hundred, or one in ten. In truth, many mothers on welfare did contrive to receive benefits to which they were not entitled under the government’s official rules. They felt it impossible to live on the welfare stipend, so they did do some paid work, usually of an unrecorded sort. They didn’t report their wages to their case workers so as not to have their welfare benefits reduced. However, in most cases, the standard of living they achieved by this maneuver was still painfully low.27 In the early 1990s, some modest initiatives were undertaken to make the lives of job-holding single mothers less difficult, and hence to encourage them to leave or avoid going on welfare. More help was given to parents who were not dependent on welfare, and were struggling in low-paying jobs. Government-supported medical insurance under the Medicaid program was extended to larger numbers of such families, and a significant increase was voted in the Earned Income Tax Credit which supplemented the wages of job-holding parents. A federal program to help with the costs of child care was instituted.28 Despite these measures, the number of families on welfare continued to rise. Conservatives assertions that welfare mothers were a careless, lazy, sluttish, undeserving lot grew louder. They claimed that programs that subsidize out-of-wedlock births create child misery. The way to reduce child misery, they argued, is to discourage teenage and adult behavior brings into the world infants destined to live in poverty. Although they did not say so, their argument amounted to a plea to discourage such behavior by making the lives of those engaging in it even harder and more punishing than it currently was. Poor people would be better off if they were forced to sink or swim. Democrat Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for the presidency was based on an embrace of many conservative positions, and included a promise to “end welfare as we know it.” In speaking that way, he fanned the public’s impatience with the welfare system and its clients. But neither Clinton nor those to the left of him presented an alternative to AFDC which had the promise

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of reducing deprivation among the children of single mothers. So the way was left open for Republicans to define what welfare reform would be. Enrollment reached an all-time high in 1994, covering five million families and one in eight American children. That year, the American electorate swept into power in the Congress a group of right-wing Republicans who promised a reform which they were prepared to implement. In 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress voted to repeal AFDC and replace it by a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). President Clinton signed the bill into law. The new law ended entitlement to help for single mothers. The most important provision of the law was probably its establishment of a lifetime limit of five years of federally financed benefits. An unwed mother under eighteen was not allowed to receive benefits if she set up an independent household. Immigrants who arrived after the law was passed were made ineligible for benefits until they had been in the country for five years. Training and educational activities, which had been permitted under AFDC, were sharply curtailed. The emphasis was on getting mothers to work, and the appropriations for child care were increased. Those who earned enough would leave the rolls; those who didn’t would have a harder life, and so would bestir themselves to leave the rolls faster.29 For people who remained beneficiaries, there were new and more stringently enforced work or community service requirements. Recipients caring for children under six were required to perform work activities for 20 hours a week after receiving 24 months of benefits, or sooner if they were deemed ready. Those with only older children were required to work 30 hours. States that failed to impose TANF’s work requirements on benefit recipients were to be penalized by having their federal grant funds cut. States were allowed to establish more stringent rules than specified in the federal law, and some states did. There was considerable evidence in the legislation and its implementation of a religiously derived preoccupation with sexual sins. States could now deny an increase in benefits to a woman who had an additional child while on the program—an increase that had been mandated under AFDC. Large sums were to be spent “promoting marriage,” and there were monetary rewards for states in which out-of-wedlock births were reduced, provided abortions did not rise. The law authorized states to administer TANF services through religious groups. The people who actually administered the new program in each state (including some for-profit companies whose financial rewards depended on cutting the case load) were under instructions to act rigorously in getting people into jobs and off the rolls, and in enforcing work requirements for those remaining on the rolls. Procedures were developed with the purpose of making it difficult for new people to get onto the rolls, such as requiring them to return many times to the welfare office. Partly as a result of the enforcement of TANF provisions and this administrative stringency, and partly as a result of the expansion of the economy, the welfare caseload


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dropped 53 percent between 1996 and 2001.30 The dramatic drop in case loads was widely taken to show that welfare reform was a success. It is far from clear, however, that the new regime was a success in terms of improving the lives of single mothers and their children. Many families that had left TANF were experiencing considerable hardship. In 1999, when the economy was still expanding, only 50 percent of beneficiaries who had left the program in the previous two years reported themselves as working. Another 10 percent had a working spouse. But 24 percent were back on welfare. The remaining 16 percent had neither work nor government benefits. By 2002, when a recession had hit, only 42 percent of recent TANF leavers were working, 8 percent had a working spouse, and 30 percent had returned to some form of welfare.31 Clearly instability in employment is a major problem for this population.

Should Single Mothers be Supported to Stay Home? Many feminists and liberals believe that the abolition of the entitlement of support to single mothers and their children and the stringent time limits that have been placed on the receipt of benefits was a step in a wrong and inhumane direction. They believe that all mothers, regardless of marital status, should be able to choose to refrain from paid work outside the home, while being enabled to live at a comfortable standard.32 They certainly do not view single mothers who want to stay home full time as lazy or sinful; they are wont to remark that caring labor is, indeed, work. They emphasize the failure of our economic and social policies to provide employment at decent wages to large numbers of people, particularly to black men. If these men were enabled to bring home a family wage on a reliable basis, more of them would be married to the mothers of their children and they could support their children themselves. For the children of those who cannot bring home an ample wage, generosity in government benefits is simple humanitarianism, they believe.33 Should we return to a regime where welfare payments are an entitlement for lone mothers who want to stay home with their children, if that were to become politically feasible? Any policy we aim for and advocate should be consistent with the goal of keeping lone-mother families out of deprivation. So the reestablishment of welfare as the mainstay of support for single mothers, but with benefits as punishingly low as they are today, ought not to be considered as a desirable goal. The stipends for stay-at-home mothers, if guaranteed access to them were to be reestablished, would have to be two or three times as large as welfare payments have been. To confine such stipends to lone mothers would be considered unfair (and would indeed be unfair). Stipends (not necessarily the same size, but nevertheless sizeable ones) would have to be given to married mothers who stayed home with their own children. Offering large stipends to married and unmarried mothers (or to parents of either sex) who stay home with their children would probably increase

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the number of women who spend considerable time out of the labor force with the birth of each child. Now a majority of the mothers of children under one year are in the labor force. Employers can with some confidence depend on their continuity, treat them as fit for responsible jobs, and therefore consider them promotable. Reducing the continuity of women’s labor force attachment would threaten a reversal of the gains that women have made in the last half-century. Those gains—in educational opportunity, in the freedom to practice occupations and professions previously reserved for men, in the independence and status that comes with working for pay—could be lost as employers with good reason ceased to view women as having a continuous attachment to the labor force. One can see the effect of such a policy in the case of Sweden, where the stipend is given in the form of paid parental leave, which can be taken for a year after a birth and extended to three years at a lower stipend. Fathers are given incentives to share the leave, but take only a small percentage of the leave time. Probably this system has had a considerable part in keeping Swedish women very highly segregated into female-dominated service occupations.34 There is thus a tension between supporting lone mothers to stay at home with their children and gender equality, which arguably depends on men and women having similar life courses and activities.35 Where one comes down in this matter depends on the value one puts on gender equality, and on what social arrangements one believes constitute gender equality. It depends also on whether one accepts the views of most researchers that children do not require full-time maternal care to develop, grow up, and function successfully.36 It must also be recognized that there is a better chance for a sensible and humane policy toward single mothers if they are seen as honorable and hard working members of the community, holding a job and earning a wage as the majority of other adults are now doing.

The Need for Good Jobs Much emphasis has justifiably been put on the fall in purchasing power of the U.S. minimum wage, and the desirability of raising it. Many of the workers at or near the minimum wage are women, and a rise would clearly benefit them disproportionately. Recent research suggests that raising the minimum wage does not increase unemployment.37 However, a substantial rise in the minimum wage, desirable as that would be, would do relatively little to push a substantial proportion of single mothers and their children into the mainstream of American life. Single parents have an especial need for good jobs. The single parents who are white men have good jobs open to them, and almost all of them and their children live above the poverty line. However most single parents are women and many of them are black or Hispanic, so that they suffer race and sex discrimination in employment. Effective programs, including


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training and affirmative action, are needed to get single mothers into relatively well-paying jobs, which few of them now hold. As has been noted, the need for action against the exclusion of women is particularly acute in those occupations that pay well but do not require a college education, where very little progress has been made in breaching the male monopoly on jobs. As the economy is presently structured, men are able to take home relatively large money rewards for their labor, as compared with women. High wages for men have traditionally been justified by the idea that they were earning a “family wage,” that is, a wage that they were going to share with their nonearning wives and children. As the two-earner couple becomes common, a family wage for the husband loses whatever justification it once had. On the contrary, it is the growing corps of single female parents who need radically higher earnings to stay afloat.

Benefits that Lone Mothers Need Consider a lone mother with two preschool children, living in a city with average housing costs, working for the 2003 minimum wage, and receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit and food stamps. She would have a disposable income of $15,736, which is close to the official U.S. poverty line for such a family of $14,824. We can interpret the poverty line as indicating the amount that would suffice to cover ordinary living expenses—food, clothing, and shelter—at a minimal level of decency.38 However, her income would certainly not cover ordinary living expenses plus health insurance at $4,000 and licensed child care at $12,000. In fact if she had to spend any of her wage income on health care or child care, her living standard would fall to a sub-poverty level. It is very clear that if this family is going to lead a normal life, some way must be found to provide them with health insurance and child care. What is the best way to do that? Raising the minimum wage or giving monthly child allowances would not do the job. If we wish a family to be covered by a certain standard package of health insurance, the only sure way to bring that about is to require that they enroll in a plan, with the government payment going to the provider. In theory, a health insurance system especially for lone mothers could be established. But the benefit would best be provided as part of a national scheme for universal coverage. That would remove any incentive for couples to avoid marriage so they might obtain the insurance, and it would avoid the animus toward lone mothers, which special benefits for them alone might attract. More basically, access to health care is something that everybody needs, and a well-functioning government will make sure that everybody has it. If it is provided by a unified system for the entire population, that reduces the chance that an inferior version will be supplied to less influential parts of the population. (Unfortunately, it does not eliminate that possibility, as the example of the public schools demonstrates.)

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The same kinds of considerations apply to child care, including afterschool and summer care for school-aged children. While some unrestricted cash benefits to families with children are clearly justified, they could not suffice to solve the expensive problem of child care. Getting children good care and relieving parents of at least part of the financial burden of buying child care requires government action. It could take the form of provision of child care itself, or the provision of vouchers for care in private facilities, or some combination of the two. The improvement of the quality of purchased child care requires a better system of government licensing of child care facilities and personnel. Again, a unified system of government help with child care would work better than one restricted to lone mothers or to lower-income families. Setting up a universal, free, full-day prekindergarten program for children who are three years old and above would be a substantial start on solving the child care problem.39 The need for government help for families in meeting the cost of health insurance and child care is clearest in the case of the single mother with the rock bottom disposable income of $15,736, who has a need for goods and services whose cost is almost $32,000. But the case for giving help extends to families with incomes considerably above the amount that can be earned at the minimum wage. Single mothers with pretax wage income of $30,000 are faced with a poverty-line standard of living if they have to buy health insurance and licensed child care on their own. Faced with this uncomfortable prospect, they are likely to go without health insurance, and to buy the cheapest child care they can find, which may be stultifying, harmful, and possibly dangerous. This shows that government provision for health care and child care needs to be extended to families considerably above the poverty line. Governmental support for health insurance and child care, whether provided free to the families or for fees on a sliding scale, would go a long way toward allowing single parents to lead more normal lives. Other major aids to a normal life for single-mother families include support for a college education for children of such families, and assistance with housing costs in areas where such costs are high relative to wages. In a sense, the unemployment problem of single parents is more acute than that of other people. The consequences of a spell of unemployment are more severe for a single parent than for a spouse in a two-earner couple, or for a single person with no child to support. This suggests that the unemployment insurance system ought to be more generous to single parents in terms of eligibility, as well as in the size and duration of benefits. A somewhat liberalized version of unemployment insurance could be made available to single parents. Like the regular unemployment insurance, it would be limited in duration, but would be available to single parents just entering the labor market. Adequate child support, plus their earnings, supplemented by unemployment insurance, would keep a high percentage of single parents out of poverty.


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Ending the Poverty of Single Parents and their Children The millions of single mothers got into that situation because of difficult events in their own lives—they went through out-of-wedlock births, or through separations and divorces. Some of them were unwise in their choice of male companion, some were careless in using contraception, while others were victims of other peoples’ lack of wisdom, carelessness, and uncaring behavior. Some were unable to find husbands, but wanted children nevertheless. However we may deplore the lack of wisdom (or, if one wishes to define it that way, the immorality) of the behavior that made some of them single parents, we cannot condone a life of poverty for them and their children. It is not likely that the trend toward single female parenthood could be reversed by harsh treatment of the single parents and their children. Preaching to women to be good wives and to men to be good husbands will not solve this problem either. Single motherhood is not a passing phenomenon in our community and economy. The children of single mothers are an increasing proportion of all of our children. The welfare reform of 1996 did not reduce deprivation among single mothers and their children. So we need to begin again to think about long-term solutions to their problems and about a set of policies that would allow single mothers to live in the mainstream of American life. Even were the wages of men and women to approach equality more rapidly than now appears to be in prospect, single female parents, who are currently among the economically weakest members of the community, would still be carrying a disproportionately large share of the burden of the reproduction of the human species. To the unshared physical burden of pregnancy and birth have now been added, for an increasing number of women, the unshared economic burden of rearing. Wise policy, which makes sure they have access to health care, child care, decent housing, and college for their children, can help them with that burden in a way that will leave them proud members of the productive community, and will not condemn their children to an undeserved poverty.


11 Keeping House:The Economics and Politics of Family Care

Family well being depends on the performance of the chores that create a safe, healthy, and comfortable life—putting meals on the table, caring for the children, keeping clothing and living quarters neat and clean. The organization of family care services has undergone considerable change, as the number of housewives has dwindled. When the wife has a paid job, the family has the problem of replacing the services that she as a housewife would have provided. The employed wife may continue to do most or all of the same tasks she performed as a housewife. Or the husband may take a larger share of the housework. The couple can reduce the amount they have to do themselves by lowering their standard of housekeeping, or by purchasing a larger proportion of the family care services they use. Much depends on the choices that the family makes in organizing family care. If the wife continues to do substantially all of the chores, plus her paid work, the overload may sour life for her and the whole family. Resort to the purchase of services on a large scale may change the whole tenor of family life. Chicken soup like mother used to make may no longer be on the menu; the substitute may be better or worse. As families wrestle with these decisions, they are forced to confront and reconcile the sometimes conflicting interests of husband and wife. How these problems are dealt with determines the fairness of the spouses’ workloads, the shape of children’s daily lives, whether wives can live lives as full, as free, and as pleasant as husbands can, the amount of friction between spouses, and the likelihood of divorce. The shape of the economy is affected. When family-produced services are replaced by purchased services, a large number of service jobs are created, many of them in small enterprises. As wives have increased their participation in paid employment they have reduced the time they spend in housework. There has been some increase in the contribution of services by husbands. To take up part of the slack, many families have increased their purchases of services. They now

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eat less home-cooked food, and some are buying child care. In many families, the daily life of a child is nothing like what it used to be, nor are the meals. The marketplace responded to the changes in demand. Good quality frozen dinners and the microwave ovens to defrost them became available. New enterprises sprang up, offering to sell to families the services that the housewife used to perform. Fast-food restaurants selling hamburgers, chicken, and French fried potatoes, submarine sandwich shops, sushi bars, Chinese carryouts, and pizza palaces have taken the place of mother’s services for many families. So have child care centers. New products that have reduced housework hours include permanent press fabrics which don’t have to be ironed, frozen foods, and microwave ovens. The free market has filled the gap left by the departure of the full-time housewife and the unwillingness of men to take on a greater share of the housework. The question of which spouse is to do how much housework was not a subject of discussion 50 years ago. Under a caste system that still has a great many adherents, females were held to be marked out from birth to provide family care services, while males were marked out as fully exempted from providing any. Indeed, males were considered to be disgraced if they did take part in family care. The caste system for family care appeared to be a simple matter of following biological dictates. Up to now, and for some time into the future, biology ineluctably assigns to the wife the gestation and birthing of the family’s infants. However, it is not pure and simple biology that assigned to her the responsibility for all subsequent care of the children within the home. Alternative arrangements certainly were and are viable in biological terms. However, if she was to do all of the child minding, a great deal of that could be done simultaneously with cooking and cleaning. So the addition of the housework to the wife’s child care assignment served the purpose of economic efficiency. Concentration of responsibility for housework in a single person also led to the development of expertise and simplified the management of the home. Until relatively recently, a high proportion of urban husbands earned all or almost all of the family’s money income, and a considerable proportion of them had a physically demanding job. So the assignment of all of the housework to the wife also served roughly to balance out the work assignments of the spouses. Even so, this traditional division of duties produced in many families a considerable disparity between the spouses in time and effort devoted to work and in time free for rest and leisure. The husband’s work activities might be restricted to business hours, or to a short agricultural season, while his wife, burdened perhaps with many children, with a disabled parent to attend to, and with primitive household equipment, might work long hours seven days a week throughout the year. In a small minority of families, where domestic servants were employed, the wife did little work of any kind. On average though, within the last 100 years in Western economies, there was probably rough justice in terms of the leisure time of both spouses. Men did monopolize the kinds of work that gave mental

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stimulation, independence, high status, and the scope to express and develop talents; but rest and recreation, and access to entertainment has been enjoyed by both sexes on a more-or-less equal basis in the United States and Europe. The entry en masse of married women into the labor force, most of them holding full-time jobs, upset whatever balance of work assignments there was between spouses. It has removed the rationalization for the devolvement of all housekeeping work on the wife. However, a fair reallocation of housework to husbands has not occurred in most families. The result has been substantial inroads into the time that wives could devote to rest and leisure. Husbands have shared in the rise in the standard of living financed by the wife’s earnings, but have not put out the additional effort that would be required to restore a fair balance of work effort between the partners. Wives have traded the disadvantages of the housewife status—monotony, overexposure to children, lack of direct access to money, little opportunity for expression and development of skills and talents—for a new set of disadvantages. They include loss of leisure, increased management difficulties, a more harried and difficult schedule. The balance of advantages and disadvantages to the employed wife must be preferable to those of the housewife or fewer women would have made the trade. Yet the disadvantages of the employed wife are substantial, and since her situation is now more directly comparable to that of her husband, inequities between the two are more obvious. The move to a greater dependence on purchases of services eases this problem, but does not entirely do away with it. We have not yet discovered, much less started to adopt, a lifestyle in which the burdens of family life are evenly spread between husband and wife. The transition to a new style of providing family services is particularly difficult because husband and wife may be engaged in a zero-sum game. Selling the husband on doing more housework is not promoted by television advertising. However, store-bought pizza and fried chicken are. The market solution—buying rather than doing—provides the easy way out. Whether a particular couple will buy on the market a product that is of a higher or lower quality than the parents would provide on a do-it-yourself basis depends on their efficiency, knowledge, devotion, and the alternative uses of their time. It is not necessarily true that purchased goods and services, including child care, are inferior to parent-provided ones in every case, although that is the assumption often made.

Alternative Ways of Organizing Family Care Services Family happiness is affected by the way in which the mundane necessities of eating, child care, and maintaining cleanliness are taken care of. Human nature being what it is, no one mode of organizing family care guarantees happiness. Nor is adherence to any one mode necessary for happiness. We can certainly speculate, however, that some arrangements are more likely than others to produce unhappiness.

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In some families, most of the family care needs are met by unpaid work by family members; in other families, relatively little is done internally and needs are met by purchasing services for money from outsiders. The extent of housework sharing between spouses also varies somewhat, although the wife currently does considerably more than half of it in most families. Families change from one set of arrangements to another as children are born, as they grow up, as new job opportunities present themselves, as new products appear and are promoted—and perhaps as conflicts are resolved. In the housewife-maintaining family, a large amount of unpaid housework is done, almost all of it by the wife, who does no productive work apart from housework and child care. In such a family, there will be few restaurant meals, and the wife will cope with most of the labor of housecleaning and laundry herself. Such families use little paid child care, apart from preschools whose primary purpose is education for the child, and babysitters employed on occasional evenings to permit the wife to accompany the husband to an entertainment or social event. In the more affluent housewife-maintaining families, there may be a part-time cleaning woman employed. The housewife may take on some highly labor-intensive tasks such as home baking, despite the relatively cheap substitutes available for convenient purchase. The husband of a housewife generally limits his contribution of unpaid labor to the family to occasional and highly intermittent tasks that are physically demanding, such as yard work, and some that demand special expertise, which by social convention is cultivated mostly by men, such as light carpentry. He may also play with the children on occasion, or teach them, or occasionally do some shopping. The development of a parallel form of househusband-maintaining family is still in the early stages. There are a few families in which the wife holds no paying job, but does very little housework—defined here as meal preparation, meal cleanup, indoor housecleaning, and laundry. The work she does at home is supervision of children and of paid servants. We can call this arrangement the ladyof-leisure family. Until 30 years ago, the achievement of a lady-of-leisure life as the wife of a high-status man was the principal worldly ambition that parents had for their daughters. Turning to two-earner families, we want to distinguish the case where the wife is employed part-time (say 30 hours or less, including commuting time) from the case where she has a full-time job. The family in which the wife works part-time and the husband takes little hand in the housework can be dubbed the semi-housewife family. Where the wife is employed full time, there is likely to be considerable pressure to reduce unpaid housework and buy services. However, many families in which both spouses are employed full time continue to do a considerable amount of unpaid housework. Such families have the choice of having the wife do substantially all the housework, or having the husband take a non-negligible share. (There is a third possibility—the husband might do almost all; I know one such family.) When the wife is employed full time

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yet does most of the housework, we can dub the family the second-shift-wife family, after Arlie Hochschild’s famous characterization.1 For the family in which both spouses work an approximately equal time for pay, an alternative is to split the housework about half and half between the spouses. If the family buys relatively little in the way of housekeeping services, we might call this form the two-housekeeper family. This kind of family prepares most of its own meals, and may do a great deal of its own housecleaning and child care. Both spouses in this kind of family may work part-time. A variant of the two-housekeeper family is the shiftwork family, in which the husband and wife both work for pay, possibly full time, but have work hours that do not overlap or overlap minimally. The research of Harriet Presser and her associates found that of families with children, with both spouses employed full time, 17 percent were in that situation.2 Such families use little or no paid care. However, in such families, much of the burden of the housework (exclusive of child care) may still be on the wife, with the husband doing little or no housecleaning or kitchen work. In these families, husband and wife may get to spend very few waking hours together. Dual-earner couples may decide to meet a high proportion of their family care needs by buying services for cash from outsiders. We can call this the cash-paying family. Some families with a cash-paying lifestyle live in apartment houses, which have no requirements for gardening or the management of structural repairs, and may have restaurants, child care facilities, and laundries nearby. Living in a single-family house in the suburbs is far less compatible with a cash-paying lifestyle. A few suburban two-earner families employ a full-time domestic, who can provide a combination of cleaning, cooking, and within-the-home child-minding services. However, the data on the employment of household servants suggest that only a very small proportion of families manage to do this. Lacking a full-time servant, most suburban cash-paying families have a complicated and stressful time delivering their children to out-of-the-home care, have part-time cleaning help, and eat a considerable number of dinners in restaurants or fast-food outlets or take out food.

The Way Families Operate In the mid-1970s, the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center asked people in a sample of households to record in great detail the way they spent their time. Of the married couples responding to that survey, 44 percent were housewife-maintaining. Only a very small group, about 5 percent, could be classed as two-housekeeper families. The remaining families were split fairly evenly into three modes—the semi-housewife mode, the second-shift-wife mode, and the cash-paying mode.3 The amount of time spent on housework and child care by employed wives in the 1970s had diminished considerably from what it had been previously—on average they spent about 30 percent less time at it than

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employed wives had spent 10 years earlier. But the reduction was not a result of more family work on the part of husbands. These wives were not getting appreciably more help from their husbands than their counterparts had gotten in the previous decade. In fact, in the mid-1970s, the husbands of job-holding wives were still doing no more housework on average than the husbands of housewives. The job-holding wives (and the housewives as well) had been enabled to reduce their housework time by purchasing goods and services, including new labor-saving products and services, which had found a ready market. Table 11.1 Average minutes per day in market, nonmarket, personal care, and free time activities for married women and men in dual full-time-earner couple families, 1975 and 1998 Average minutes per day in primary activity Married women

Sample size Market work Work Commuting Nonmarket Work Housework Meals Cleaning Male/Shared tasks Child care Daily care Teaching/Playing Shopping and services Everyday shopping Durable goods shopping Services Travel Total work (market ⫹ nonmarket) Personal care Eating Sleep Other self care Primary free time Education Organizational Entertainment Recreation Communication Television Conversations Other

Married men

Ratio (women’s time/men’s time)

1975

1998

1975

1998

1975

1998

108 334 310 24 223 151 56 82 14 29 24 4 43 17 4 8 14 557

161 371 339 32 230 125 48 55 22 47 40 7 58 9 25 5 19 602

123 414 382 32 95 50 8 5 37 13 12 2 31 10 1 5 15 509

109 370 330 40 168 88 17 25 46 31 19 12 48 6 19 6 17 538

0.8 0.8 0.8 2.3 3.0 7.0 16.4 0.4 2.2 2.0 2.0 1.4 1.7 4.0 1.6 0.9 1.1

1.0 1.0 0.8 1.4 1.4 2.8 2.2 0.5 1.5 2.1 0.6 1.2 1.5 1.3 0.8 1.1 1.1

634 77 478 79 250 4 15 58 24 148 101 12 35

617 65 470 82 221 8 16 46 36 116 73 12 31

645 91 479 75 286 6 16 41 35 188 138 12 37

611 69 487 55 291 11 23 53 46 157 113 14 31

1.0 0.8 1.0 1.1 0.9 0.7 0.9 1.4 0.7 0.8 0.7 1.0 0.9

1.0 0.9 1.0 1.5 0.8 0.7 0.7 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.9 1.0

Source: Tabulations of time use data were made available by Liana C. Sayer. Times may not add to totals because of rounding.

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In the 1970s, wives working full time did 70 percent of unpaid family work and husbands did 30 percent. The years since 1975 appear to have brought considerable change—husbands of fully employed wives increased the time they spent doing unpaid family chores.4 By the late 1990s, husbands’ share of the time spent on family chores had moved up to 42 percent. Table 11.1 gives details on the changes that occurred in family work arrangements in the time period 1975–1998 in two-earner couples.5 Husbands increased the time they spent in child care by about a third of an hour per day. They increased by half an hour a day the time they spent participating in the central housework tasks of meal preparation and cleaning. However, wives are still doing about three times as much work on meals and twice as much work on cleaning as husbands.

Work/Family Policies The heavy burden many job-holding wives bear has been the major source of demands for workplace policies that accommodate family life.6 A second source has been the abandonment by job-holding wives of certain activities felt to be particularly valuable, such as the care for very young children at home by a parent. Workplace policies which simply allow the resumption by the wife of those abandoned duties, or facilitate her doing them, can be viewed as a partial or temporary return to the housewife-maintaining or the semi-housewife family style. Policies that provide the opportunity for part-time work are of this type, particularly if the part-time status means low pay and benefits, routine duties, and low promotion opportunities. Husbands are unlikely to take this kind of work, and the wives who do take it are cementing the inequality of their status. Maternity leaves that extend significantly beyond the time necessary to overcome the disability caused the mother by the child’s birth, and that are designed to allow the mother (but not the father) to engage directly in child rearing are also of this type. When the wife takes care of children, it is very common for her to also do, at the same time, all of the cleaning, cooking, laundry. (Husbands who increase their child care time apparently do not increase their cleaning and cooking time in proportion.) There are workplace policies which can promote greater equality. They can allow for or encourage greater participation in family duties by the male partner. They can promote the purchase of substitutes for unpaid family labor. Reductions in work time can be given as reduced daily hours rather than as additional days of vacation. If both spouses work fulltime, a shorter standard working day is probably more conducive to the sharing of family duties by both partners. More days of vacation may be used by the husband to go off fishing with male companions, or the family may spend more time at a summer home, where the wife continues to do all the domestic tasks. Workplace subsidization of child care, or the siting of child care facilities at the workplace probably have an effect of promoting equality, because they relieve the family of a function usually carried on by the wife.

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The requirement that leave associated with a birth (or an adoption) be shared by both spouses is potentially an important way of encouraging equality. Requiring the father to take some part of the leave on pain of losing it has little positive effect. However, a series of leaves in which the mother and father alternated spells that lasted several months each could provide within-family care for very young infants in a way that would promote similar duties for both parents. Financial arrangements that provided for the receipt by the couple of a constant fraction of their usual joint income, regardless of which parent was staying home at any particular moment, possibly subsidized by the state, would help to establish this pattern. Most discussions of work/family policies seem to have in mind married heterosexual couples with children. An additional concern about “familyfriendly” policies that must be attended to is their effect on the absolute and relative status of single people, with and without children, who are more likely to be women than men. A reduction in hours, matched by a proportional drop in pay, may make life more difficult for lower-income female single parents. If employers devote a fixed amount to employee benefits, the provision by employers of health insurance and other benefits to spouses may have the effect of reducing the rewards to those without officially recognized spouses. Employer-provided benefits, which cost the employer money and which require relative affluence if they are to be taken advantage of (such as the matching of employee pension contributions by the employer), may also penalize the relatively hard-up single mother. Family-friendly policies, like “family values,” can push us in a retrograde direction. They cannot be assumed to be benign. Policies that may help one group may hurt others. Policies that appear to make life easier for women, and that may even be welcomed by a majority of them, may cement their inequality. The effect on gender equality of such policies deserves close scrutiny.

Getting to an Equal Sharing of Housework One way to achieve equity between the sexes—very possibly the only way— would be for women and men to take similar economic roles. Husbands and wives would do the same amount of family care work and devote the same amount of time and energy to paid employment. Wives have moved in that direction; they are spending more time in employment and doing less housework. Husbands with wives working full time have done some changing of their behavior, but have not yet met wives halfway. As table 11.1 shows, these men have an hour more of free time a day than their wives. One explanation for men’s failure to do more, which has found favor with male economists, was put forth by Gary Becker.7 He argued that a husband’s time is so well paid for in the marketplace that it is too valuable a resource to be devoted to housework. In the jargon of economists, husbands have a comparative advantage at paid work, and wives have a comparative advantage at housework, and it is only rational for each to specialize in the

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activities in which they have a comparative advantage. The comparative advantage argument does not explain why husbands are able to concentrate their time at home on the more occasional and recreational tasks, and don’t do a fare share of routine child care, or of housecleaning, cooking, dishwashing, and laundry, the central and despised “housework” chores. This is the same Gary Becker whom we have seen in previous chapters attributing women’s lower wages to women’s larger housework burden, making them more tired and so less productive in the workplace. Housework begets low wages, which begets housework. The argument is a bit circular. As is true of most theories propounded by economists, this is merely conjecture. It is more likely that women’s wages are lower than men’s largely because of discrimination by employers against equally productive women workers. To the extent that men’s higher wages empower them to avoid doing a fair share of housework, discrimination punishes women in the workplace, and then punishes them at home a second time. A more adequate explanation of men’s failure to increase housework time has to include an account of the dynamics of family decision making. The unequal distribution of the housework burden may start at the time of the marriage. Whether it does or not, things certainly go in that direction if the wife quits her job when she has a baby, or reduces her hours in paid employment. If she is at home, her schedule will be less full than her husband’s even if she does substantially all the housework, so his doing little or none is not unfair. The problem is that when the wife resumes regular employment, it is not easy to shift a fair share of the burden onto the husband’s shoulders. One important and obvious reason that the renegotiation of the housework burden has been difficult is that people do not find housework enjoyable.8 Both men and women rate cleaning the house as an activity that they like less than most other uses of their time. Shopping also gets a low rating from both sexes. Cooking gets a higher rating from women and doing repairs gets a higher rating from men. Apparently, activities that take some expertise rate high with the sex customarily having the skill to work at them efficiently and produce a good product, and low with the opposite sex. (The amount of time spent cooking for a family is considerably greater than the time consumed doing repairs, by a factor of about three.)9 It is very difficult for a wife to get her husband to increase the time he spends doing something he dislikes. He may refuse her request outright, or he may simply ignore her suggestion. Or he may say he will do it, but fail to do it, or do it grudgingly or sloppily or tardily. He may do it for a while and then stop. Then the wife has the choice of asking him again (he will define that as nagging) or of giving up and continuing to do the tasks she had wanted to get off her own shoulders.10 In the marketplace, people change their ways and their activities when sufficient financial incentives are offered. Within the family, the essence of the wife’s problem is that the only incentive she has to offer for the husband’s compliance is the cessation of her requests for more help. However,

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these requests have a negative side for her too, because they fuel hostility and add to the likelihood of a breakup. To a woman who has recently had a baby, the idea that her marriage is headed for the rocks will understandably be painful. Thus all the husband has to do is resist the requests for help in some way or other for some period; eventually they will cease. It is easier for the wife to take the initiative in getting some of the household tasks replaced by purchases than it is for her to get the husband to provide more services. The wife who wants to cook less and wash fewer dishes might unilaterally start to make it a practice to buy a pizza or some other kind of takeout food instead of making dinner from scratch. If she has full control of the family’s cash, then the rebudgeting is automatic. If they have a food budget, then he may grumble at its increase. However it is he who must in this case make requests for changed behavior. If he persists in such requests, it is he who is defined as causing trouble for the marriage. A husband who hates housework might think himself happiest if his wife continues to do most of it without complaint. However, most husbands, faced with the choice of continuing to receive pressure to do more, pitching in and performing more services themselves, or acceding to greater purchases of services, may lean toward the latter. When a couple changes the mode of providing family care services, the final arrangement of tasks and budgets may be quite different than was anticipated early in the process by the person who initiated it. The husband who thought that the sole result of his suggestion that the wife consider an outside job would be that he was going to take better vacations may end up eating more fast food and under pressure to do more housework. The wife who thought she was going to exchange housework time for market work time may find that she has merely added to her work burden, while the family budget for durable goods has enlarged itself irreversibly. She may end up as a second-shift-wife, with very little she can do about it short of marital breakup.

Divorce and the Division of Housework Husbands are in a good material position to resist employed wives’ demands for more equal division of hours of housework because most wives do not earn enough at their job to support themselves and their children in any degree of comfort. If she carries the fights about housework too far, and the couple separates or divorces, her standard of living is going to be severely cut. Consider a couple with two children, where the wife makes 80 percent of what the husband makes. If they separate and she keeps the children, the per capita income in her household falls by 40 percent. Child support payments reduce the loss but don’t eliminate it, and getting them is not by any means a sure thing. Her social status will also be reduced without a husband. By contrast, the income the husband has to devote to himself will have increased, and he will be wooed by the many single women eager for husbands.

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Power in any relationship, including marriage, tends to flow to the partner who can most easily replace the other. It is much easier for the husband to replace the family care services of the wife than for the wife to replace the financial contributions of the husband. Divorced women looking for husbands are up against a shortage of suitable partners, with the odds worsening as they age. Men die on average at a younger age than women do, and they generally look for and succeed in attaching women who are younger than they are. The way the disparity in economic and social power works to keep the housework fastened on the woman is that repeated requests for a change in the sharing of housework may bring in return a threat on the part of the husband to leave. The disparity in raw economic power between men and women is the main basis for the adoption by many working couples of the second-shift-wife mode.

Sex-Role Ideologies The influence of sex-role ideologies on the unequal sharing of housework has been perceptively described by Myra Marx Ferree, a sociologist who has done extensive interviewing on this subject: One contraint employed women have to struggle against in negotiating a more favorable division of labor is their husbands’ perceptions of housework as demeaning and unmasculine. The individual man who does not share that perception is nonetheless likely to believe that his buddies do, and all-male social gatherings may reflect and reinforce this rejection of housework as unfit for “real men.” For a wife to let other people know what chores her husband does around the house “would make the man seem like he was henpecked.”11

Ferree emphasizes that when husbands take up housework in individual families, the news of it is suppressed, and the help such news might give to other wives in the process of their negotiations is withheld. Each wife fights in isolation. If the housework issue became a subject of public discussion— perhaps through TV comedies, letters to advice columns in newspapers, articles in women’s magazines—people who are members of a second-shiftwife type of family might lose face. Husbands with an egalitarian attitude toward sex roles do little or no more housework on average than husbands who adhere to a traditional ideology.12 Either ideology is unimportant, which is difficult to believe, or as Feree suggests, individuals base their actions on what they perceive to be the dominant ideology rather than on their own ideology.

The Ethics of Intra-Family Economic Relations Husbands sometimes respond to the requests of their employed wives for more housework contributions with the assertion that they are bringing in

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more than half of the family’s money income, and so the wife should do more than half of the housework. This rejoinder may be simply a reminder of the power that better access to economic resources bestows on the husband. Or it may just be a rationalization cynically designed to shut down the argument. On its face, however, such an argument is an expression of an ethical point of view: it is the importation of a market idea of fairness into family life. The market ethic is that things ought to trade at their market-determined price, that a trade at any other price is both inefficient and exploitative, and that anything is up for sale. The market ethic imported into national defense says that those who don’t wish to risk their lives in defense of their country should be able to hire people to replace themselves in the armed forces. The market ethic imported into the family says that a family member should be able to buy himself out of spending time doing housework. According to market ethic, at what price should the purchase of freedom from danger or housework occur? At the market price for those services, of course. Because of the husband’s high salary, he brings to the family enough money to match the wife’s cash contribution, plus a good deal more. With this excess cash contribution, he claims the right to purchase his freedom from doing half of the housework. By the ethics of the marketplace, the husband who is not allowed to buy his freedom—who contributes lots of money and does half the housework too—is exploited. Under market ethics, contributions to the family are valued in money terms. The wife’s big contribution of time is valued at her low market-set wage rate. By this method of valuation, the husband in the second-shiftwife-style family, who does little or no housework, is considered to have contributed much more than the wife, who bears a greater work burden in terms of the number of hours. An alternative to the market ethic is what we might call the sharing ethic. Each spouse’s contribution might be valued as proportional to the total time the person devoted to the family’s economic well-being—time devoted to a paid job (including commuting) and time devoted to housework. Each hour would be valued inversely to the pleasure the activity gave. By this method of valuation, a husband working at an interesting and lucrative job contributing less to the family than his wife working at a painfully boring job, if that were the best she could get. The sharing ethic would have him do more of the housework than she in that case. The sharing ethic’s measurements are for internal use only. On the market, including today’s marriage market, he is worth a great deal more. Which standard reflects justice? To try to answer that question, we have to appeal to the essence of family life—love, caring, companionship, consideration, continuity, familiarity. In the culture predominant in the United States, sharing equally in purchased consumer goods is commonplace for spouses. The sharing ethic calls for carrying that idea further, and moving toward equality for the spouses in the pleasurability of their time.

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In other cultures, where the spouses do not look to each other for sociality and support, and where the wife is maidservant-cum-breeder of the husband’s children, even equality of material living standards has not been achieved. In Japan, for example, the husband has large areas of consumption that the wife does not share, but which are done in company of male friends or colleagues. Wives are seldom seen in restaurants with their husbands, and husbands take pleasure trips, including trips abroad, in the company of other males. What in the West is an occasional “night out with the boys” for the husband has in Japan remained at the center of males’ sociability in Japan. Sociologists call this “homosociality.” The idea of sharing is central to the American ideal of family, and this suggests that the time standard of valuing contributions is the most appropriate one. Under that standard, the husband is sharing with the wife his good fortune in the market’s evaluation of his services. In the opposite case, where the market value of time is the standard, the husband is importing into the family the disparate valuations of their labor and extracting advantage from his own market superiority. In other words, the money standard makes family life look like the market life as envisaged in economic theory— no friendship, just get what you can out of the person you are dealing with. (Actually, there are friendships in market life, but economists have not noticed them.)

The Future of Housework The housewife-maintaining family is giving way, but which form will replace it as the dominant mode of organization of family care is not clear. Neither the second-shift-wife type of family nor the semi-housewife type offers an egalitarian alternative. As yet only a modest fraction of married couples lead lives where both spouses have parity in market work and family work. Even in families that have to a great extent replaced their own household labor with purchased goods and services—the cash-paying families—most of the activities that are least pleasant are loaded onto the back of the wife. At least in such families, the amount of housework is low, so perhaps the uneven allocation matters less. A 1994 survey that sampled the opinions of male and female undergraduates at Harvard suggests that attitudes more favorable to the equal sharing of housework by dual-earner couples may be gaining, at least among young people at elite institutions. Both men and women considered half of the housework to be their fair share when both partners worked full time. And both men and women said they expected actually to do about half the housework under such circumstances.13 However, these results must be interpreted with caution. Only 11 percent of the male respondents and 17 percent of the female respondents said they favored both parents working full time when there were preschool children in the home. So perhaps the male undergraduates, when they pondered what answers to give to this survey’s questions, did not really expect to be called upon to do much housework in the

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near future, and felt they could afford to give generous answers. And the women did not expect that their spouses would have occasion to contribute that much, and so could give hopeful answers. Of course, in reality more than half of all married couples with preschool children have two earners, and women who have completed an elite higher education are employed at a considerably higher rate than that. The relief of the wife from the double burden of wage work and housework is of very great importance to the well-being of women, yet it does not appear explicitly on the agenda of feminist organizations. Popular magazines angled toward married working women generally shun it. As a topic of conversation, it is avoided because it brings into the open the unresolved grievances that lurk in family life. Talking it over with friends is akin to washing the family’s dirty linen in public. In the words of a male friend of mine, “That’s divorce-type talk.” However, as more and more married women emerge into the paid labor force, questions concerning the distribution of housework among family members must and inevitably will come to the foreground. It is certainly possible that we are in a transition phase, and that we are in the process of passing on to a different and more egalitarian arrangement. However, no one can predict with any certainty whether and how rapidly American families will reach the point in which each adult takes an equal part in neatening up the mess he or she and the children make as they live their daily lives. Our free competitive economy makes possible the movement of resources into producing housework substitutes in step with families’ increasing willingness to buy such goods and services. It is possible that much of the housework problem will dissolve by a process of “commodification” and “industrialization.” The prospects for that, the conditions under which it might take place, the effects on the economy, and the special problems of the industries involved are the subject of the next chapter.

12 “Industrializing” Housework and Child Care

The replacement of housework done on an unpaid basis by purchased family care services has increased, due to the entry of more and more married women into paid work. The “industrialization” of childcare and food services, and perhaps of housecleaning services as well, can be thought of as the ultimate episode—and the logical conclusion—of a process that began millennia ago. Before economies based on regularized exchange were well established, the only way to get some product or service was to have some family member produce it. As economies have developed over the centuries, more and more products for family consumption have come to be supplied by barter or purchase and fewer by within-the-family production. Housework and child care are the major do-it-yourself products that remain; if they are absorbed into the exchange economy, only selfchauffeuring, some amateur housepainting, and backyard vegetable gardening will be left. The industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century and the urbanization it engendered speeded up the decline of production in the home for direct family use, particularly for city people. People stopped sewing their own clothes, and purchased clothing became the rule. The lifting of water from a well by the bucket was replaced by the services of the water authority. Centrally provided energy services changed the nature of the activities needed to produce heat, lighting, and cooking, and reduced the time such activities took. While country people continued to do much of their own butchering, food preserving, and baking, city dwellers could not. Schools have partially replaced home care for children. Institutions such as hospitals and old-age homes have replaced some in-home care of the sick and the disabled. Most recently, entertainment activities with a significant do-ityourself component—conversation, reading, games—have given way to commercially produced electronic entertainment. There has been some reverse flow, where purchased production has been replaced by production by family members. One instance is the decreased usage of household servants. Another is the replacement of the public bus

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and train by the private car driven by a family member. The latter is the result of suburbanization, and a failure, in the United States at least, to develop public transportation. Every transfer of the production of services from the home to an industrialized or commercial setting changes the size and shape of the economy. Establishments that produce and sell prepared food and out-of-home child care have proliferated. The sale for money of housecleaning services may also be growing, after a century or so of shrinkage, partly due to uncontrolled immigration. The growth of these industries creates paid jobs, some of which are taken by women coming onto the labor market. The industrialized production process is generally different from the at-home process: for one thing, efficiency is gained by producing in large batches. And as Clair Brown has noted, home production requires that each home have its own equipment, which is idle much of the time.1 An industrialized process is more mechanized than a home-based process, and yet may require less total societal investment in mechanical equipment. Each piece of equipment a business buys is more intensively utilized. When we replace self-produced services with purchased services, family life changes. The services we buy tend to be quite different from the homeproduced services they are replacing. Fast food differs from home-cooked food; a child’s experience in a day care center is nothing like the experience of a housewife’s child. The purchased services may be judged to be better or worse than the homemade ones they are replacing, but different they certainly are, and less individualized. There is a loss of the “mother’s touch.” As a cook, a mother may produce meals lacking taste and variety; as a childminder, she may be petulant, negligent, or anxiety-producing. Nevertheless she is one’s own mother, and commercial substitutes for her services, even of excellent quality, do not have the same psychological significance. The purchase of services has tended to reduce the contacts that family members have with each other. Day care is the most obvious example of that. The purchase of prepared food seems to reduce the number of meals that are shared by family members. When the only source of dinner was the main dish mother had prepared, everybody gathered around the table for it. Now individual family members can pick up their own takeout food and eat it by themselves or with friends. A vow to completely industrialize housework was heard from Russian revolutionaries in the 1920s.2 However, their commitment to the relief of women from household drudgery turned out to be not a very deep one. At that same time, communes called “kibbutzes” were being organized in Israel by people who wanted to work and live collectively. The kibbutzes were set up to minimize private housework, and to replace it by collectively organized food preparation and child care services.3 Most people in Israel never joined a kibbutz, however, and the kibbutz style of life never spread beyond Israel. Yet under the highly flexible economies that capitalism creates, the industrialization of family care is going forward. An industry providing

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out-of-the-home child care has grown, and at the same time, the commercial availability of other housework-replacing services has increased. Capitalist production of any line of goods or services can be expanded in response to the perception by business people that consumer demand has risen. Of the family care services being switched to an industrialized basis, the least problematic is food service, and we shall have little to say about it. With the transfer of housecleaning services, there are organizational and ideological problems. Our longest discussion will be devoted to the child care industry. There are severe problems of “affordability” and quality if child care is left solely to market forces. Finally, we shall discuss the possibility of the rise of a new type of integrated service establishment, which could replace the management functions of the housewife, as well as her cleaning, cooking, and child care functions—the service mall apartment complex.

The Purveying of Prepared Food The industry that sells prepared food is an ancient one; visitors to Pompei, the Roman city buried and preserved by volcanic ashes in 79 AD, can see the remains of numerous commercial bakeries and shops purveying other eatables. A billboard advertising a commercial brand of the Roman condiment liquamen, was also found there. Canning was invented in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Many canned foods, such as soups, stews, and sauces, go through extensive processing and cooking in the cannery. Canning allowed consumers to replace some home-cooking activities by the purchase of cooking services performed in a factory setting. The sale of prepared frozen “dinners” dates from the 1950s; the invention and spread of microwave ovens, which speed the heating of frozen dinners for serving, increased their popularity. Mass-produced frozen dinners of high quality have become available. Restaurants probably go back to the inns set up to accommodate travelers. Ordinaries, meant to serve local people, were common in large English towns by the sixteenth century. Most of their customers were men who lacked a woman “to look after them.” After the French Revolution, many of the chefs who had previously cooked for members of the aristocracy opened restaurants. The self-service cafeteria is an American invention. By the 1930s, a New York chain of cafeterias called Automats—which passed food to the patrons through a wall of coin-in-the-slot vending machines—had as their advertising slogan “Less work for mother.” Chains of fast-food restaurants started in the 1960s. They are cafeterias with very limited menus, which feature cheapness, no wait, and no plates or cutlery that require washing. All branches have the same menu, and the advertising done by the parent corporation benefits all of them. The taking out of restaurant food for off-premises consumption has grown rapidly, and many pizza makers and Chinese restaurants now deliver hot food to the home. The restaurant sector has been one of the fastest growing segments of the economy since World War II.

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Housecleaning for Pay As measured by the Census Bureau, the proportion of workers employed as domestics in private households, which includes housecleaners and nannies, has been going down since the turn of the last century. In 1900, there were 1.6 million people who worked as servants, out of a labor force of 28 million. There was one servant for every 10 households. By 1950, there was one servant for every 28 households. In 2002, out of a labor force five times as large as the one in 1900, 729,000 people said they worked in private households—500,000 as housecleaners and 229,000 as child care providers— one domestic worker for every 150 households.4 These days, many of those employed as domestics are not in the country legally, and thus are more likely than other workers to get missed by the Census. Of the cleaners whom the Census did count, 40 percent are Hispanics, up from 5 percent 20 years previously. The vast majority of housecleaners do not work full time for one family; they visit each of the families they serve perhaps once or twice a week, and some families get visited only once every two weeks. So the proportion of households employing some domestic help might well be 20–30 percent. Given the rise in the share of income going to households with above-average incomes, the stagnation of wages at the bottom of the income scale, and the rapidly increasing availability of immigrants for this work, the proportion of households employing domestic help may well have started climbing. Buying housework from domestic workers is not like buying the same kind of services from a hotel or a restaurant. The individualized nature of the transaction for such services damps down the sale of housework. Large numbers of people shrink from advertising for strangers from the lessfavored groups in the population to come to their private home, from conducting interviews, checking references, setting pay, supervising and criticizing the work, firing those who are unsatisfactory, and then starting all over again. The personal nature of the relationship of the employer to the household servant is also daunting to both. The homes of many potential customers for domestics are located in suburbs, far from the residential locations of the potential workers. The poor state of public transportation makes transport to the job for the houseworkers difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Transportation problems also reduce the reliability of the service—a crucial issue for working parents who use domestics to care for their child. However, as real wage levels rise, more domestic workers have their own cars, and are able to transport themselves to their jobs in the suburbs. Nevertheless a move of middle-class families back to central cities would probably increase considerably the purchase of domestic services. It is not considered demeaning for a housewife to clean a toilet, but it is for a hired worker, and so some people consider it immoral to be procuring someone to do that kind of work, especially at a low wage. Hiring a servant has some of the unpleasant aspects of becoming a slum landlord. In both


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cases, one makes transactions that are conditioned by the poverty of the people one is dealing with. The slum landlord offers a substandard apartment to a poor person with no better alternatives. Domestics are hired to clean up messes at a low wage, since the going rate for their labor is set in a market where workers with poor alternatives sell their time. A wife with a well-paid job having high time demands who hires a woman to do housework for pay is condemned by some who call themselves feminists for passing along “her shitwork” to another woman, and stands accused of joining men in oppressing women. Women who hire domestic help are accused of paying somebody to clean up the messes they make, instead of cleaning them up themselves. Of course nobody accuses a man who eats in a restaurant of doing anything bad or oppressive when he leaves his dirty dishes to a low-paid dishwasher, or makes an issue of his failure to dust his own office before leaving for the day, or, for that matter, complains when he does not share in the cleaning of his own house or the diapering of his own children. Few of the people who oppose hiring domestics emphasize a greater effort to engage husbands in doing part of the shitwork. The only alternative to that they see is for every woman to do “her” own. Just as day care centers now care for many children who in the past would have been cared for by nannies, neighbors, or relatives, we can expect that in the future more families will buy their household services from business firms which take on all of the chores of personnel procurement and management. There does appear to be a modest-sized growth of small local business firms that offer housecleaning services. For some reason that merits psychological research, they frequently adopt whimsical names such as Maid to Order, Maid in the USA, Maiday. Their charges are high relative to the cost of hiring an individual, in part because the firms and their employees must pay taxes. However, they do take care of recruitment and supervision, try to screen out workers likely to cause trouble, work quickly using teams, bring their own equipment, and offer reliability and high standards. The provision of cleaning services for office buildings, restaurants, hotels, stores, and schools, which include kitchen areas and toilet facilities, are dealt with in an apparently satisfactory way either directly by the establishments’ employees specialized to that purpose or by contract with firms that specialize in providing such services. We are already paying for cleaning services for our daytime environments. The prices we pay for the products sold from offices, factories, and stores, and the bill for the food we eat in restaurants include an allowance for cleaning charges. Eventually many of us will want to pay for the cleaning of our nighttime and weekend environments as well. A significant expansion in paid-for housecleaning would be helped by a recongregation of affluent people in the central-city. The service mall apartment complex discussed below would provide an environment that would make the hiring of housecleaning services easier and cheaper.

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Usage of Nonparental Child Care The trends in child care usage since the 1960s are shown in Table 12.1. Organized facilities, including child care centers, have shown the most rapid growth compared to other forms of care. They served 8.2 percent of children of employed mothers in 1965; by 1999, they were serving 21.5 percent. The industry has been responsive to the growth in demand. Between 1985 and 1999, the number of places in child care centers grew by 67 percent. “Family day care”—provided by a woman who takes a few small children into her own home to be cared for, perhaps along with her own children— has lost popularity. The distribution of children among child care arrangements since 1996 has probably been affected by the welfare reform, which pushed many single at-home mothers out to jobs. Although many of these mothers got government help in paying for child care, the state employees or contractors who dealt with these mothers pointed them toward the cheapest possible child care modes, which meant toward “informal” care by relatives, friends, and neighbors, and away from center care. Table 12.1 Primary child care arrangements used by employed mothers of preschoolers: 1965–1999 Type of arrangement

1965

1977

1985

1995

1999

Parents Mother while working Father Relatives Grandparent Sibling and other relatives Organized facility Day care center Nursery/preschool Federal Head Start program Other nonrelative care In child’s home In provider’s home Family day care Other nonrelatives Others Self care Other arrangement** No regular arrangement Total

17.0 6.7 10.3 36.0 NA NA 8.2 NA NA NA 38.1 18.5 19.6 NA NA 0.7 0.3 0.4 NA 100.0

18.8 8.2 10.6 32.2 NA NA 14.6 NA NA NA 33.2 6.6 26.6 NA NA 1.2 0.3 0.9 NA 100.0

23.8 8.1 15.7 24.1 15.9 8.2 23.1 14.0 9.1 NA 28.2 5.9 22.3 NA NA 0.8 * 0.8 NA 100.0

22.0 5.4 16.6 21.4 15.9 5.5 25.1 17.7 5.9 1.5 28.5 4.9 23.6 15.7 7.9 2.9 0.1 0.6 2.2 100.0

21.5 3.1 18.5 28.8 20.8 8.0 22.1 17.9 3.8 0.4 20.3 3.3 16.9 10.9 6.0 7.3 0.0 2.7 4.6 100.0

Notes: Data prior to 1985 refer to children of ever-married mothers employed full time. NA: not available. * Represents or rounds to zero. ** Includes children in kindergarten/grade school or in a school-based activity. Source: Tabulations derived from Current Population Reports, Series P23-117, P-70-9 table 1; P-70-30 table 1; P-70-36 table 1; P-70-53 table 2; P-70-70 table 1; P-70-86 table 3; Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), PPL-168.


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Of families with employed mothers who had preschool children, 56 percent made some cash expenditures for their care. Others managed to avoid having to do so by utilizing care given by the husband, grandmother, or other relative. Of families below the poverty line, 41 percent made some payment for child care, an indication of the failure of current government programs to help all of those in extreme need.5 Care by a nanny in the child’s own home appears to have fallen steadily as a proportion of all child care arrangements. Yet the use of foreign women to serve as nannies has received a great deal of negative attention from people on the left. The “care deficit,” created by American mothers going out of the home to work, attracts foreign women to provide caring labor, exporting the care deficit to the poorer parts of the world. Those deploring globalization, such as Arlie Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich, have seized on the importation of domestic workers as a prime example of capitalist oppression. They remind us that many imported nannies leave behind children of their own. As Zelda Bronstein summarized their argument, they see “the wholesale removal of third world women to first world nurseries as a new form of imperialism. For centuries the powerful have seized gold, oil, and other natural resources from the weak; nowadays . . . they also extract love, or its facsimile.”6 Women from poor countries take the painful step of leaving their children and going abroad to work because conditions in their own country make the consequences of staying home worse than the consequences of leaving. But it is farfetched to attribute the poverty of these countries and the desperate condition of many of the women in them to the depredations of American capitalism. On the contrary, these countries are poor because they have not developed vigorous capitalist economies of their own. And the women in them, who in many cases suffer male oppression far worse than what occurs in economically advanced countries, as a result have only painful alternatives. These third-world women are victims of corrupt governments, sexist religions, and retrograde social customs, which keep modernization from occurring in their own countries. To characterize them as the victims of transnational capitalism or affluent American women is preposterous. The people taking this line tend not to suggest that the American care deficit be filled by American fathers, or that American work hours be reduced for both sexes. Rather, the implication is that mothers are guilty and should not take jobs, but should instead stay home and do all “their” own housework. As argued in previous chapters, such advice, if followed, would undo all of the progress women have made toward equality.

Effects of Nonparental Child Care Attitudes toward paid-for child care are determined in part by what people think is good for their children. They are also influenced by the importance people give to women’s autonomy—whether they think women have

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the same right as men to be a parent without taking off from work, and thus the right to avoid, if they wish, a stint in the housewife status when they have children. Attitudes, even on such issues centrally important to people’s lives, are influenced by economic conditions. The opportunity cost of mothercare, which is the wage a mother might earn, and her opportunities for congenial work have changed, and this has changed attitudes. Only a few decades ago, a mother was considered neglectful unless she waited until her youngest child had graduated from high school before taking a full-time job. A mother was told that it was crucial to her child’s development that she be in the house when the child came home from school so that the child might tell her about the events of the school day. Later on, it became respectable for a mother to go to work when her last child entered elementary school. Now almost 60 percent of mothers of children under one are employed, Yet our society is still divided on whether mothers should be given society’s permission to avoid all full-time housewifery. This last development depends on an acceptance of day care as a satisfactory way of caring for preschool children. One change in the climate of opinion was the turnabout in the ideas of at least some of the most influential “experts” on the harmful effects of mother’s employment on the child. Prior to 1976, the most widely used baby care manual, Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care had this to say: If a mother realizes clearly how vital [good mother care] is to a small child, it may make it easier for her to decide that the extra money she might earn, or the satisfaction she might receive from an outside job, is not so important after all.

The 1976 edition and subsequent editions of Spock’s book abandoned this attitude completely. The new version said, Parents who know they need a career or a certain kind of work for fulfillment should not simply give it up for their children . . . [but should] work out some kind of compromise between their two jobs and the needs of their children, usually with the help of other caregivers.7

There has been a readiness in the press to run sensational articles whose purpose has been to scare mothers into remaining home. In the 1960s, when the baby boom was ending and mothers of young children were beginning to enter the labor market in large numbers, the press gave extensive publicity to an experiment on monkeys. An infant monkey’s mother was replaced in its cage by a heated post swathed in terrycloth, on which was mounted a bottle of milk. To no one’s surprise, the monkey brought up by the terrycloth post developed severe psychological problems. It is hard to see how the results of that experiment could be considered relevant to the effects on children of maternal employment. Yet that research was widely quoted as showing that American children in care might suffer as those baby monkeys had, and that non-mother care could severely damage human children.8


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The publicity it got strengthened the presumption that the full-time presence of the mother was indispensable if the child were to develop normally. The fright created by the baby monkey experiments soon died down. But almost 40 years later, in 1998, the New York Times Sunday Magazine featured an article describing the gross neglect of the young children in Russian and Romanian orphanages, and the devastating results of that bad care on their psychological state and their behavior. The article’s author, the well-known journalist Margaret Talbot, tried to arouse the suspicion that American children whose mothers were employed might well be suffering from similar problems. She cited no research and provided no facts that would justify equating Romanian children living in hellish orphanages with American children living with working parents and going to day care.9 The Romanian orphans had replaced the baby monkeys in the attempt to scare mothers. To provide better information on these and other questions, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) started tracking 1,300 babies born in 1991, looking at the kind of care they have had and how that has affected them.10 The report on the children when they were four-and-a-half suggested that on most measures those children who had experienced lengthy non-maternal care showed no more problems than those who had not, and those in high-quality care showed some benefits. However, 17 percent of those who had been in non-maternal care for more than 30 hours a week were rated by teachers (although not by parents) as being aggressive, as compared with 6 percent of children in care less than 10 hours per week.11 Behavior labeled “aggressive” included such things as grabbing toys from another child and defying the teacher, behaviors that children (especially only children) in exclusive mother care may have had little or no occasion to demonstrate. This finding of aggressive behavior on the part of an additional 11 percent of children who had been in early care made front page news and was much talked about by right-wing broadcasters. Some experts in child development take the increased number of children in early care who show aggressive behavior as proof that non-mother care is undesirable.12 Others suggest that whenever children enter a group setting, whether early or late, some of them will display such behavior. They say that children who have been at home with their mothers, and who enter into group settings relatively late, will start out unaggressive, but may eventually develop these aggressive behaviors in the same numbers as those who had entered such settings earlier. Indeed, these experts point out that some studies report that about 17 percent of all elementary school children display such behavior.13 Future results of the NICHD study will reveal whether children who haven’t had much or any exposure to group care early in their lives catch up in the bad behavior department when they enter school with those who have had such exposure. With regard to cognitive development, the NICHD researchers and most other recent studies suggest no harm from non-maternal care and the possibility of gain if the care is at a center of good quality.14

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Government Financial Support for Child Care: A Short History There have always been mothers who needed to work and whose children therefore needed care from others. In the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, these mothers’ need for help with child care was viewed as something private charities should address.15 Starting in the New Deal era in the 1930s, government took a more active role in helping mothers who were lacking male support. But nonparental child care was not a prominent feature of the U.S. program, as it became in France, Sweden, northern Italy, and Canada. The U.S. government help took the form of support for the mother herself to stay home and take care of her own children. “Welfare,” under Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), became the centerpiece of government help to single parents for six decades.16 AFDC was not commonly thought of as a “child care program,” but it was in effect a major government effort devoted to securing children’s needs for care. During the years of World War II, with millions of men in the armed forces, the government needed women to take jobs producing military equipment. To get housewives to emerge from the home, extensive governmentrun facilities for the care of children of women workers were provided. However, at the war’s end the government was concerned about the possible reappearance of male unemployment, and wanted women to go back into the home. It abruptly closed its child care facilities. A modest federal tax break for working parents with child care expenses was enacted in 1954, and is still in effect.17 Programs devoted to children’s development, as opposed to their care, also gained political support. Public kindergartens spread, and the 1960s saw the establishment of Head Start, a program aimed at giving children from deprived backgrounds an early socialization and educational experience—at getting them ready for school. However, these programs typically offer only half-day sessions, with long breaks in the summer, thus giving minimal help with child care to jobholding parents. In the 1970s, there were “welfare reform” initiatives in both Republican and Democratic administrations which tried to get mothers off welfare and into jobs, and offered some time-limited help with child care for mothers leaving welfare for jobs. The meagerness of the child care provision these welfare-to-work programs offered is one of the major reasons that all of them—one after another—failed to produce the desired fall in the numbers of mothers on welfare. In 1971, Congress passed a bill that included the establishment of a federally financed child care program. President Nixon vetoed it, memorably declining, as he said in his veto message, to “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”18 Another such bill was vetoed by President Ford in 1974.19


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Despite the Nixon and Ford vetoes of child care bills, public spending for child care continued to increase. Title XX of the Social Security Act, passed in 1975, provided the states with funds for social services for the lowincome population and included a requirement that some of the money be spent for child care. When that requirement was later removed, during the Reagan administration, a third of the states stopped using any of the Title XX funds for child care. Sonia Michel, in her history of American child care policy, calls the overall impact of the Reagan-era cuts in federal child care funding “devastating” for low-income mothers.20 Given this history, the creation of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) of 1990 was a hard-won turnaround, although the scope of the bill that enacted it had been significantly reduced in the course of the legislative battle and its funding had been brought down to less than $1 billion a year. Whatever else it accomplished, the welfare reform that occurred in 1996 forced a recognition of the fact that working mothers were here to stay and that many of them needed and deserved help in obtaining care of decent quality for their children. Larger appropriations for child care were embodied in the welfare reform package. However, they were far below the level needed to fund care for all families who, by existing regulations, would be eligible for benefits, to say nothing of those who are not now eligible but arguably should be. Help under the CCDBG is not an entitlement that any eligible family can receive merely by applying for it. The number of families who can actually get benefits depends on the amounts appropriated for these programs by the federal Congress and the state legislatures. Most eligible families still receive nothing at all, and waiting lists are common. Of the 15 million children eligible under federal rules to receive benefits in 1999, fewer than 2 million actually received them.21 This means that while some few families receive quite sizeable benefits, other families in the same kinds of circumstances receive nothing. This situation persists today.

Quality and Regulation Most systematic research on the quality of child care has concentrated on child care centers. How good are centers in the United States? How many of them actually nurture children, promote their development, contribute to their sense of well-being, and prepare them for success in school? How many centers are places where children are happy to be? The Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes Study (CQO), led by Suzanne Helburn, was based on evaluations made on 100 randomly selected centers in each of four states.22 Trained observers intensively and systematically studied two rooms in each center—one containing preschool children and a second containing infants and toddlers, if the center served children of that age. For preschoolers (three years old and above), most of the rooms were rated as at least minimally adequate. But high-quality care—as opposed to minimally adequate or mediocre care—was relatively rare. Only 24 percent

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of preschool rooms and 8 percent of infant or toddler rooms received care rated “good” or “developmentally appropriate.” The study found that downright poor-quality care—care that may be harmful to children’s development and even to their health—is far from rare. Ten percent of the rooms for preschool-age children (two–five years old) and a shocking 40 percent of infant/toddler rooms were rated as providing poor quality. The poor scores given to infant rooms were due in large part to poor sanitation practices— failure of providers to wash their hands after diapering each child or to wash diaper-changing surfaces and children’s hands and toys, and to careless feeding practices. In the absence of effective regulation, there will be providers who deliver low-quality services, even unsafe ones, and children and their parents need protection against them. In the United States, governmental regulations on child care providers are set and enforced by the state, and in some cases by local authorities. For the most part, they pertain to issues of health and safety—appropriate space, bathroom facilities, staff/child ratios, the avoidance of overcrowding, cleanliness of food service—rather than to the conditions that promote children’s mental and social development. All licensed providers are required to meet minimum standards for such things as staffing ratios, group size, staff qualifications and training, and practices affecting health and safety. Licensing standards differ considerably from state to state. Some norms that provide an adequate floor under safety and quality are developing, and a majority of the states apply most of them. However in almost a third of the states, standards are low enough to allow situations that are dangerous to children’s physical safety and their healthy development. Effectiveness of licensing depends on how well the standards are enforced. Without conscientious monitoring of providers, regulations are useless. Unfortunately, most state licensing agencies are underfunded, leading to infrequent monitoring inspections and enforcement of penalties. Some states exempt large numbers of providers from licensing and regulation. Little or no enforcement effort is directed at the smaller and more numerous family day care operators. And, of course, care for children in their own homes by maids and nannies is totally unregulated. Yet these are the providers who work mostly on a solo basis, with no other adult to witness what they do or don’t do. Sociologist Julia Wrigley studied families that employed nannies in the early 1990s and her book gives a disquieting view of the social relations in such families.23 The parents want nannies to develop warm, loving relationships with the children, but their treatment of them is inconsistent with that: they most often treat them as servants who can be fired at a moment’s notice.

Justifications for Governmental Help with Child Care Free or below-cost care for American children, subsidized by the government, can be justified by a concern to put a floor under the quality of child care,


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to get children ready to succeed in school, as a way to assist parents with the expenses of bringing up children, and as furthering gender equality. Of those, the educational advantage that could come from governmentsubsidized care has the broadest appeal. The Committee for Economic Development (CED)—a highly respected group of public policy analysts—has proposed that the nation should consider spending $25–35 billion more taxpayer dollars each year so as to provide all American children with access to free prekindergarten classes, starting at age three. The organization making this proposal gets its financial support from the Ford Motor Company, Merck, J.P. Morgan, Prudential Insurance, and a long list of other big corporations.24 There are many highly placed executives in the biggest American corporations who understand that the economic condition of the country and the long-run prosperity and stability of their business will be strengthened if the trouble spots in the society are cured. They know it will be to their companies’ ultimate advantage if many more American children enter first grade ready to learn, and they know that today’s workers perform better and show up more reliably if they have access to good and reliable care for their children. They think that the country has major unmet needs, which can only be addressed by the government, and that the care and education of young children is one of the important ones. The CED is the voice of this group. The CED believes that the country needs a system of taking care of young children and of helping them to develop that gives good quality services and that all families have access to. It proposes that the federal and the state governments should share the cost for universal prekindergarten, and pay for programs that could be set up in privately run child care centers as well as in public schools. It suggests that the pre-k sessions take place in settings that would also offer the after-hours care and summer care needed by the children of working parents. This would end the misery-making shuffling of children from one caregiver to another that many parents and children currently endure. In making this proposal, the CED is implicitly saying something that millions of parents know from sad experience but that conservatives will have trouble acknowledging: leaving parents by themselves to go out and buy child care and early education in the free market has not served the country’s needs. The free market has not been able to provide a supply of quality education and care that would be affordable to all families. The market has not even been able to provide that to much of the middle class. Free public schools were established in the nineteenth century when it was recognized that the unfettered marketplace worked poorly in supplying the country’s needs for primary and secondary education. Rich people could buy what they needed, but the rest were not well served. For much the same reasons, leaving things entirely to the marketplace works poorly in the care and education of children under six. It is in the children’s interest and in the public’s interest that the services be of decent quality, but millions of parents are unable to pay what standard-quality services currently cost, much less

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what they would cost if the wages of those workers who care for and teach these young children were increased to decent levels. On average, it costs about $12,000 in the United States to buy care in a center for two children under five. As we have seen, there is no way a single mother could possibly manage to pay that if she is earning $17,000 a year or less, as many do. She wouldn’t have enough money left over for food and rent after paying such fees. But even a couple making $35,000 have to push their standard of living down almost to the poverty level if they are to pay such prices. These families have to get help if their children are to get the care and the educational experience they need without wrecking the family’s budget. The nation’s current set of providers of child care and early education are not evil exploiters, trying to price-gouge parents. They couldn’t if they wanted to, because the industry is highly competitive. The prices they charge are very close to costs, even in the part of the industry that is profitmaking. Prices are high because costs are high. Child care that helps children develop can’t be done by machines; it requires lots of labor. It’s not an industry in which productivity rises every year. Is the CED trying to pass the buck to the taxpayers? Shouldn’t the nation’s employers be called on to solve our problems in the field of child care and early education, by providing on-premises centers, as some already do? No—depending on employers would be a big mistake. If it were made mandatory for employers to provide and pay for centers for their employees’ children, hiring discrimination against parents and even potential parents would become rampant. If it were left for employers to do it voluntarily, as is the case with employer provision of health insurance, large parts of the population would be left without coverage. Only increased government appropriations will solve the problem of child care affordability. Additional steps would be needed to make headway on the quality problem this country has. Centers have to compete with providers of family child care—people who take children into their homes— who have considerably lower costs. So centers economize by paying low wages to their employees. Those wages don’t allow them to attract and retain a workforce that is professionally trained in methods to help children develop and learn. That’s one reason the quality offered by many centers has been found to be mediocre or worse. Relatives and family child care providers also lack such training. Government subsidy programs should contain provisions that mandate standards of training, and prescribe other aspects of quality for providers receiving public funds. And those funds should be sufficient to finance appropriate salaries for trained people working in the field. Setting up a pre-k system that parents could, if they wished, use for free would be a huge step in the right direction. In addition to its educational benefits, it would give major financial help to families with children. Families would save some of the billions of dollars in fees that they have had to pay for their children’s care between ages three and six. They could


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devote that money to raising their standard of living. That in itself would be of major help to the children themselves, especially those in hard-pressed single-mother families. While the pre-k proposal would essentially solve close to one-half of the financial problem of caring for children in the first six years of their lives, it would give no help to working parents for the care of children under three, many of whom need it badly. And infant care is more expensive than care for three and four year olds, because it takes more labor. There is now widespread recognition of the fact that even the youngest babies need care of a kind that helps them to develop, and research has shown that many babies are not getting it. One way to get better care for children under three would be to allow families at or under the poverty level to pay no fees for care, and those above the poverty level to pay no more than 20 percent of their income in excess of the poverty line on child care. Government subsidies would fill in to pay the remainder of the cost. With this kind of fee schedule, people at higher incomes would pay all or most of the costs themselves. Rallying the country behind a program that will serve the country’s needs in early child care and education would be difficult, and would take years. But as the CED proposal shows, the ranks of those calling for a major step forward, financed by government, are growing. The women’s movement would do well to take up this cause. The most powerful opposition will come from those who regard the movement of mothers into the workplace as a terrible mistake. However, many children of stay-at-home moms already go to nursery schools, and could benefit from this program. Moreover, most people understand that many mothers of small children will continue to hold jobs and their children will need care that helps them to develop. This is particularly true for the single-parent families. This country could well afford to do better, as virtually all of the other western countries do. More government help with child care expenses would powerfully serve the cause of gender equality. Current economic arrangements and social assumptions allow men to fulfill the duties and have the pleasures of parenthood without sacrificing their right or ability to pursue economic and vocational interests. Men customarily go to their jobs unencumbered by the worry that their children will not be well cared for. Those fathers who are single parents usually have salaries high enough to enable them to buy child care. Or a female relative may volunteer to help with child care. High-quality child care subsidized by government would confer on female parents the right and ability to pursue their economic betterment (and their children’s) similarly unencumbered by child care worries. Many of those opposed to expanding the government provision of child care subsidies do so because they are devoted to the perpetuation of the system of sex roles that devotes women to homemaking—a system that accords the husband primacy in the family on the basis of his role as sole earner. A second group who are opposed to child care appropriations favor low taxes and small government, and think that as a rule it is best if people

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buy what they consume out of their own incomes, unsupplemented by government help. Free or subsidized child care, which reduces the cost to the parents of having children, may increase people’s willingness to have and rear children. Government subsidy of reproduction is something that may become an open issue as the birthrate drops further. Even if there is no desire on the part of the public to increase the birthrate, it is possible to argue that parents are performing a public service by doing the work of bringing up the next generation. However, once subsidies for children becomes the avowed intent, then the form of the aid becomes an issue, and there are many possible forms. Cash allowances, free medical care, and paid time off for parents will strike some as more worthy means of support than subsidized child care in away-from-home centers. Some employers provide partially subsidized child care to their employees. The employer may simply help the employee to pay for day care in a facility unconnected to the employer’s enterprise, or may set up and run a child care center on its premises. From the employer’s point of view, setting up a high-quality day care center for employees’ children is a good way to allow employees to work without distractions occasioned by child care problems, and to reduce absenteeism. It is also a way to lower labor turnover. However, employers are not likely to provide it for workers who can be easily replaced, and whose low wages make them most in need of this kind of help. Government subsidies for employer-run day care do not help the unemployed, who need a place for their children while they conduct a job search. Nor do they help those parents who work for employers too small or too marginal to establish child care centers for employees. If government subsidies were available to all parents on the same basis, there could be no objection to having some of the child care centers on the premises of large employers. But depending on employer provision of child care would repeat the mistake of depending on employers for the financing of health insurance— a dependence that must somehow be undone. Other countries have been far more active than the United States in providing government funds to finance the care of children under school age. Sweden and France have done the most. In France, worries about population size have been a government preoccupation for generations, and this probably explains at least in part the generosity of government provisions for child care. Some of the youngest are cared for at low or zero fees in government-subsidized creches, which are supervised by a special corps of pediatric nurses. As soon as children are toilet trained, they are eligible to go to ecoles maternelles, high-quality preschools, which are free to the parents, and provided with accredited teachers who lead the children in activities designed to enhance their development. By age three, most children attend these preschools, including most of those children whose mothers are not employed. The ecoles maternelles run for the full school day, and there is low-cost before- and after-school care for the children of working parents.25


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A revival of political activity for a more extensive governmental program of providing help with child care to middle-class parents in the United States must await the return of an administration espousing a willingness to undertake more extensive domestic spending programs, one that is comfortable with an egalitarian sex-role ideology.

High Service Housing—The Family Care Mall As time goes on, American families are buying more and more of their family care services, thus trading some of their money income for greater freedom from housework chores. This trade is easiest for those who live in urban multifamily dwellings. In some apartment houses, the services of housecleaners who go from one unit to another can be contracted for. Apartment houses are likely to have restaurants and dry cleaners situated nearby, and possibly child care facilities as well. At the present time, the convenience of having a large number of services available under one roof and one management is available for older people. A considerable number of apartment houses are currently being built in metropolitan areas for affluent and still physically independent elderly people. They generally have community dining facilities, and offer housecleaning and laundry services. These facilities are not available to younger people; in fact they and their children are expressly barred by the rules of most of these establishments. One possibility for helping young parents with children to get their family care done in an efficient way would be to build residential centers that are set up to provide many of the services being provided to the affluent elderly, plus child care. The Swedes have set up some housing complexes that do offer such service—one name for them in Sweden is “family hotel.” In a hotel, the living quarters are neatened up and cleaned by people paid to do that work, and the hiring, scheduling, quality control, and supervision of the cleaners is done by the hotel’s management. A hotel supplies interior decoration, and buys and renews the furnishings and linens. It manages the maintenance of the building and of the appliances. Laundry service is available. A hotel maintains one or more restaurants on the premises, whose services replace food shopping, cooking, and dishwashing. Sometimes contracts can be signed for a certain number of fixed-menu meals at reduced prices. A hotel will cater parties. Hotel staff will take messages and are there to accept deliveries when the residents are out. Finally, many hotels will arrange for babysitters. Obviously, affluent two-earner families already purchase many of the services that a hotel offers, but only a tiny minority of families actually live permanently in a building designed for family residence, whose management coordinates the provision of all of them. The first Swedish family hotel or servicehus was built in the 1930s for 120 families at the instigation of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal. It had a restaurant, a laundry, and a child care center. Unfortunately, people whose children grew up refused to move out. As a result, patronage of its service

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facilities fell off, and they were forced to close. The building still exists as a conventional apartment house. Projects built subsequently along this line do continue to function in Sweden. A typical project might have apartments for more than 1,000 families. It would offer meals from a central kitchen, which could be eaten in a dining room or in one’s apartment, day care for children from six months to seven years of age, activities and day rooms for older people, laundries, clinics, and a “front desk” staffed by people who arrange for occasional child care, housecleaning, and errand running. It is notable that the Swedes have seen these projects as a way to integrate a high-service environment for elderly people with the provision of services to employed parents.26 These establishments reportedly have their drawbacks. One problem is noise. A large complex might house over 1,000 children under 15. The management of restaurants for such complexes has been a problem, apparently both for the restaurant and for the residents. The residents understandably would rather not commit themselves to pay for and eat large numbers of meals from the restaurant, but the existence of the restaurant is predicated on the assumption that they will. In spite of all of these problems, the Swedish service houses have long lists of people waiting to get into them. American versions of the service house might consist of a large apartment house built over a “service mall.” The child care center would be part of the service mall, while people who contracted to provide family day care might be especially recruited as tenants. Sick children might be accommodated in their own apartment, under the care of specially trained practical nurses. The service mall might contain a pediatrician’s office, a fast-food establishment, an Asian food takeout, a high-style cafeteria, a dry cleaner, the child care center, and the service desk, which would help residents with arrangements for housecleaning. If the service mall were open to the general public, the problem of forcing the residents to use the services would be reduced. The management of a service mall apartment complex would be rather tricky—one would have to balance off giving the residents some freedom of choice in whether to patronize the establishments of the service mall with the necessity to make those establishments viable. The pricing of the apartments might have to include prepaid vouchers for the services so as to discourage the residence of those who did not intend to use the provided services. The location would have to be carefully chosen. In the United States, the central city has largely been stripped of white middle-class families with children, who after World War II fled to the suburbs to get away from crime and from the problems they perceived with schools that had a high proportion of disadvantaged black youngsters. Positively, they went in search of space and greenery and the financial benefits of home owning. However, for the two-earner family, and especially for the family with two parents with demanding careers, carrying on life in a single-family house in the suburbs has been extremely difficult. We do not know what proportion of such couples might opt for an urban high-service environment—would choose to give up the greenery and the space and the


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privacy so as to be able to stop commuting and avoid the endless juggling to provide family care services. But at least some might opt for service mall housing, were it to come into existence. The extent to which service-rich housing develops depends to some extent on the entrepreneurship of American developers. It also depends on the amount of progress we make in solving the problems that currently render the city unattractive and dangerous. A better integration of African Americans into the American economy, better methods of fighting crime, a rehabilitation of public transportation, and improvements in urban school systems would facilitate a move toward an end to housework—initially for a few pioneers, later for everyone.


13 A Policy Agenda for the Sex-Role Revolution

As the revolution in sex-roles proceeds, it becomes more and more obvious that many of the policies, institutions, attitudes, and habits that belong to the old regime are out of place in the new. Whatever purpose they formerly served, under current conditions they create hardships and injustices. Reserving the best jobs for men is an example of a habit that does not accord with today’s notions of fairness, nor with the needs of the many women who are supporting children without the help of a man. The age-old custom that men are waited on by women within the family and take little or no part in providing household services has to be changed if women are to have lives as comfortable and enjoyable as those of men. Some customs get changed when large numbers of individuals or families, acting without much or any public discussion, respond to changes in the economic incentives. Reducing the need for housework by purchasing prepared food has gone on gradually and quietly, spurred on by the advertising of those selling the food. This change, which has helped many women, did not require an ideologically charged campaign. In fact, such a campaign might well have hurt more than it helped. Some of the needed changes in long-standing habits and practices in the workplace, the school, and the home do have to be speeded by agitation— consciousness raising, as it used to be called in feminist circles. Active and ongoing discussions need to take place on a broad range of sex-role issues, with both women and men taking part. We need public discussion on whether and how to keep working single mothers and their children from deprivation, on what level of child support payments would be fair, and on how the employed wife’s double burden is to be alleviated. For some of the needed changes, government action will be required. Only the government can threaten penalties that will motivate more employers to allow women to compete fairly for the most interesting and best-paid work. The work of welfare reform is unfinished—millions of unmarried women and their children are still severely deprived, and need more help. Child support enforcement, which should insure the monthly delivery of

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relatively small sums to millions of people, has to be made more automatic and efficient. Government should set the standards for the child care industry, and make a major increase in the help it gives to parents to pay for care and early education. A new government insurance program is needed to help families who give birth to a disabled child—a risk of disaster that all prospective parents face. It is not easy to devise social policy changes that do more good than harm. Examples of failed or flawed policy initiatives litter the stage. No-fault divorce looked like a civilized way for equal adults to deal with marital incompatibility. Its implementation cut adrift considerable numbers of middle-aged and elderly housewives, who had depended on what they thought was a guarantee of a comfortable home for life. The reform of welfare has not led to self-sufficiency at a decent level of income. It has left many single mothers and their children poor and without a safety net. Government encouragement of home ownership drained off the vitality of the central cities, which at their best provide the most comfortable environment for two-earner and single-parent families. Given the difficulties of finding and implementing policies that will help more than hurt, we need a spirit of experimentation. New ideas are best tried out on a small scale, and the results carefully observed. Resources have to be found and devoted to research. Demonstration projects have to be mounted. Unsuccessful projects have to be analyzed, and campaigns run to get successful projects reproduced. Interest in particular policies that promise improved conditions must be kept up over a time span of decades. The women and men who see the need for policy changes have lacked a forum for discussion. Partly as a result, we have done little to establish sensible priorities—to decide which policy areas are of primary importance and which are secondary—and then to concentrate our efforts on the most important issues. In the last quarter century, a great deal of the energy of feminists went into maintaining the right to have an abortion. The little energy that was left over was spent on efforts at reforms that, while positive, could have only minor effects or could help only small numbers of people. Much effort was lavished on a failed attempt to pass an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Its small material value can be judged by the condition of African Americans 125 years after the U.S. Constitution was amended to give them equal rights. One of the few activist women in the Congress, Patricia Schroeder, largely devoted herself to passing legislation that allowed judges to award divorcing women a share of their spouses’ military and diplomatic pensions. Feminists’ main focus in the late 1990s was on passing a Family and Medical Leave Act to require employers to allow workers to take time off (without pay) to attend to family needs. Pension sharing, an ERA, the right to take unpaid time off to deal with illness are good things. But the issues that I have highlighted—fairness in the workplace, a better system for helping single parents, better public support for child care costs—are of greater import. Feminists have up to now devoted remarkably little energy to formulating needed remedies, fighting to

A Policy Agenda for the Sex-Role Revolution

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strengthen the law, and then fighting to get the laws energetically and intelligently applied, with sufficient appropriations. Many of the things that feminists should be campaigning for government to do would cost lots of money. They include universal health insurance, expanded government help with child care costs, and the costs of college. They should have been enacted during the period when the federal treasury was running a huge surplus, during the Clinton Administration. The conservative mood of the country, and the budget deficits that loom make it unlikely that we will be able to move forward on most of the items on the feminist agenda for some time. This does not mean that assembling such an agenda is a fruitless task. On the contrary, unless a sensible agenda is established, the next opportunity for realizing gains may be wasted, as past opportunities have largely been wasted. The 10-point policy agenda that follows draws together the most important of the suggestions made in earlier chapters, plus some additional ones. It starts with a group of four measures that would promote equality in the workplace for women and men. It goes on to proposals for reforming child support and child care, and to measures that would make family care more compatible with work in a way that promotes gender equality. Finally, it directs attention to the importance of government provision of basic services to the whole population—a provision that would be necessary if single mothers and their children are to live decently.

1. Improved Enforcement of Fairness in Placement and Promotion Many employers still separate the sexes by function in the workplace, and certain jobs continue to be virtually off-limits to women. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) have not been effective in inspiring most employers to change this kind of behavior. If the tax laws of the United States were enforced as slackly as the antidiscrimination laws currently are, very few people would pay any taxes. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) gets business firms and individuals to obey the tax law by requiring annual reports, scrutinizing the reports closely, investigating those whose reports do not conform to the law or look suspicious. It assesses fines and initiates prosecutions when it establishes violations. People are worried about how the IRS is going to react to their tax returns. By contrast, EEOC gets reports on occupational employment by race and sex from employers but makes little or no use of them for enforcement purposes. Its operations have had little effect on the behavior of employers, because employers who disobey the law have little cause to fear that EEOC will come after them. The program of monitoring the employment practices of establishments that sell to the federal government, or get grants or contracts, should also be strengthened. Withdrawing eligibility for federal funds from a higher proportion of noncooperating employers would be bound to increase the rate of compliance.

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The bulk of resources for antidiscrimination enforcement should be focused on large-scale employers. Each branch of each large firm should have an EEOC audit officer attached to its case, just as it has an IRS agent looking at its tax compliance. If we can make wholesale progress against sex and race discrimination in large establishments, which tend to dominate the labor market, then time-consuming enforcement actions against small employers will become less necessary. Among the employers who need to be pushed harder to abolish sex and race discrimination are the federal, state, and local government agencies. They are large employers, and although they probably discriminate less than private industry does, their record is far from good. Both the antidiscrimination enforcement agencies and organizations interested in civil rights should monitor their progress. Business firms need better guidance in developing their personnel policies to conform to laws against discrimination. A new breed of business consultants is needed. They would specialize in helping firms to get rid of current practices, whether formal or informal, that disadvantage women and blacks. They would be equipped to teach an employer how to locate individuals within the organization who act as discriminators and reeducate them or neutralize their influence. Such consultant firms might employ psychologists, social workers, and education specialists, as well as personnel experts and lawyers. Winning plaintiffs in large class-action discrimination cases could ask the judge in the case to assign such a consultant group to monitor the offending employer for a few years, and to help in a transition to a nondiscriminatory regime.

2. Realignment of Wage Rates Based on Comparable Duties In the 1980s, a considerable number of state and local government agencies realigned the wages they paid their own employees, raising the wages in the occupations in which women predominate. It was the result of political pressure, and shows what skillful agitation which hits a responsive chord can accomplish, even in a relatively hostile political climate. These wage scales need updating, and this should be done for the employees of the federal government as well. Wage realignment in the public sector would affect occupational wage levels in the private sector. However, if wage realignment is be applied directly to the private sector, a strategy of attack must be formulated. A wholesale approach, rather than individual lawsuits or firm-by-firm negotiations, would make for faster progress. The Labor Department or the National Academy of Sciences should issue guidelines concerning relative wages for important occupations. The agency would rate a small number of widely used occupations, some predominantly female and some predominantly male. The occupations would be rated with respect to intelligence required, extent of knowledge required, responsibility, unpleasantness of the work. Guidelines in the form of wage ratios would be based on the agency’s study.


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Government contractors should be required to realign their wages according to the guidelines to remain eligible for contracts. Even if enforcement powers were lacking, the existence of the guidelines, and knowledge by women employees of what they say, might cause enough ferment in the workplace to make employers interested in applying them.

3. End to Sex Segregation in Vocational and Engineering Education Many blue-collar and technical occupations continue to be virtually closed to women. The schools or courses where the skills needed in these occupations are taught remain mostly male. Public high-school courses which teach people construction trades or how to be machinists or repair engines or electronic equipment have very few if any female students. While the boys are learning high-paying trades, the girls are learning cosmetology, haircutting, typing, or data entry. They are headed for a lifetime of low-wage dead-end jobs. Harassment by male students of the few girls who do try to make it through the technical courses is not uncommon. Vocational education teachers of “male” courses probably do not want trouble among their students, and in any case consider the present situation natural and normal and nothing to worry about. Girls of high-school age are extremely vulnerable to peer pressure to behave in ways that appear to validate their identity as women. They now perceive the technical occupations as outside of their permissible repertoire. Campaigns should be mounted to convince high-school girls that technical and crafts occupations are open to them and that these occupations have important advantages that the typically female occupations do not have. Most of all, they must be convinced that they will not be desexed if they participate in them. Where the schools themselves are inhospitable to training girls in crafts and technical subjects, local feminist groups should organize to force them to change. Compulsory courses in construction skills, mechanical subjects, cooking, and baby care for students of both sexes should be instituted in high schools. Some union-run apprenticeship programs continue to be discriminatory— only white males gain entry. In some cases, applicants for apprenticeship slots are referred by high-school vocational education teachers whose classes lack girls. So no girls get referred. Engineering continues to be a large and lucrative profession which is largely male. While women students are flooding into law, medicine, business, and the sciences, the increase of women among engineering students has been small. While engineering is something one studies in college rather than in high school, what goes on in high schools is crucial to the recruitment of engineering students under the present system. One does not come to an undergraduate engineering major as one might come to a history or economics major, or even a mathematics or physics major. Most people enter those majors as college sophomores or juniors, after a period of trying out courses to see where their talents and tastes lie. By contrast, one applies

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to be an engineering major from high school. It probably never occurs to the vast majority of high-school girls that they might have an enjoyable career as an engineer. Once they get to college, there may be no way they can explore a course or two and find out that they have the talent and the taste for engineering. The engineering department usually is not interested in having them transfer into the program. So 18-year-old girls are shut out of the program because they did not know enough at 17 to apply. The result is that engineering is the one professional field that is not having a sizeable influx of women. The solution to the exclusion of women from engineering must be outreach to the high-school students, plus a restructuring of engineering curricula to allow for transfer in after the freshman year.

4. End to Discrimination against Part-Time Workers Employers customarily treat part-time workers very differently than full-time workers—they get less hourly pay for the same work. Most often, they are deprived of the fringe benefits their employers give to other workers—health insurance, vacations, pay for holidays, paid sick leave, credits toward pensions. They are not considered to be in line for promotion. The poor treatment of part-time workers affects women most of all. In 2001, 27 percent of employed women usually worked part-time, while only 12 percent of men did.1 In some cases, the poor treatment of part-time workers may be motivated by the fact that the workers involved are women, who, because of discrimination, have a weak position in the labor market. Some, perhaps most, women workers with part-time jobs prefer part-time work. However there are some circumstances where women have part-time jobs because of employer discrimination. Employers may offer women applicants part-time jobs, and offer similarly qualified male applicants far more advantageous full-time jobs. While this occurs in retail sales, it is also not uncommon for universities to treat teaching staff in this way. There male professionals may be hired into regular full-time faculty slots, which carry the possibility of promotion and permanence, while females, including those with doctoral degrees, find themselves being offered and being forced to take lower-status part-time appointments, which are “nontenure track” and which pay less for more teaching. The poor pay and benefits that part-time jobs carry penalize those workers—male or female—who would like to devote less than the standard number of hours to paid work in order to have more time for themselves or their families. It makes difficulties for couples who want to share family and child care, and who would be willing to make a modest sacrifice of money income in return for ample time for their home duties. It makes the cost of such a trade-off very high.2 Legislation ending discrimination against part-time workers would require that they receive pro-rata fringe benefits, and that their hourly pay be equal to that of full-time workers performing similar duties. It would not allow


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workers to set their hours unilaterally, but would guarantee those assigned part-time work by their employer the same treatment full-time workers receive. Such legislation would raise costs to employers, and raise some prices. It would add to the burden of government interference with business, something that should not be done lightly. However, if discrimination against part-timers is not outlawed, the problem, which is already an important source of disadvantage to women workers, will grow worse.

5. National Adoption of a Uniform Child Support Plan There are major problems with our current system of enforcing child support payments by parents who live apart from a child of theirs. The system uses the state courts, which are ill-suited to this task. As a result, most children with an absent parent either receive nothing or less than what they are entitled to. Awards cannot be adjusted in a timely way to changes in the income of the absent parent. Cases that cross state boundaries are difficult to resolve. We need a system that will relieve these problems. We already have a well-working national agency that could be expanded to take charge of child support collections: the IRS. It is good at collecting payments that are automatically adjusted for changes in the income on which the tax is based; it is national in scope. A system based on IRS would treat child support as a part of the income tax—levied on persons who had children they did not live with. It would allow for uniform awards based on the absent parent’s income and the number of children involved. Awards would be the same for children born out of wedlock as for children of divorced or separated parents. As now, for each child born out of wedlock, a judicial determination of parenthood would have to be made, based on a genetic test. There would be automatic deductions from pay for child support; for the self-employed, the tax payments would be based on estimated quarterly income. Each custodial parent would receive the funds contributed by the absent parent. In the case where little or nothing was collected, the custodial parent would be sent a minimum payment.3 This would certainly inspire the IRS to good efforts to enforce payment, as well as helping vulnerable families.

6. A Publicly Funded, High-Quality Child Care System Child care that meets a standard of decent quality should be “affordable.” What might that mean in practice? When people work and “play by the rules” in America, one of the richest of all countries, they and their children should have a standard of living that comes up to some basic minimum and their children should have care of a decent quality. A family shouldn’t have to choose between bare necessities and licensed care, or be in a position where it is tempted to look for care that is cheap but of dubious quality and safety. A family with a below-poverty-line income should not have to spend any of that income on child care. A family that earns wages above the poverty level should not have to be pushed into a poverty-level living standard—or

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even below it—by child care costs. Rather the cost of child care to this family should be low enough so that, after paying it, the family would retain some of its above-poverty-line income and be able to use it to provide itself with a standard of living that includes some amenities. If such families are given little or no help with child care expenses, they are likely to choose to enjoy some of those amenities anyway, at the expense of the quality of their children’s care. These considerations suggest that affordable child care is care whose costs to the parents would take away as a co-payment only a fraction of their income above the poverty-line. This idea has to be at the core of any reasonable definition of affordable child care. A program that incorporates this idea will have to provide child care subsidies to families with incomes considerably above the poverty line.4 A program that would require co-payments of 20 percent of a family’s income over the poverty level would cost over $50 billion a year. Some have advocated that the government should provide free, universal care at no cost to job-holding parents, just as it provides free, universal elementary and secondary schooling. This would cost over $125 billion annually. A decision to make quality child care affordable to all American families would go far to solve the problem of child poverty in the United States. Much of the money families now pay for child care could go instead to raising their living standard. If administered well, a program of affordable child care for all featuring low co-payment rates would also be likely to get children out of care that is of low quality and is dangerous and into care that will help them to develop and prosper. Such a program would require an annual flow of considerably larger amounts of public money than we are now providing.

7. Lower Standard Hours of Daily Work There has not been a drop in the standard hours of work since the 1930s when the law requiring employers to pay premium wages for time worked over 40 hours per week was passed. The best way to take drop in the work week would be a reduction in the length of the work day. Women and men would have more time to spend with their children, and more time to participate in housework. If the change were to be phased in over time in small steps, weekly pay need not drop. As hours fall, productivity increases would keep the cost of output to employers fairly constant. Lower daily hours would make long commutes less advantageous, because the ratio of paid work time to unpaid commuting time would fall. While this would be a serious disadvantage to those committed to living far off from their work, it would encourage central-city living, which is more advantageous to single parents and two-earner parent couples.

8. Subsidies for Apartment Complexes with Resident Child Care Facilities Builders should be encouraged to plan new apartment housing designed for parents, which would include child care facilities on the premises. As I have


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suggested, they might be called service mall apartments. In the existing Swedish version of this type of housing, the child care center and the restaurant are under the apartment house management. In the United States, such facilities might be rented out to entrepreneurs, and people who live in other housing might be allowed to patronize them. A “front desk” would take messages and packages, and arrange for housecleaning.

9. Help for Families with an Impaired Child Giving birth to an impaired child is a hazard that every potential parent faces. To the ordinary difficulties and expense of parenthood are added extra ones, often of overwhelming magnitude. The burden almost always falls on the mother. She may be forced to give up any hope of leading an ordinary life with ordinary pleasures—travel, study, work she would like to do—in order to take care of the child. Since we all share the danger of having such a child, we should band together to share the cost, so that it is not concentrated on the unlucky. Public facilities for impaired children exist, but their poor quality makes it difficult for a conscientious parent to make use of them. Private facilities are beyond the reach of most families. We need vastly improved and expanded publicly funded residential facilities to take care of children who are mentally impaired, for those parents who would like to make use of them.

10. A Big Increase in Services Provided by the Government The best way to alleviate the low condition of single mothers and their children would be to provide them with “merit goods,” which are goods and services that we as a society want everybody to have access to. In addition to quality child care mentioned above, this would include health insurance, decent housing in safe neighborhoods, access for their children to higher education, uniformly high-quality elementary and secondary schooling. No conceivable cash benefit or increase in the level of wages would insure that all who need these things would be able to get them—only supplying the services themselves would accomplish that. Probably the only way to supply these things to single mothers would be through universal provision— supplying them to everybody.

An Intelligent Focus for Our Efforts Some women and men argue that reformist efforts on behalf of justice for women, like the ones I am advocating here, represent false priorities. They characterize reducing sex discrimination, better child support, more housework sharing as trivial, or perhaps only of interest to white middle-class women. True feminism, they say, requires us to spend a high proportion of our energy on really important issues like peace, racism, the environment, and globalization. These issues are certainly worthy of the energy of a person of good will. However, none of the campaigns that would address them would do anything

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toward ending the institutions and customs that are oppressive to women. If the cause of women in this world is to advance, then the energies of at least some people must be devoted primarily to advancing it. And anything that advances American women—even American middle-class women— contributes by example to the advancement of women of all classes all over the world. The reforms I have advocated here would not get rid of all injustices in the world or all of the world’s major problems. But they would help a lot of women toward independence, out of poverty, toward greater respect, and out from under the dual burden of wage work and housework. A success in favor of women, even if its beneficiaries were for a time largely limited to white middle-class women in the United States of America, would eventually help women of other races, other classes, and other countries by emulation and example. Other women would argue that many of the reforms I advocate, particularly those in the labor market, contemplate that women would compete in men’s worlds on men’s terms. But, they say, men’s terms should be unacceptable to truly civilized people. The womanly virtues of nurturing, tenderness, cooperation, consideration should become the standard by which both women and men should operate and be judged. We should not accept, they say, the harsh competitive dog-eat-dog environment men have created. Instead of asking that women be accorded a fair chance to compete and succeed in that environment, we should be working to change it. Women, they say, should never adopt the brutal characteristics men have cultivated, even if it means they can never successfully compete with men. The answer to that objection is that women who want to compete with men under the current rules and customs deserve the chance to compete fairly. The world might well be a better place if women and men adopted a less competitive style of behavior and were more nurturing. However, it is very hard to change the rules of a club from outside the clubhouse. For now, competitive behavior is necessary to get into the clubhouse. Those of us who are beneficiaries of the sex-role revolution have time on our side. The changes we have seen in sex roles are the inevitable result of a progressive economy and advancing technological change. Sooner or later, the policies and institutions appropriate to the new arrangements in the family, in child rearing, in the workplace will be realized and built. It is our job to see that they are built with justice, common sense, and humanity, and sooner rather than later.

Appendix

Table A.1 Detailed occupations of full-time workers, 18 and over, ranked by women’s share in the occupation, 2002

Employment (000) Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Occupation Stenographers Dental hygienists Dental assistants Child care workers, private household Family child care providers Secretaries Teachers, prekindergarten & kindergarten Receptionists Speech therapists Eligibility clerks, social welfare Early childhood teachers assistants Dietitians Health specialities teachers Private household cleaners & servants Licensed practical nurses Child care workers, n.e.c. Typists Records clerks Bank tellers Registered nurses Payroll & timekeeping clerks Bookkeepers, accounting, & auditing clerks Billing, posting, & calculating machine operators Information clerks, n.e.c.

Men Women

Women’s share of each occupation (%)

Percent of workers in this and higher ranked occupations (%) Men

Women

* * * 1

142 66 185 133

100 100 100 100

0 0 0 0

1 1 1 1

6 33 14

532 2,105 633

99 98 98

0 0 0

2 5 7

24 3 3 16 3 3 16

895 102 60 349 61 51 234

97 97 96 96 95 95 94

0 0 0 0 0 0 0

8 8 8 9 9 9 9

26 10 38 16 31 188 16 123

366 138 511 195 353 2,064 159 1,225

93 93 93 92 92 92 91 91

0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1

10 10 11 12 12 16 16 18

16

154

91

1

18

35

341

91

1

19 Continued

220

Appendix

Table A.1 Continued

Employment (000) Rank

Occupation

25 26 27 28 29 30

Teachers aides Billing clerks Telephone operators Hairdressers & cosmetologists Library clerks Nursing aides, orderlies, & attendants Interviewers Occupational therapists Legal assistants Cost & rate clerks General office clerks Teachers, special education Welfare service aides Dressmakers Supervisors, financial records processing Management-related occupations, n.e.c. Teachers, elementary school Data-entry keyers Statistical clerks Maids & housemen Communications equipment operators, n.e.c. File clerks Administrative support occupations, n.e.c. Hotel clerks Cashiers Kitchen workers, food preparation Public relations specialists Health aides, except nursing Radiologic technicians Managers, medicine, & health Order clerks Personnel clerks, except payroll & timekeeping Investigators & adjusters, except insurance Photographic process machine operators Clinical lab technologists & technicians

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Men Women



Women

65 22 13 78 8 258

633 218 118 662 67 1,935

91 91 90 89 89 88

1 1 1 1 1 1

20 20 20 22 22 25

18 10 61 7 117 58 17 9 25

127 68 397 45 732 354 85 47 120

87 87 87 87 86 86 84 83 83

1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2

25 25 26 26 27 28 28 28 28

91

436

83

2

29

483 97 19 130 5

2,182 428 83 536 21

82 82 81 80 80

2 3 3 3 3

33 33 34 35 35

36 226

144 887

80 80

3 3

35 36

25 376 51 52 88 43 242 86 16

95 1,313 172 175 286 139 748 264 49

79 78 77 77 76 76 76 75 75

3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

36 39 39 39 40 40 41 42 42

321

935

74

5

43

19

55

74

5

43

100

289

74

5

44

Continued

Appendix

221

Table A.1 Continued

Employment (000)


Percent of workers in this and higher ranked occupations (%)

Rank

Occupation

Men Women

60

Transportation ticket & reservation agents Therapists, n.e.c. Insurance adjusters, examiners, & investigators Personal service occupations, n.e.c. Personnel, training, & labor relations specialists Public transportation attendants Social workers Textile sewing machine operators Health technologists & technicians, n.e.c. Recreation workers Counselors, educational & vocational Graders & sorters, agricultural products Underwriters Waiters & waitresses Librarians Expediters Supervisors, personal service occupations Physical therapists Animal caretakers, except farm Hand packers & packagers Supervisors, general office Psychologists Bill & account collectors Food batchmakers Cementing & gluing machine operators Sales workers, apparel Street & door-to-door sales workers Demonstrators, promoters, & models, sales Food counter, fountain, & related occupations Personnel & labor relations managers Weighers, measurers, checkers, & samplers

57

162

74

5

44

28 160

77 427

73 73

5 5

44 45

47 203

123 529

72 72

5 6

45 46

27 261 107 209

71 671 276 535

72 72 72 72

6 6 6 6

46 47 48 49

26 84

64 207

71 71

6 6

49 49

21

51

71

6

49

38 245 54 103 42

86 548 118 226 85

69 69 69 69 67

7 7 7 7 7

50 50 51 51 51

56 38 108 170 98 76 16 9

110 75 207 321 185 140 29 16

66 66 66 65 65 65 64 64

7 7 7 8 8 8 8 8

51 52 52 52 53 53 53 53

53 62

94 109

64 64

8 8

53 53

13

23

64

8

53

43

73

63

8

54

95

161

63

8

54

19

32

63

8

54

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

Men

Women

Continued

222

Appendix

Table A.1 Continued

Employment (000) Rank 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

Occupation Optical goods workers Electrical & electronic equipment assemblers Administrators, education, & related fields Mathematical science teachers Sales workers, other commodities Production coordinators Sales counter clerks Advertising & related sales occupations English teachers Bookbinders Operations & systems researchers & analysts Pressing machine operators Purchasing agents & buyers, n.e.c. Graders & sorters, except agricultural Laundering & dry cleaning machine operators Physicians’ assistants Supervisors, food preparation & service Teachers, secondary school Bartenders Winding & twisting machine operators Dispatchers Accountants & auditors Authors Sales workers, shoes Mail clerks, except postal service Designers Folding machine operators Biological technicians Economists Production inspectors, checkers, examiners Computer operators Statisticians Technical writers Respiratory therapists Waiters/waitresses’ assistants

Men Women



Women

29 109

49 180

63 62

8 8

54 54

354

584

62

9

55

15 392 86 46 79

24 642 136 72 125

62 62 61 61 61

9 9 9 9 10

55 56 57 57 57

28 12 132

44 18 194

61 60 60

10 10 10

57 57 57

46 108 52

66 150 71

59 58 58

10 10 10

58 58 58

89

118

57

10

58

38 135

50 179

57 57

10 10

58 59

630 93 24

829 122 31

57 57 56

11 11 11

60 60 60

128 854 41 27 76 345 12 55 47 272

162 1,066 50 32 88 401 14 61 51 293

56 56 55 55 54 54 54 53 52 52

12 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 14

60 62 62 62 63 63 63 63 63 64

181 18 35 64 205

196 19 38 68 218

52 52 52 52 52

14 14 14 14 14

64 64 64 65 65 Continued

Appendix

223

Table A.1 Continued


Occupation

126

Officials & administrators, public administration Real estate sales occupation Nursery workers Managers, service organizations, n.e.c. Managers, properties & real estate Engineers, n.e.c. Typesetters & compositors Financial managers Postal clerks, except mail carriers Packaging & filling machine operators Photoengravers & lithographers Pharmacists Art, drama, & music teachers Management analysts Sales workers, furniture & home furnishings Attendants, amusement & recreational facilities Religious workers, n.e.c. Technicians, n.e.c. Managers, food serving & lodging establishments Painters, sculptors, craft art, & art printmakers Other financial officers Stock & inventory clerks Assemblers Miscellaneous food preparation occupations Miscellaneous hand working occupations Insurance sales occupations Artists, performers, & related workers, n.e.c. Biological & life scientists Buyers, wholesale & retail trade, except farm products Machine feeders & offbearers Precious stones & metals workers Sales occupations, other business services

127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157

Men Women



Women

457

480

51

15

66

383 15 394

396 15 401

51 51 50

15 15 16

66 66 67

310 354 13 501 167 138

311 351 12 466 155 127

50 50 49 48 48 48

16 17 17 17 18 18

68 68 68 69 69 70

17 147 27 288 78

16 128 24 250 68

48 47 47 46 46

18 18 18 18 19

70 70 70 70 70

108

91

46

19

71

86 69 956

72 58 795

46 46 45

19 19 20

71 71 72

104

85

45

20

72

551 272 769 227

439 208 564 165

44 43 42 42

21 21 22 23

73 73 74 75

41

29

42

23

75

349 61

249 43

42 42

23 23

75 75

82 134

58 94

41 41

23 23

75 75

50 25 465

35 17 309

41 41 40

23 24 24

75 75 76

Continued

224

Appendix

Table A.1 Continued


Occupation

158 159 160 161

Bakers 97 Veterinarians 24 Editors & reporters 167 Inspectors & compliance officers, 188 except cons Bus drivers 341 Cooks 1,132 Medical scientists 56 Supervisors & proprietors, n.e.c. 3,403 Purchasing managers 89 Miscellaneous textile machine 17 operators Administrators, protective services 42 Health diagnosing practitioners, 39 n.e.c. Biological science teachers 25 Agricultural & food scientists 35 Supervisors, cleaning & building 122 service workers Managers, marketing, 588 advertising, & public relations Stock handlers & baggers 492 Postsecond teachers, subjects not 254 specified Traffic, shipping, & receiving 454 clerks Machine operators, not specified 300 Supervisors, dist, schedulers, & 133 adjusting clerks Chemists, except biochemists 92 Funeral directors 51 Actors & directors 95 Miscellaneous printing machine 24 operators Sales workers, radio, TV, hi-fi, & 182 appliances Broadcast equipment operators 31 Chemical technicians 50 Dental lab & medical appliance 48 technicians Janitors & cleaners 1,444 Securities & financial services 467 sales occupations Physical scientists, n.e.c. 22

162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189

Men Women



Women

64 15 102 114

40 39 38 38

24 24 24 25

76 76 76 76

206 674 33 2,000 52 10

38 37 37 37 37 36

25 27 27 31 31 31

77 78 78 81 82 82

23 21

35 35

31 31

82 82

14 19 65

35 35 35

31 31 31

82 82 82

305

34

32

82

251 129

34 34

33 33

83 83

229

33

34

83

148 64

33 33

34 34

84 84

44 24 44 11

32 32 32 31

34 34 35 35

84 84 84 84

82

31

35

84

14 22 21

31 30 30

35 35 35

84 84 84

619 198

30 30

37 37

85 86

9

30

37

86 Continued

Appendix

225

Table A.1 Continued


Occupation

190 191 192 193 194 195

Business & promotion agents 28 Science technicians, n.e.c. 72 Supervisors, farm workers 31 Helpers, mechanics, & repairers 21 Psychology teachers 18 Miscellaneous machine 935 operators, n.e.c. Managers & administrators, n.e.c. 6,744 Photographers 105 Supervisors, motor vehicle operators 84 Physicians 645 Correctional institution officers 294 Musicians & composers 70 Engineering technicians, n.e.c. 139 Punching & stamping press 61 machine operators Computer systems analysts & 1,544 scientists Slicing & cutting machine 93 operators Lawyers 752 Mail carriers, postal service 296 Sales representatives, mining, 1,356 manufacturing, & wholesale Compressing & compacting 19 machine operators Computer programmers 515 Ship captains & mates, except 24 fishing boats Protective service occupations, 22 n.e.c. Optometrists 47 Laborers, except construction 980 Guards & police, except public 759 service Molding & casting machine 72 operators Miscellaneous precision workers, 26 n.e.c. Upholsterers 41 Farmers, except horticultural 677 Production testers 52 Production helpers 48 Electrical & electronic technicians 395

196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222

Men Women



Women

11 29 12 8 7 362

29 29 29 28 28 28

37 38 38 38 38 39

86 86 86 86 86 86

2,609 40 32 246 111 26 52 22

28 28 28 28 27 27 27 27

47 48 48 48 49 49 49 49

91 91 91 91 91 91 92 92

566

27

51

93

34

27

51

93

265 100 448

26 25 25

52 53 54

93 93 94

6

25

54

94

167 8

24 24

55 55

94 94

7

24

55

94

15 302 230

24 24 23

55 56 57

94 95 95

21

22

57

95

8

22

57

95

11 183 14 13 102

22 21 21 21 20

58 58 58 59 59

95 96 96 96 96 Continued

226

Appendix

Table A.1 Continued


Occupation

223 224 225 226 227

Supervisors & guards 77 Farm workers 487 Butchers & meat cutters 198 Baggage porters & bellhops 33 Grinding, abrading, buffing, & 74 polishing machine operators Sheriffs, bailiffs, & other law 156 enforcement officers Supervisors, production 1,031 occupations Drafting occupations 212 Crushing & grinding machine 26 operators Telephone installers & repairers 264 Metal plating machine operators 21 Data processing equipment repairers 269 News vendors 34 Geologists & geodesists 42 Supervisors, police & detectives 132 Messengers 90 Supervisors, computer equipment 24 operators Managers, farms, except 142 horticultural Sales engineers 41 Extruding & forming machine 35 operators Printing press operators 249 Miscellaneous woodworking 39 machine operators Architects 211 Sales workers, hardware & 223 building supplies Industrial engineers 251 Chemical engineers 89 Mixing & blending machine 108 operators Engineers, n.e.c. 341 Police & detectives, public service 595 Painting & paint spraying machine 159 operators Air traffic controllers 31 Announcers 42 Inspectors, testers, & graders 150

228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255

Men Women



Women

19 124 49 8 18

20 20 20 20 20

59 60 60 60 60

96 96 96 96 96

38

19

60

96

247

19

62

97

49 6

19 19

62 62

97 97

58 5 57 7 9 27 19 5

18 18 18 18 17 17 17 17

62 62 63 63 63 63 63 63

97 97 97 97 97 97 97 97

29

17

63

97

8 7

17 16

63 63

97 97

48 7

16 15

64 64

97 97

37 38

15 15

64 64

97 97

41 15 18

14 14 14

65 65 65

98 98 98

55 94 24

14 14 13

65 66 66

98 98 98

5 6 21

13 13 12

66 66 67

98 98 98 Continued

Appendix

227

Table A.1 Continued


Occupation

256 257 258

Aerospace engineers Clergy Railroad conductors & yardmasters Miscellaneous electrical & electronic equipment repairers Civil engineers Meter readers Athletes Parking lot attendants Supervisors, mechanics & repairers Power plant operators Sales workers, parts Vehicle washers & equipment cleaners Barbers Insulation workers Industrial truck & tractor equipment operators Engineering teachers Surveying & mapping technicians Taxicab drivers & chauffeurs Electrical repairers, commercial & industrial equipment Welders & cutters Sales workers, motor vehicles & boats Electrical & electronic engineers Freight, stock, & material handlers, n.e.c. Groundskeepers & gardeners, except farm Locksmiths & safe repairers Machinists Miscellaneous plant & system operators Automobile body & related repairers Dentists Garbage collectors Supervisors, related agricultural occupations Miscellaneous metal, plastic, stone, & glass machine operators

259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287

Men Women



Women

114 418 43

16 57 6

12 12 12

67 67 67

98 98 98

75

10

12

68

98

274 57 49 45 252 61 153 253

36 8 6 6 32 7 18 29

12 12 12 12 11 11 10 10

68 68 68 68 68 68 69 69

98 98 98 98 98 98 98 98

61 80 620

7 9 63

10 10 9

69 69 70

98 98 98

29 58 309 222

3 6 29 21

9 9 9 9

70 70 70 71

98 99 99 99

550 369

50 33

8 8

71 72

99 99

794 675

70 58

8 8

73 74

99 99

692

59

8

75

99

25 541 53

2 43 4

7 7 7

75 75 75

99 99 99

206

15

7

76

99

159 40 174

12 3 12

7 7 6

76 76 76

99 99 99

31

2

6

76

99

Continued

228

Appendix

Table A.1 Continued

Employment (000)


Percent of workers in this and higher ranked occupations (%)

Rank

Occupation

Men Women

288

Furnace, kiln, & oven operators, except food Specified mechanics & repairers, n.e.c. Numerical control machine operators Cabinet makers & bench carpenters Sheet metal workers Garage & service station related occupations Airplane pilots & navigators Mechanical engineers Painters, construction & maintenance Truck drivers Electrical power installers & repairers Telephone line installers & repairers Miscellaneous material moving equipment operators Carpet installers Millwrights Construction laborers Mechanics & repairers, n.e.c. Stationary engineers Firefighting occupations Concrete & terrazzo finishers Sewing machine operators Construction trades, n.e.c. Industrial machinery repairers Forestry & conservation scientists Operating engineers Plasterers Supervisors, n.e.c. Tile setters, hard & soft Separating, filtering, & clarifying machine operators Pest control occupation Carpenters Tool & die makers Drywall installers

58

4

6

76

99

442

28

6

77

99

41

3

6

77

99

80

5

5

77

99

157 158

8 8

5 5

77 77

99 99

133 382 613

7 18 28

5 5 4

78 78 79

99 99 99

3,559 140

147 5

4 4

83 84

100 100

47

2

3

84

100

61

2

3

84

100

128 78 985 413 142 303 119 69 277 513 27

4 2 29 11 4 8 3 2 7 13 1

3 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2

84 84 85 86 86 86 86 86 87 87 88

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

273 58 983 112 85

6 1 23 3 2

2 2 2 2 2

88 88 89 89 89

100 100 100 100 100

59 1,582 108 191

1 28 2 3

2 2 2 2

90 92 92 92

100 100 100 100

289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320

Men

Women

Continued

Appendix

229

Table A.1 Continued


Occupation

321

Plumbers, pipefitters, & 661 steamfitters Electricians 1,007 Drivers & sales workers 153 Horticultural specialty farmers 49 Brickmasons & stonemasons 293 Bus, truck, & stationary engine 389 mechanics Aircraft engine mechanics 179 Water & sewage treatment plant 115 operators Heavy equipment mechanics 236 Surveyors & mapping scientists 33 Fishers 37 Automobile mechanics 980 Crane & tower operators 77 Helpers, construction trades 88 Heating, air conditioning, & 378 refrigeration mechanics Lathe & turning machine 27 operators Small engine repairers 49 Farm equipment mechanics 56 Timber cutting & logging 51 occupations Office machine repairers 58 Elevator installers & repairers 35 Household appliance & power 60 tool repairers Supervisors, firefighting & fire 43 prevention Supervisors, electrical & power 46 transmitter installers Locomotive operating occupations 48 Hoist & winch operators 26 Excavating & loading machine 129 operators Grader, dozer, & scraper operators 45 Boilermakers 26 Mining machine operators 37 Drillers, oil well 29 Supervisors, extractive 39 occupations Structural metal workers 73

322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353

Men Women



Women

10

2

93

100

15 2 1 4 5

1 1 1 1 1

94 94 94 95 95

100 100 100 100 100

2 1

1 1

95 96

100 100

2 * * 6 * * *

1 1 1 1 1 0 0

96 96 96 97 97 97 98

100 100 100 100 100 100 100

*

0

98

100

* * *

0 0 0

98 98 98

100 100 100

* * *

0 0 0

98 98 99

100 100 100

*

0

99

100

*

0

99

100

* * *

0 0 0

99 99 99

100 100 100

* * * * *

0 0 0 0 0

99 99 99 99 99

100 100 100 100 100

*

0

99

100 Continued

230

Appendix

Table A.1 Continued


Occupation

354 355 356 357

Sheet metal duct installers Roofers Glaziers Construction inspectors

Men Women 47 226 56 94


* * * *

0 0 0 0


Women

99 100 100 100

100 100 100 100

Note: Occupations with fewer than 25,000 workers are not listed in the table, although the workers are included in the last two columns. n.e.c: not elsewhere classified; * fewer than 500. Corresponding percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number. n.e.c. not elsewhere classified. Source: Data from the Current Population Survey tabulated by the author.

Notes

1


1. In 2000, 22% of families with children under 18 were maintained by unmarried women. Not all of these women were “lone mothers.” Some of these households contained other adults, not married to the householder. Some married-couple families contained children whose biological father was not the husband. See U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Characteristics of Families in 2000,” USDL 01-103, April 19, 2001. 2. Labor force statistics quoted throughout the book are from the website of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov) unless otherwise specified. 3. See Howard V. Hayghe, “Developments in Women’s Labor Force Participation,” Monthly Labor Review (September 1997): 41–46, table 1. 4. See Heidi I. Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in Lydia Sargent (ed.), Women and Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1979). 5. See Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 6. On relations between husbands and wives, see Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 7. The originator of this argument, cited by many economists, is Gary S. Becker. However Becker himself appears to be undecided as to the actual importance of sex discrimination. See The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). 8. See Solomon Polachek, “Occupational Self-Selection: A Human Capital Approach to Sex Differrences in Occupational Structure,” Review of Economics and Statistics 63,1 (February 1981): 60–69. For a refutation, see Paula England, “The Failure of Human Capital Theory to Explain Occupational Sex Segregation,” Journal of Human Resources 17,3 (summer 1982): 358–370. 9. National Center for Health Statistics, “New CDC Report Shows Teen Birth Rate Hits Record Low,” July 24, 2001. 10. Timothy S. Grall, “Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support: 2001,” Current Population Reports P60-225, U.S. Census Bureau, October 2003.

2


1. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1912). 2. See Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

232

Notes

3. According to the definition in current use by the statistical agencies of the United States, a person is counted as being “in the labor force” if he or she is employed or is actively searching for a job. To qualify as “employed,” a person does not have to be working full time; any part-time job suffices. Those working on an unpaid basis in a family money-making enterprise are also, in theory at least, included in the U.S. labor force. In practice, few farmwives are counted, despite the fact that most of them are involved in some aspect of farming. 4. Since 1950, the data refer to the part of the population aged 20 and above; from 1890 to 1940, aged 14 and above; from 1870 to 1880, aged 10 and above. Labor force data prior to 1948 are from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960). 5. The labor force participation rate for women aged 20 and above in 1999 was 60.7%. In 2003, it was 60.6%. These data are given on http://www.bls.gov. 6. Another source of the drop in men’s labor force participation has been a reduction in black men’s participation. 7. On employers’ “marriage bars”—the forced retirement of women from jobs upon marriage—see Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 8. Linda J. Waite, David E. Kanouse, and Thomas J. Blaschke, Changes in the Lifestyles of New Parents (Santa Monica: Rand, 1984). 9. See Howard Hayghe, “Rise in Mothers’ Labor Force Activity Includes Those with Infants,” Monthly Labor Review 109,2 (February 1986), and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Characteristics of Families in 2000,” USDL 01-103, April 19, 2001. 10. Information on wages prior to 1960 is from Historical Statistics. For the trend since 1979, see U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2000,” Report 952, August 2001. Data for each of the intermediate years are found in the annual Current Population Reports issued in the month of March. 11. Earnings data from Current Population Reports, P60-53 and P60-209. Price Indexes for the period 1939–1954 from Historical Statistics; those since then are from the website http://www.bls.gov. 12. Economists summarize this by saying that the marginal utility of income falls as income rises. 13. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. viii. 14. Deborah Fallows, who believes that mothers should stay home with their children, understands this dodge, and attempts to debunk the “need” rationale for mothers to take up employment. See her book A Mother’s Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985). At this writing, the most prominent advocate of mothers staying home with their children is the right-wing talk-show host Dr. Laura Slesinger, who tells her listeners that it is better for a child to be given up for adoption to a couple with an at-home wife than to remain with its job-holding biological mother. 15. See Myra Marx Ferree, “Sacrifice, Satisfaction and Social Change: Employment and the Family,” in Karen Brodkin Sacks and Dorothy Remy (eds), My Troubles are Going to Have Trouble with Me (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1974), pp. 61–79. 16. The Social Security tax rate rose in terms of percentage of income, and the inflation was pushing people with no increase in real income into higher income tax brackets. 17. See Maxine L. Margolis, Mothers and Such: Views of American Women and Why They Changed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chapter 4. 18. Clair Vickery Brown, “Home Production for Use in a Market Economy,” in Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (eds), Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions (New York: Longman, 1982), pp. 151–167.

Notes

233

19. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Expenditures in 1999,” Report 949, May 2001. 20. Valerie K. Oppenheimer, “The Female Labor Force in the United States: Demographic and Economic Factors Governing its Growth and Changing Composition,” Population Monograph Series, No. 5 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1970). 21. In terms of supply and demand curves, the wage-change theory suggests a shift upward in the demand curve for women’s labor, and a move along a fixed supply curve. The suitable-jobs theory posits a shift in both the supply and the demand curves. 22. Margery Davies, Women’s Place is at the Typewriter (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). 23. See Myra Strober and Carolyn Arnold, “The Dynamics of Occupational Segregation by Gender: Bank Tellers (1950–80),” in Clair Brown and Joseph Pechman (eds), Gender in the Workplace (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987). 24. Jean Lipman-Blumen, “Role De-Differentiation as a System Response to Crisis: Occupational and Political Roles of Women,” Sociological Inquiry 43,2 (1973): 105–129.

3 The Social Factors: Births, Schools, Divorces, Ideas 1. National Vital Statistics System, “Trends in Pregnancy Rates for the United States, 1976–97: An Update,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 49, No. 4, June 6, 2001; National Vital Statistics System, “Births: Preliminary Data for 2002,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 51, No. 11, June 25, 2003. 2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing office, 1960), p. 24. 3. National Vital Statistics System, “Births: Preliminary Data for 2000,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 49, No. 5, June 24, 2001. 4. Ibid. 5. Nancy Folbre, “Of Patriarchy Born: The Political Economy of Fertility Decisions,” Feminist Studies 9,2 (summer 1983): 261–280. 6. Historical Statistics and Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment and Wages, 2001,” November 6, 2002. 7. Warren C. Sanderson, “Qualitative Aspects of Marriage, Fertility and Family Limitation in Nineteenth Century America: Another Application of the Coale Specifications,” Demography 16,3 (August 1979): 339–358. 8. Pascal K. Whelpton and Clyde V. Kiser, Social and Psychological Factors Affecting Fertility (New York: Milbank Memorial Fund, 1950). 9. Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York: Dover, 1971). 10. Arland Thornton and Deborah Freedman, The Changing American Family, Population Reference Bureau, Inc., Vol. 38, No. 4 (October 1983). 11. The cases are Griswold v. Connecticut 381 U.S. 4779 (1965) and Eisenstadt v. Baird 405 U.S. 438 (1972). 12. 410 U.S. 113 (1973). 13. “Trends in Pregnancy Rates.” 14. Claudia Goldin, “From the Valley to the Summit: The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women’s Work,” NBER Working Paper No. 10335, March 2004. 15. National Vital Statistics System, “Trends in Pregnancies and Pregnancy Rates by Outcome: Estimates for the United States, 1976–96,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 21, No. 56, February 11, 2000.

234

Notes

16. Carol Cassell, Swept Away: Why Women Fear Their Own Sexuality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984). 17. Gary Becker and Richard Easterlin favored such theories. See Paul T. Schultz, The Economics of Population (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1981). 18. See Alice Nakamura and Masao Nakamura, The Second Paycheck: An Analysis of the Employment and Earnings of Married Women (New York: Academic Press, 1985). 19. Tabulated by the author from the Current Population Survey for March 2000. 20. Historical Statistics, p. 212. 21. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2000, p. 183. 22. Statistical Abstract, 2000, p. 196 and Statistical Abstract, 1994, p. 191. 23. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers: Second Quarter 2001,” USDL 01-228, July 19, 2001. 24. Kingsley Davis, “The Future of Marriage,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 36,8 (May 1983): 33. 25. A survey of women 15–44 years of age done in 1995 showed that 43% of first marriages had broken up within 15 years. Additional marriages will break up at still older ages. See Matthew D. Bramlett and William D. Mosher, “First Marriage Dissolution, Divorce, and Remarriage in the United States,” Advance Data Number 323, National Center for Health Statistics, May 31, 2001. 26. The figure is for 2002, from http://www.census.gov. 27. Ibid. 28. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Doubleday, 1983). 29. Martha Guttentag and Paul F. Secord, Too Many Women: The Sex Ratio Question (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983). 30. Statistical Abstract, 2000, p. 12 31. The Census Bureau counted 5,054,000 households with two unrelated adults of the opposite sex in 2003. This does not include same-sex couples and heterosexual couples living with others. See http://www.census.gov. 32. Unpublished table calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from data from the Current Population Survey taken in March 2002. 33. Ernest A.T. Barth and W.B. Watson, “Social Stratification and the Family in Mass Society,” Social Forces 45 (1967): 392–402. 34. Christine de Pisan (ca. 1364–ca. 1431) wrote The Book of the City of Ladies [translated and with an introduction and notes by Rosalind Brown-Grant (London, New York: Penguin Books, 1999)]. 35. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 157. 36. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953). 37. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963). 38. The National Organization for Women, the National Women’s Political Caucus, The National Abortion Rights Action League. Organizations formed later include the National Women’s Law Center, 9 to 5, Women Employed, The Feminist Majority, Wider Opportunities for Women. 39. Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (eds), Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); see also Barbara R. Bergmann, “Becker’s Theory of the Family: Preposterous Conclusions,” Feminist Economics 1,1 (spring 1995). 40. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Gender and Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1993); Paula England, “The Failure of Human Capital Theory to Explain Occupational Sex Segregation,” Journal of Human Resources 17 (1982): 358–370; William T. Bielby

Notes

235

and James N. Barron, “A Woman’s Place is With Other Women: Sex Segregation Within Organizations,” in Barbara F. Reskin (ed.), Sex Segregation in the Workplace (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1984), pp. 27–55.

4


1. Irene LoRe was one of a group of women who filed a suit against Chase Manhattan Bank in 1976 charging a wide-ranging policy of discrimination aimed at preventing women from achieving managerial, professional, or official positions. The suit was settled, with the bank paying $1.8 million as part of the settlement. As is usual in such settlements, the bank did not admit that it had discriminated. For description of the charges, see LoRe v. Chase Manhattan Corp., 15 FEP Cases 724 (1977). 2. One of those quoting Leviticus, and in a journal not usually given to citing God’s word, was Victor Fuchs, “Sex Differences in Economic Well-Being,” Science 25 (April 1986): 459–464. 3. These data are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and refer to full-time wage and salary workers. See http://www.bls.gov. 4. “Title IX and Equal Opportunity in Vocational and Technical Education: A Promise Still Owed to the Nation’s Young Women” (Washington, DC: National Women’s Law Center, June 2002). 5. For data for the year 2002, see the table A.1 in the Appendix. The first edition of The Economic Emergence of Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986) contains a table with 1984 data similar to the one in the Appendix. 6. This proportion of women changing (PWC), so as to give women a share of jobs in each occupation equal to their share in the labor force, but keeping the size of occupations as they are, is calculated as @max (0, f(i)/F⫺(f(i)⫹m(i))/(F⫹M)) summed over i, where f(i) and m(i) are the numbers of female and male workers in the ith industry, and F and M are the total number of female and male workers, respectively. The “index of dissimilarity” (DI) from these same data is .52. This is calculated as, 1 2*@abs(f(i)/F⫺m(i)/M) summed over i The DI is the proportion of women or men who would have to change occupations to give women the same distribution over occupations as men now have. See Richard Anker, Gender and Jobs: Sex Segregation in Occupations in the World (Geneva: International Labor Office, 1998). Andrea Beller calculated the index of dissimilarity as .63 for 1981 and as .71 for 1950. See Andrea H. Beller, “Trends in Occupational Segregation by Sex and Race, 1960–1981,” in Barbara F. Reskin (ed.), Sex Segregation in the Workplace (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1984). 7. See Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Gender & Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1993). 8. Ibid., pp. 30–37. A job with substantial numbers of males and females doing the same work was defined as one with 30–70 percent women. A survey on sex segregation done on a national basis in 1991 came up with similar findings. With a total absence of assignment based on sex or race, the percentage of people working only with members of their own race or sex would not be zero, because some job titles would have only a single employee, and some small groups would be single-sex or single-race by chance.

236

Notes

9. The ad appeared on April 5, 1996 on page A21. 10. The portraits were reprinted in the book Portraits of Grief (New York: Times Books, 2002). 11. These “averages” are medians: 50% made more and 50% less. 12. Gary Becker first made the argument that discriminators would be competed to death. See his book The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). 13. Morgan v. Hertz Corp. 542 F.Supp. 123 (1981). 14. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848). See book II, chapter 4. 15. For example, see Theodore Caplow, The Sociology of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954). 16. Jacob Mincer and Solomon Polachek, “Family Investments in Human Capital: Earnings of Women,” Journal of Political Economy 82,2, part 2 (March/April 1974): S76–S108, Solomon Polachek, “Occupational Self-Selection: A Human Capital Approach to Sex Differences in Occupational Structure,” Review of Economics and Statistics 63,1 (February 1981): 60–69. For a refutation, see Paula England, “The Failure of Human Capital Theory to Explain Occupational Sex Segregation,” Journal of Human Resources 17,3 (summer 1982): 358–370. 17. Mary Corcoran and Greg J. Duncan,“Work History, Labor Force Attachment, and Earnings Differences between the Sexes,” Journal of Human Resources 14 (winter 1979): 3–20. 18. Many of those who did not work full time year round in 2001 did not leave the labor market, but had a spell of involuntary unemployment. 19. The data set also gives information on male workers’ children, but I have assumed that men’s work behavior and therefore their pay is not affected by the presence of children. 20. These figures derive from an ordinary least squares regression on gross weekly wage of all full-time workers over 18, with sex and all the other items listed in table 4.3 used as explanatory variables. The coefficients of all variables listed are statistically significant, with the exception of the number of women’s children aged 6–18. The adjusted r-square is 0.29. A slightly better fit is obtained with a regression on the logarithm of the weekly wage, but the results are similar. 21. Jane Waldfogel has found large and persistent negative effects on women’s hourly wages of dropping out of the labor force, which in most cases is for purposes of child rearing. However her sample included full-time and part-time workers. The latter were more likely to have dropped out, and part-time work is typically paid less than fulltime work. See Jane Waldfogel, “Understanding the ‘Family Gap’ in Pay for Women with Children,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 12,1 (winter 1998): 137–156. 22. One plausible explanation is that the high cost of child care causes some mothers to opt for part-time jobs or to stay home, and that this is particularly true of women who have reason to believe that their earnings will be sub-par given their education. 23. Daniel Hamburg, in a private communication, points out that some women workers whose children are over 18 may in the past have dropped out of the labor force to care for them, or worked part-time, and that part of the currently existing gap may be due to that. 24. A small part of the pay gap between women and men is due to this fact, because African Americans constitute a higher proportion of the female workforce than of the male workforce. However the opposite is true of Hispanic workers—they form a higher proportion of the male workforce than of the female workforce. Altogether race and ethnicity differences in the male and female workforces account for only $3 of the gap between women’s and men’s wages in 2002. 25. Based on data from “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2000,” BLS Report 952, table 3. New average wages for full-time male and female workers were calculated on the assumption that (1) the total number of engineers would have been the same,

Notes

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

237

(2) women would have had engineering jobs in proportion to their share of all professional jobs, and (3) the additional women engineers would have earned what women engineers actually earned in that year ($949 per week), instead of the average pay of women professional workers ($725). This would have resulted in average female wages rising from $491 to $495, and male wages falling from $645 to $643. Gary S. Becker, “Human Capital, Effort, and the Sexual Division of Labor,” Journal of Labor Economics 3,1, part 2 (January 1985): S33–S58. The quotation is from page S35. Denise D. Bielby and William T. Bielby, “She Works Hard for the Money: Household Responsibilities and the Allocation of Work Effort,” American Journal of Sociology 93,5 (March 1988): 1031–1059. The literature on these studies is reviewed in Sharon Toffey Shepela and Ann T. Viviano, “Some Psychological Factors Affecting Job Segregation and Wages,” in Helen Remick (ed.), Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). That theories, such as those by Becker, which are made up by economists out of their imaginings of how people behave, are more convincing than actual cases is one of the curiosities of contemporary social science. A Unique Competence: A Study of Equal Employment Opportunity in the Bell System (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1972), reprinted in the Congressional Record for February 17, 1972 at pages E1234–E1272. A useful summary of this document is presented in Barbara Allen Babcock, Ann E. Freedman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Susan C. Ross, Sex Discrimination and the Law (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975). See also, Phyllis Wallace (ed.), Equal Employment Opportunity and the AT&T Case (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). Quoted in Babcock et al., Sex Discrimination, p. 289. Computations made by the author based on the submissions of Michigan Bell of employment data by race, sex, and occupational group to the EEOC, produced in connection with the discovery required in the course of a Title VII lawsuit against the company, Gerlach et al. v. Michigan Bell. See Barbara R. Bergmann, “The Common Sense of Affirmative Action,” in Selected Affirmative Action Topics in Employment and Business Set-Asides (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1985). Job Patterns for Minorities and Women in Private Industry, 2000 (Washington, DC: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2001), p. 23. The data from the EEOC on which this statement is based do not contain information on the penetration of women into the upper levels of management in the industry. Ronette King, “Bias Lawsuit Has LA. Roots,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 27, 1997. L. M. Sixel, “EEOC Sues Home Depot Over Women’s Job Status,” The Houston Chronicle, August 23, 2001; Business section, p. 1. Nichols’s complaint was made while the company was operating under two consent decrees wherein it had agreed to erect a system to hire and promote women fairly. After she filed her complaint, she did get the promotion. King, “Bias Lawsuit.” Bloomberg News, “Home Depot Settles Four Sex Bias Lawsuits; Retail Chain Will Take $104 Million Charge,” The Houston Chronicle, September 20, 1997. Again, as is typical in cases settled without trial, no fault was admitted. Steven Greenhouse, “Wal-Mart Faces Lawsuit Over Sex Discrimination,” The New York Times, February 16, 2003, p. 18. Mauricio Valásquez, “The National Litigious Environment,” http://www. diversitydtg.com. A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT (Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999). The quotation is from p. 8. Status of Women Faculty, p. 3.

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Notes

5 Occupational Segregation by Sex:The Root of Women’s Disadvantage 1. See Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Gender & Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1993). 2. The occasion was a meeting sponsored by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. One of the featured speakers at the lunch was a woman high up in the hierarchy of the AFL-CIO, who of course made no reference to the lack of women among the servers. 3. Peter A. Riach and Judith Rich, “Field Experiments of Discrimination in the Market Place,” Economic Journal 112 (2002): 480–518. 4. See Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1,2 (June 1987): 125–151. To anyone seeking an understanding of women’s displays of gender, Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984) is indispensable. 5. Sandra L. Bem and Daryl J. Bem, “Does Sex-Biased Job Advertising ‘Aid and Abet’ Sex Discrimination?” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 3,1 (1973): 6–18. 6. Rosabeth Kantor, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 7. This account is based on the complaint documents filed in federal court by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which are available in the Commission’s files. 8. Digested from the winter 1985 issue of GENERATIONS, The Newsletter of the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition, PO Box 1357, Lexington, Kentucky 40590. For more recent accounts along the same line, see Susan Eisenberg, We’ll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 58–59. 9. “Trying to Fill A Fallen Husband’s Boots: Widow of Firefighter Killed on 9/11 Wants to Join the Department,” New York Times, April 2, 2003, p. A19. The Times editorial staff clearly knew about the extreme segregation in the Fire Department in the fall of 2001, having published the photographs, but only reported on that segregation almost two years later, and only in the context of a human interest story about a particular woman. 10. On the exclusion of blacks from crafts jobs by unions, see Herbert Hill, “The Problems of Race in American Labor History,” Review in American History 24, 2 (1995): 189–208. 11. This is the definition given by the Working Women’s Institute, quoted in Suzanne C. Carothers and Peggy Crull, “Contrasting Sexual Harassment in Female- and MaleDominated Occupations,” in Karen Brodkin Sacks and Dorothy Remy (eds), My Troubles are Going to Have Trouble with Me (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), pp. 219–220. 12. U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, Sexual Harassment in the Federal Workplace: Is it a Problem?, March 1981, p. 47. 13. See the discussion in Catherine MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1979). 14. This account appeared in a term paper by Deborah J. Wigler. 15. See Carothers and Crull, “Contrasting Sexual Harassment.” 16. Complaint of EEOC versus CBS Broadcasting Inc., October 25, 2000. 17. “EEOC Settles Bias Suit for $2.6 Million Against TWA,” Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, May 24, 2001. 18. Susan Carney, “Automakers Struggle to Stem Harassment: Part 1,” The Detroit News, October 6, 2002. 19. The quote is from an interview on National Public Radio. 20. “Mitsubishi Settles Suit for $34 Million,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 12, 1998. 21. Peter Doeringer and Michael J. Piore, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1971).

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22. Letter of Jay Allen, Wal-Mart senior vice president for corporate affairs in the Washington Post, September 10, 2003, p. A18. 23. Some researchers mistakenly use the rate of promotion by sex in judging whether women are discriminated against. See, e.g., Kristin McCue, “Promotions and Wage Growth,” Journal of Labor Economics 14,2 (April 1996): 175–209. 24. Solomon Polachek, “Occupational Self-Selection: A Human Capital Approach to Sex Differences in Occupational Structure,” Review of Economics and Statistics 63,1 (February 1981): 60–69. 25. Paula England, “The Failure of Human Capital Theory to Explain Occupational Sex Segregation,” Journal of Human Resources 17,3 (summer 1982): 358–370. 26. Valerie K. Oppenheimer, The Female Labor Force in the United States: Demographic and Economic Factors Governing its Growth and Changing Composition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). 27. Myra H. Strober and Carolyn Arnold, “The Dynamics of Occupational Segregation by Gender: Bank Tellers (1950–1980),” in Clair Brown and Joseph A. Pechman (eds), Gender in the Workplace (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987). 28. Ibid., p. 99. 29. One study recorded that women employees had spent 12% of their time with their present employer in training, while men had spent 20%. Mary Corcoran and Greg J. Duncan, “Work History, Labor Force Attachment, and Earnings Differences between the Sexes,” Journal of Human Resources 14 (winter 1979): 3–20. 30. A review of studies on turnover rates by sex is given in Paula England, “Socioeconomic Explanations of Job Segregation,” in Helen Remick (ed.), Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimination (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984). 31. Max Boot, “For Plaintiffs’ Lawyers, There’s No Place like Home Depot,” Wall Street Journal, February 12, 1997, section A, p. 17. Boot was on the editorial staff of the paper. 32. These data are from the U.S. Statistical Abstract, 2003. 33. Title IX and Equal Opportunity in Vocational and Technical Education: A Promise Still Owed to the Nation’s Young Women (Washington, DC: National Women’s Law Center, June 2002).

6


1. These medians come from the Current Population Survey, March 2002. They refer to full-time workers. 2. See the discussion in chapter 4 of Mary Corcoran and Greg J. Duncan, “Work History, Labor Force Attachment, and Earnings Differences between the Sexes,” Journal of Human Resources 14 (winter 1979): 3–20. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., see table 4.1. 5. Solomon Polachek, “Occupational Self-Selection: A Human Capital Approach to Sex Differences in Occupational Structure,” Review of Economics and Statistics 63,1 (February 1981): 60–69. 6. Gary S. Becker, “Human Capital, Effort, and the Sexual Division of Labor,” Journal of Labor Economics 3,1, part 2 (January 1985): S33–S58. 7. William T. Bielby and James N. Baron, “A Woman’s Place is with Other Women: Sex Segregation Within Organizations,” in Barbara F. Reskin (ed.), Sex Segregation in the Workplace (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1984), pp. 27–55. 8. See Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Gender & Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1993).

240

Notes

9. Sometimes economists speak of a single labor market divided into segments based on sex, and also on class and human capital differences. Workers are compartmentalized into particular segments, and cannot move from one segment to another. The idea of a “dual labor market” is similar. See Peter Doeringer and Michael J. Piore, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1971). 10. Some restaurants that hire both men and women have tended to assign them to different parts of the restaurant or different shifts, with the males getting the assignments in which the tips are higher. Restaurants seldom mix table servers of different races also, although people of one race may bring the food and people of another race may take away the dirty dishes. Recently some restaurants have started using males and females interchangeably. 11. We know from the phenomenon of unemployment that the market does not adjust wages to equalize the supply of labor to the demand. Employers, for reasons of morale, dislike lowering established wage rates. However wages in particular occupations slowly realign themselves as the general wage level rises with the rise in productivity. Those occupations with excess supply tend to get lower-than-average wage increases. 12. This statement was given as part of the evidence in a sex-discrimination suit against Sears filed by the EEOC. Sears’ chief expert witness, economist Dr. Joan Haworth, had picked out Howland’s application as an example of a woman applicant to Sears who, despite commission sales experience, was in reality not an applicant for a commission sales job. To rebut Dr. Haworth’s testimony, the EEOC tracked down Alice Howland and elicited from her the statement quoted in the text. 13. Although women’s productivity is kept lower than men’s by segregation, the productivity of workers of both sexes has tended to rise over time, thanks to the increase in the nature and quantity of productive equipment (see chapter 2). 14. For a more technical discussion of these issues, see Barbara R. Bergmann, “Occupational Segregation, Wages and Profits when Employers Discriminate by Race or Sex,” Eastern Economic Journal 1 (April/July 1974): 561–573. 15. Early research on this issue was done by Francine D. Blau. See her Equal Pay in the Office (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1977). 16. This has been documented for British establishments in Rosemary Cromption and Gareth Jones, White-Collar Proletariat: Deskilling and Gender in Clerical Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). 17. In conversation, Heidi Hartmann noted that this was the case with male clerical workers at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. 18. Stanley Holmes, “A New Black Eye For Boeing? Internal Documents Suggest Years of Serious Compensation Gaps for Women,” Business Week Online, April 26, 2004. 19. See Academe, May/June 2004. 20. Testimony given in Lemons v. City and County of Denver, 17 FEP Cases 906 (D.Col 1978). 21. County of Washington v. Gunther, 452 U.S. 967 (1981). 22. See Rosabeth Canter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 23. Claudia Goldin, “The Gender Gap in Historical Perspective,” in Comparable Worth: Issue for the 80s (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1984). 24. See chapter 7 of Paula England and George Farkas, Households, Employment, and Gender: A Social, Economic and Demographic View (New York: Aldine, 1985). 25. Bourque v. Powell Electrical Mfg.Co. 617 F.2d 61 (1980). 26. Strecker v. Grand Forks County Social Service Board 640 F.2d 96 (1980). 27. Perhaps this is a better interpretation of Becker’s discrimination coefficient. See Gary S. Becker, The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).

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241

28. Employment figures (including both full and part-time) by occupation from Historical Statistics of the United States, p. 74, and BLS tabulations from the 2003 Current Population Survey.

7


1. 29 U.S. Code 206(d)(1)(1970). 2. Michael Evans Gold, “A Tale of Two Amendments: The Reasons Congress Added Sex to Title VII and their Implication for the Issue of Comparable Worth,” Duquesne Law Review 19 (1981). 3. Exclusion from restaurants and hotels on the basis of race is forbidden by the public accommodation sections of the Civil Rights Act, but exclusion based on sex is not barred, so that single-sex restaurants, bars, and hotels are permitted. Private clubs are allowed to exclude people on any basis, including race and sex, but what is private and what is public is subject to definition by the judiciary. 4. Quoted in Barbara Allen Babcock, Ann E. Freedman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Susan C. Ross, Sex Discrimination and the Law (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1975), p. 231. 5. Edmund S. Phelps, “The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism,” American Economic Review 62 (September 1972): 659–661. 6. 303 F. Supp. 754 (M.D. Ala. 1969). 7. Testimony of the author in Spirt v. Long Island University. 8. Manhart v. City of Los Angeles, 435 U.S. 702, 98 S. Ct. 1370, 55 L. Ed. 2d 657 (1978). 9. Evans v. Sheraton Park Hotel 5 FEP Cases 393 (D.D.C. 1972). 10. Sibley Memorial Hospital v. Wilson 6 FEP Cases 1029 (D.C.Cir. 1973). 11. Diaz v. Pan American World Airways, Inc. 442 F.2d 385 (5th Cir. 1971) as cited in Babcock et al., Sex Discrimination. 12. Alice Kessler Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 64. 13. Rosenfeld v. Southern Pacific Company 444 F.2d 1219 (9th Cir. 1971). 14. Griggs v. Duke Power Company 401 U.S. 424, 91 S. Ct. 849, 28 L. Ed. 2d 158 (1971). 15. Stotts v. Memphis Fire Department 104 S. Ct. 2578 (1985). 16. Laffey v. Northwest Airlines, Inc., 6 FEP Cases 902 (D.D.C. 1973). 17. John Helyar, “Hooters! A Case Study,” Fortune, September 1, 2003. See also http://www.hooters.com/. 18. Catherine A. MacKinnon and Thomas I. Emerson, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 19. Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc. 114 S. Ct. 367 (1993) (quoting Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57, 1986). 20. Vicki Schultz, “Reconceptualizing Sexual Harassment,” Yale Law Journal 107,6 (April 1998): 1683–1805. 21. Fleur v. Cleveland Board of Education, 326 F. Supp. 1208 (N.D. Ohio, 1972), 414 U.S. 632, 94 S. Ct. 91. 22. UAW v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 111 S. Ct. 1196, 55 EPD 40,605 (1991). 23. See Jean R. Sternlight, “As Mandatory Binding Arbitration Meets the Class Action, Will the Class Action Survive?,” William and Mary Law Review (October 1, 2000). 24. Researchers have found the result of enforcement activities to be positive, but not large. See, e.g., Randall W. Eberts and Joe A. Stone, “Male–Female Differences in Promotions: EEO in Public Education,” Journal of Human Resources (fall 1985). Also see Charles Brown, “The Federal Attack on Labor Market Discrimination: The Mouse

242

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

8

Notes That Roared,” in Ronald G. Ehrenberg (ed.), Research in Labor Economics, vol. 5 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1982). Nancy Kreiter, “Equal Employment Opportunity: EEOC and OFCCP,” in Dianne M. Piché, William L. Taylor, and Robin A. Reed (eds), Rights at Risk: Equality in an Age of Terrorism (Washington, DC: Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, 2002). http://www.eeoc.gov. For a compendium of all of the texts of the relevant Executive Orders, see Jeffry A. Norris and Salvador T. Perkins, Developing Effective Affirmative Action Plans, 4th edn (Washington, DC: Employment Policy Foundation, 1993). Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which makes it illegal for employers to act so as to disadvantage people on account of their race, sex, religion, or national origin, does not explicitly require an effective affirmative action program. It does, however, provide a modest encouragement to an employer to set one up. Title VII gives an aggrieved person or group who believe they have suffered discrimination the right to file a lawsuit against the employer in a federal court. The EEOC may also file suits against employers on behalf of individual employees or groups of employees. A firm may have a better chance of winning lawsuits accusing it of discrimination if it has an affirmative action plan and is seen to be working toward achieving the plan’s numerical goals. Statement by Victoria A. Lipnic, Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Labor, on Fiscal Year 2005 Request for the Employment Standards Administration, House Committee on Appropriations, February 26, 2004. See OFCCP, “Companies Ineligible for Federal Contracts Under the Regulations of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs,” September 29, 1994. Nancy Kreiter, “Equal Employment Opportunity.” See Barbara R. Bergmann, In Defense of Affirmative Action (New York: Basic Books, 1996), table 2.3. The data refer to 1992. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Gender & Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1993), pp. 66–67. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1994, p. 546.


1. Peter C. Robertson, “Why the Bosses Like to be Told to Hire Minorities,” Washington Post, November 10, 1985, p. D1. See also Barbara R. Bergmann, In Defense of Affirmative Action (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 2. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Women in Law (New York: Basic Books, 1981). See also Rosabeth Kantor, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 3. This has been well documented in the case of Great Britain in Rosemary Crompton and Gareth Jones, White Collar Proletariat (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). 4. U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Central Personnel Data File, tables 1.5 and 1.7. These data are for the year 2002, and represent a considerable advance from the early 1980s, when women held 6% of these jobs. 5. All material on Diane Joyce comes from the Supreme Court opinions in Johnson v. Transportation Agency, Santa Clara County, Cal. 107 S. Ct. 1442 (1987). 6. Ibid., p. 1475. 7. The economists who expounded the theory that human capital was the major, or indeed the sole, determinant of wages managed to ignore gender differences in wages that could not be explained by human capital differences. However when human capital theory demonstrated discrimination against women workers, some economists argued that wages might reflect factors other than human capital requirements. Perhaps women have no concern for wages, and simply flock to the occupations that

Notes

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

243

are traditional for them. Or perhaps the work and conditions in these jobs appeal to some aspect of women’s minds. Mark Killingsworth makes this suggestion in “Statement on Comparable Worth,” Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress, April 10, 1984. Job evaluation, as actually practiced, is not without flaws and biases. Some job evaluation schemes are “fixed” by discounting the factors that distinguish women’s jobs and rewarding highly the factors that distinguish men’s. Giving high points for physical strength requirements, and few points for requirements of fine attention to detail are examples. But even with that bias operating, these evaluations show up differentials in men’s and women’s pay, which cannot be justified by different skill requirements. Point scores are from an unpublished tabulation made for the author by Helen Remick, director, Office of Affirmative Action, University of Washington, from “State of Washington, Comparable Worth Study, September 1974,” prepared by Norman D. Willis & Associates, Management Consultants. These figures on wages for women secretaries and male truck drivers are from an unpublished tabulation of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Lemons v. City and County of Denver 17 FEP Cases 906 (D. Col., 1978), 620 F 2d (10th Cir.), cert denied, 449 U.S. 888 (1980). AFSCME v. State of Washington 770 F.2d 1401 (9th Cir. 1985). Robert G. Gregory and Ronald C. Duncan, “The Relevance of Segmented Labor Market Theories: The Australian Experience of the Achievement of Equal Pay for Women,” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 3 (spring 1981): 404–428.

9


1. Data from http://www.bls.gov. 2. John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), chapter 4. 3. Matthew D. Bramlett and William D. Mosher, First Marriage Dissolution, Divorce, and Remarriage: United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, May 31, 2001). The estimates pertain to the year 1995. 4. “Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the United States” (National Center for Health Statistics, July 2002, p. 23). 5. Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence (U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, July 2002). This survey was taken in 1995–1996. A considerably lower incidence of victimization (0.75%) is reported in “Intimate Partner Violence” (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, May 2002, rev. January 31, 2002). The former publication mentions this discrepancy but does not attempt to explain it. 6. Tjaden and Thoennes, Extent, Nature, and Consequences. 7. Ruben Casteneda and Darragh Johnson, “Johnson, Ivey Mend Rift Over Abuse Case,” The Washington Post, March 18, 2003, p. B4. 8. See the website of the International Women’s Forum, http://www.iwf.org. 9. See Lena Graber and John Miller, “Wages for Housework: The Movement and the Numbers,” Dollars and Sense (September/October 2002): 45–46. 10. For a different view of this matter, see Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988). 11. An organization called the International Wages for Housework Campaign has existed since the 1970s. 12. Even in Greece, Turkey, and some of the Latin American countries, “honor killings” by husbands or male relatives of women most often go unpunished.

244

Notes

13. These figures are rough approximations, based on the participation of 54.9% of women with children under one, 60.4% of those with one-year olds, and 65.8% of women with two-year olds. “Employment Characteristics of Families in 2001” (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 29, 2002). 14. Swedish National Insurance Board, “Social Insurance in Sweden 1999.” 15. Bramlett and Mosher, First Marriage Dissolution. 16. “America’s Families and Living Arrangements, 2000” (U.S. Census Bureau, June 2001). 17. “Number, Timing, and Duration of Marriages and Divorces, 1996” (U.S. Census Bureau, February 2002). 18. Lenore J. Weitzman, The Divorce Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1985). 19. The Census Bureau previously included information on alimony in its biennial survey of child support awards and payments, but no longer does so, presumably because of its rarity. In the report for 1981, only 15% of divorced women were awarded alimony, and most were for a strictly limited duration. Fewer than half of those awarded alimony received all the payments to which they were entitled. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, “Child Support and Alimony, 1981” Series P23, No. 124, 1983, table A. 20. The discussion follows the ideas of Isabel V. Sawhill, “Developing Normative Standards for Child-Support Payments,” in Judith Cassetty (ed.), The Parental Child Support Obligation (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1983). 21. Ibid., pp. 91–92. See also the views of Judith Cassetty in that volume. 22. U.S. tax law does permit married individuals the option of filing separate returns, but except in unusual circumstances, they would pay considerably more than if they were filing jointly. 23. Rolande Cuvillier, “The Housewife—An Unjustified Financial Burden on the Community,” Journal of Social Policy 8 (January 1979): 1–26. 24. For an explanation of how Social Security benefits are computed, see Barbara R. Bergmann, Is Social Security Broke? A Cartoon Guide to the Issues (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 25. There are other reasons benefits are not proportional to contributions. A person with a record of low wages gets a higher proportion of his or her salary replaced than a person with a history of higher wages. 26. For detailed discussions of all of the major alternatives to the present system of computing Social Security benefits, see Richard V. Burkhouser and Karen C. Holden (eds), A Challenge to Social Security: The Changing Roles of Women and Men in American Society (New York: Academic Press, 1982). 27. For a discussion of these issues, see Bergmann, Is Social Security Broke? 28. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mytique (New York: Norton, 1963).

10


1. Jason Fields, “Children’s Living Arrangements and Characteristics: March 2002,” Current Population Reports, P20–547 (U.S. Census Bureau, June 2003). Historical data are from http://www.census.gov. 2. Timothy S. Grall, “Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support: 2001,” Current Population Reports, P60–225 (U.S. Census Bureau, October 2003). 3. Birthrate for 1970 from National Center for Health Statistics, Advance Report of Final Natality Statistics, 1983, Monthly Vital Statistics Report, p. 3. Rates for later years from Joyce A. Martin et al., “Births: Final Data for 2002,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 52, No. 10, December 17, 2003, and associated web tables.

Notes

245

4. Divorce rates from the Statistical Abstract 2003. Proportion of the population that is married and divorced from http://www.census.gov. 5. Earlier figure from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Report, “Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1984,” Series P20, No. 399. Figures for 2000 at http://www.census.gov. 6. Data on labor force participation for 1983 from U.S. Department of Labor, “Number of Working Mothers Now at Record Levels,” USDL 84–321, June 26, 1983. Poverty data from http://www.census.gov. 7. See Clair Vickery (Brown), “The Time-poor: A New Look at Poverty,” Journal of Human Resources 12,1 (winter 1977): 27–48. 8. See Trudi J. Renwick and Barbara R. Bergmann, “A Budget-Based Definition of Poverty, With an Application to Single-Parent Families,” Journal of Human Resources 28,1 (winter 1993): 1–24. In 1995, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences endorsed the budget-based approach. Constance F. Citro and Robert T. Michael (eds), Measuring Poverty: A New Approach (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995). 9. Friedrich Engels, Origin of the Family, quoted in The Woman Question; Selections from the Writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 16. 10. Today, with globalization forcing workers in developed countries to compete with low-wage workers in less-developed countries, and with unchecked immigration into high-wage countries, the rise in wages in developed countries may be halted, at least for a time. 11. Child care cost was taken to be the weighted national average of state-level fees for 2000, given in Karen Schulman, The High Cost of Child Care Puts Quality Care Out of Reach for Many Families (Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund, 2000), brought forward to 2003 by using the child care and nursery school price index component of the Consumers Price Index. In going from after-tax income required to pretax income, taxes and benefits considered include the federal income and payroll taxes and the Earned Income Tax Credit. The proportion of single mothers whose pretax income exceeded the poverty line plus child care costs was estimated by the author from data on distribution of money earnings in the Current Population Survey at http://www.census.gov. 12. Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977). 13. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 14. See Irwin Garfinkel, Assuring Child Support: An Extension of Social Security (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992). 15. Harry Krause, Child Support in America: The Legal Perspective (Charlottesville, VA: The Mickie Co., 1981). 16. Reports on receipt of child support payments from 1975 to 2002 may be found in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P23–84, P23–141, P60–187, P60–225. 17. Elaine Sorensen, “A National Profile of Nonresident Fathers and Their Ability to Pay Child Support,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 59,4 (1997): 785–797. 18. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60–187 and P60–225. 19. See chapter 8 in Lenore Weitzmann, The Divorce Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1985). 20. Garfinkel, Assuring Child Support. 21. Barbara R. Bergmann and Mark Roberts, “Income for the Single Parent: Work, Child Support, and Welfare,” in Clair Brown and Joseph Pechman (eds), Gender in the Workplace (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1986).

246

Notes

22. There had been some “mothers’ pensions” awarded by state governments. See Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 23. This account of the early history of welfare relies on chapter 5 of Heather L. Ross and Isabel V. Sawhill, Time of Transition: The Growth of Families Headed by Women (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 1975). See also Barbara R. Bergmann, Saving Our Children from Poverty: What the United States Can Learn from France (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996). The original name of the program was Aid to Dependent Children. It was set up under the Social Security Act of 1935, which also set up Unemployment Insurance and Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance (OASI, later OASDI, popularly known as “Social Security”). Widows of men who had Social Security coverage now receive benefits under the latter program. 24. Ross and Sawhill, Time of Transition, p. 97. 25. The single exception was Alaska. However, because of the heating expense there, the national poverty line would have been too low to allow a living standard commensurate with what it allowed in the other states. 26. Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives, “Backround Material and Data on Programs within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means,” February 22, 1985, p. 348. 27. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997). 28. The programs in question are Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child Care and Development Block Grant. 29. This description of TANF provisions is based on chapter 7 of the 2004 Green Book (108th Congress, House Ways and Means Committee). 30. Ibid. 31. Pamela J. Loprest, “Fewer Welfare Leavers Employed in Weak Economy” (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, August 21, 2003). 32. See Gwendolin Mink, Whose Welfare? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 33. Mark Robert Rank, One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 34. L. Haas and P. Hwang, “Parental Leave in Sweden,” in P. Moss and F. F. Deven (eds), Parental Leave: Progress or Pitfall? Research and Policy Issues in Europe (Brussels: CBGS Publications, 1999), pp. 45–68. 35. For a discussion of this issue, see Barbara R. Bergmann, “The Only Ticket to Equality: Total Androgyny, Male Style,” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 9 (spring 1998): 75–86. 36. For a review of the studies on this matter, see Suzanne Helburn and Barbara R. Bergmann, America’s Child Care Problem: The Way Out (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 37. David Card and Alan B. Krueger, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 38. This is the conclusion of a panel of experts brought together by the National Academy of Sciences. See Constance F. Citro and Robert T. Michael (eds), Measuring Poverty: A New Approach (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995). 39. Preschool for All: Investing in a Productive and Just Society (New York: Committee for Economic Development, 2002).

11 Keeping House: The Economics and Politics of Family Care 1. Arlie R. Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 1989).

Notes

247

2. Harriet B. Presser and Virginia S. Cain, “Shift Work among Dual-Earner Couples with Children,” Science 219 (February 18, 1983): 876–879. Recent data on time use suggest that the percentage of families choosing this type of regime has not changed substantially. 3. The tabulation of the data was done by the author. In making the tabulation, those 49 families in which the husband and wife together did 12 or fewer hours per week of housework (defined as meal preparation and cleanup, indoor housecleaning, and laundry but excluding child care) were assigned to the “cash-paying” group. Of the families remaining after the cash-paying families had been designated, those 130 families in which the wives devoted 5 or fewer hours a week to paid employment (defined as including commuting time and lunch time at work) were classified as “housewife-maintaining.” The “semi-housewife” families were defined as those among the remaining families in which the wife devoted more than 5 hours but no more than 30 hours to paid employment. The families in which the wife devoted more than 30 hours per week to paid employment, and did more than 60 percent of the family service work—housework, child care, and other family chores—were designated as “second-shift-wife.” The remaining 14 families were classed as “twohousekeeper” families. 4. Most of the change occurred prior to 1986. Thereafter men’s contribution to family maintenance has shown little increase. See Suzanne M. Bianchi, Melissa A. Milkie, Liana C. Sayer, and John P. Robinson, “Is Anyone Doing the Housework? Trends in the Gender Division of Household Labor,” Social Forces 79,1 (September 2000): 191–228. 5. In the survey done in 1998–1999, the variances of the mean values were very large, indicating considerable diversity in behavior among couples, and raising the possibility that the sample of households responding might be unrepresentative. These time use data were collected for only one person in each household; so we cannot use them to tabulate the distribution of couples by modes of family care, as was done with the 1975–1976 data. In the survey done in 2003 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, time use data were provided by only one person per household. The results from this survey were not available at the time of this writing. 6. For a detailed discussion of work/family policies in the United States and other countries, including recommendations for changes in U.S. policies, see Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers, Families that Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003). 7. Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 8. John Robinson, How Americans Use Time: A Social–Psychological Analysis of Everyday Behavior (New York: Praeger, 1977). See also Andrew Harvey and David Elliot, Time and Time Again (Ottawa: Employment and Immigration, 1983). 9. Tabulation by the author from the 1975–1976 Survey of Time Use. 10. See the classic article on this subject by Pat Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework,” in Robin Morgan (ed.), Sisterhood is Powerful (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1970). 11. Myra Marx Ferree, “Sacrifice, Satisfaction and Social Change: Employment and the Family,” in Karen Brodkin Sacks and Dorothy Remy (eds), My Troubles Are Going to Have Trouble with Me (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1974), p. 73. 12. Joseph H. Pleck, “Husbands’ Paid Work and Family Roles: Current Research Issues,” in Research in the Interweave of Social Roles: Jobs and Families Vol. 3 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, Inc., 1983), pp. 251–333. 13. Marianne A. Ferber and Lauren Young, “Student Attitudes Toward Roles of Women: Is the Egalitarian Household Imminent?” Feminist Economics 3,1 (spring 1997): 63–83.

248

Notes

12


1. Clair Brown, “Home Production for Use in a Market Economy,” in Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (eds), Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions (New York: Longman, 1982). 2. The idea undoubtedly came from the women in their ranks. Lenin is quoted in 1920 as saying: “We are establishing communal kitchens and public eating-houses, laundries and repair shops, infant asylums, kindergartens, children’s homes, educational institutes of all kinds. In short, we are seriously carrying out the demand in our program for the transference of the economic and educational functions of the separate household to society. That will mean freedom for the women from the old household drudgery and dependence on man . . .” The quotation is from an interview Lenin gave to the German socialist leader Klara Zetkin, as given in The Woman Question: Selections from the Writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 94. 3. The kibbutz is not, however, just an organization for getting housework done collectively. People participating in the kibbutz are required to takeup a share in the work of the kibbutz’s own enterprises, and to rely for their cash income on an egalitarian share of the income of those enterprises. They cannot participate in the regular labor market, and cannot reap any benefits from special training or talents or work effort. 4. Domestic workers include those whose primary duty is child care. In 2002, 229,000 out of the 729,000 working in private households classified themselves as child care workers, but some of those who did so performed housework as well. Data for 1900 and 1950 from Historical Statistics of the United States. Data for 2002 from the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2003. 5. U.S. Census Bureau, Survey of Income and Program Participation, 1996 Panel, Wave 10. Internet release January 24, 2003. 6. This quotation (p. 94) is from a characterization by Zelda Bronstein of an argument presented by Arlie Hochschild in a chapter of Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, edited by Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003). Bronstein’s review of the book, which does not entirely endorse its approach, appeared in the spring 2004 issue of Dissent, under the title “Nowhere Woman.” 7. Quotes are from Maxine L. Margolis, Mothers and Such: Views of American Women and Why They Changed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 71 and 89. 8. Ibid., pp. 91–92. 9. Margaret Talbot, “Attachment Theory: The Ultimate Experiment,” The New York Times Magazine, May 24, 1998, pp. 22–30, 38, 46, 50, 54. 10. The detailed study design takes into account many variables, such as characteristics of child care and the family environment. Children’s development has been assessed at frequent intervals using several methods (testing, observations by trained observers, interviews, questionnaires) and measuring many facets of their development (cognitive, social, emotional, linguistic, behavioral, and physical). See The NICHD Study of Early Child Care, prepared by Robin Peth-Pierce, Public Information and Communications Branch, NICHD (Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, April 1998). 11. NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, “Early Child Care and Children’s Development Prior to School Entry,” American Educational Research Journal 39 (2002): 133–164. 12. See Jay Belsky, “Developmental Risks (Still) Associated with Early Child Care,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 42 (2001): 845–859. 13. The majority of the experts associated with the NICHD study appear to take this attitude. For example, see Christine M. Todd, “The NICHD Child Care Study

Notes

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

249

Results: What Do They Mean for Parents, Child-Care Professionals, Employers and Decision Makers?” (University of Georgia, 2001). The NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, “Parenting and Family Influences When Children are in Child Care: Results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care,” in John G. Borkowski, Sharon Landesman Ramey, and Marie BristolPower (eds), Parenting and the Child’s World: Influences on Intellectual, Academic, and Social-Emotional Development (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002). One study, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), did report a negative relation between a mother’s employment during her child’s second and third years and the child’s reading and math achievement at age five and six. However, enrollment in a child care center, of whatever quality, substantially offsets the negative effects of the mother’s employment on reading and math scores. Mothers’ employment in years two and three, combined with the children’s enrollment in center programs, appears to have increased verbal abilities at three years. Christopher J. Ruhm, “Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development,” Working Paper W7666 (Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2000). Elizabeth Rose, A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Sonia Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). The original name of the program was Aid to Dependent Children. A middle-class family with two children spending $6,000 or more on child care gets a credit that lowers its income tax by $1,200. Lower-income parents get a credit that represents a somewhat higher proportion of their spending. The credit is not “refundable,” meaning that if parents’ income is too low to pay a high enough federal income tax to offset against the credit they would be eligible for, they do not get the full credit. If they pay no tax, they get nothing. Payments for child care to relatives (except for spouses or dependent children) count as valid expenses. Families get a credit equal to a percentage of what they spend, up to an expenditure of $3,000 for the care of one child, or up to $6,000 for the care of two or more. The percentage varies from 35 to 20, depending on taxable income. See Internal Revenue Service Form 2441. Carolyn Teich Adams and Kathryn Teich Winston, Mothers at Work: Public Policies in the United States, Sweden and China (New York: Longman, 1980), p. 67. For a more extended treatment of the history of child care legislation, see Sandra L. Hofferth, “The 101st Congress: An Emerging Agenda for Children in Poverty,” in Judith A. Chafel (ed.), Child Poverty and Public Policy (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 1993). Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, p. 255. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, “New Statistics Show Only Small Percentage of Eligible Families Receive Child Care Help,” HHS News (December 6, 2000). HHS reported that only 12% of eligible children are covered. However the parents of some of the 15 million children reported as eligible for the program would not want them enrolled, so the undercoverage is less than 88%. The administration of President George W. Bush has not seen fit to issue an update of these figures. Suzanne Helburn (ed.), Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes in Child Care Centers (Department of Economics, University of Colorado at Denver, 1995). Julia Wrigley, Other People’s Children: An Intimate Account of the Dilemmas Facing Middle-Class Parents and the Women They Hire to Raise Their Children (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Committee for Economic Development, Preschool for All: Investing in a Productive and Just Society, 2002. Other CED publications, issued in 2004, include “Developmental Education: The Value of High Quality Preschool Investments as

250

Notes

Economic Tools,” and “Preschool for All: A Priority for American Business Leaders,” a newsletter designed to brief the business community about the economic and social benefits of investing in early education. 25. See Barbara R. Bergmann, Saving Our Children From Poverty: What the United States Can Learn from France (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996). 26. For brief discussions of housing projects in Sweden and England, which had a variety of family care services on the premises, see Delores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984). See also Ellen Perry Berkeley, “The Swedish Servicehus,” Architecture Plus, May 1973, which served as the source of the discussion in the text.

13


1. Data from the Current Population Survey, as reported on http://www.bls.gov. 2. It is presumably to evade the penalties against part-time workers that the idea of sharing a full-time job between two people has evolved. However, this is an awkward solution to a problem that has been artificially created by the discriminatory treatment of part-time workers. 3. See Irwin Garfinkel, Assuring Child Support: An Extension of Social Security (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992). 4. Assuming a cost of care of $11,870 for a couple with two preschool children, a 50% co-payment rate on income over the poverty line restricts aid to those earning $41,234 or less, while a 20% rate extends aid to such couples with incomes up to $76,845. See Suzanne W. Helburn and Barbara R. Bergmann, America’s Child Care Problem: The Way Out (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

Index

abortion, 28, 158, 210 affirmative action, 75, 103, 119–129 denunciation by Justice Scalia, 128 drawbacks to, 122 fairness of, 128 in promotions, 121 need for, 120 unpopularity, 119 African Americans discrimination against, 51–52 fertility, 26 shortage of marriagable men, 159 and welfare, 165–166 Anker, Richard, 235n6 Anthony, Susan B., 37 apprenticeships, 75, 82, 213 Becker, Gary, 48, 54, 87, 182–183 Beller, Andrea, 235n6 Bem, Sandra L. and Daryl J., 66 Bianchi, Suzanne M., 247n4 Bielby, Denise and William, 54 birth rates, fall in, 3, 13, 24, 26, 203 reasons, 26–27 births to unmarried women, 6, 9, 154–155, 158, 167–169, 172 Blau, Francine, 240n15 Bona Fide Occupational Qualification, 105 boring jobs, assigned to women, 67 Brown, Charles, 241n24 Brown, Clair, 156 caring labor, 1, 185–188 child care effects of non-parental care, 195–197 expansion of national system, 215

French system, 204 government financial support, 198–199 immigrant nannies, 195 quality and regulation, 199 use of non-parental care, 194 why government help needed, 200–205 child support national plan needed, 215 and sexual relations, 9 child support payments, 161–164 and child custody, 163 fathers’ relations with children, 163 guidelines for awards, 162 poverty of some fathers, 162 proposal of guaranteed minimum, 163 statistics on receipts, 162 weak enforcement, 161 children as consumer durables, 29 effect on pay gap, 52 fall in economic value, 26 increasing cost of, 26 and mothers’ employment, 14, 30 Christine de Pisan, 37 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 41 class action lawsuits, 57 Clinton, Hilary, 67 cohabitation, 34 conspicuous consumption, 36 contraception, 27–29, 158–159 crafts jobs and affirmative action, 124, 129 American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), 55–56

252

Index

crafts jobs—continued closed to women, 5, 44, 59, 81–82, 128 construction, 73–75 interest of women in, 66 training, 213 see also vocational education crowding of women’s occupations, 91–93, 97, 98 customer preferences, as excuse for discrimination, 108 Cuvillier, Rolande, 148–149 de Beauvoir, Simone, 37 discrimination, 41 appearance requirements for women, 110 by Giant Food, 43 by the Hertz Company, 48 economists who doubt importance, 48 experimental evidence, 54, 65 influence on supply and demand, 85 irrelevant tests, 109 and productivity, 93–94 statistical evidence of, 50–53 discrimination laws, enforcement strategy, 113–115, 117, 211–212 class-action suits, 113 discrimination lawsuits American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), 55 Boeing, 96 Home Depot, 56 Hooters, 110 Rent-A-Center, 70–71 Sears, 90–91 Wal-Mart, 72–73 divorce, 32 causes of increase, 7 no-fault divorce, 146 domestic violence, 1, 137–138 domestic workers ethics of hiring, 193 immigration of, 192 numbers employed, 192 Edin, Kathryn and Laura Lein, 246n27 education, 11, 24, 25, 34, 39 access to college, 172, 217 discrimination by schools, 31

effect on employment, 31, 187 and pay, 41–42, 50–51, 52, 54, 78, 101, 130 professional degrees, 31 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 33 employment growth in, 2–4, 12 mainstream activity for women, 2, 12 and presence of young children, 14, 49 and women’s equality, 11–12, 151–152, 169–170 employment, causes of increase divorce, 33 higher wages, 3, 11, 15, 22 labor saving devices, 20 lowered fertility, 30, 39 “need” for money, 17–20 new consumer goods, 21 possibility of reversal, 23 technological change, 39 television advertising, 21 engineering, 82 why mostly male, 213–214 England, Paula, 80 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 55, 57, 104 Equal Pay Act, 129 Equal Rights Amendment, 38 equality between the sexes, 24, 117–118, 209–218 family, traditional, virtues of, 6–7 fast food, 176 fathers, economic usefulness of children to, 27 feminism, 8, 37–39 Feminist Economics, 38 feminist policy, poor progress, 209–218 Ferber, Marianne A., 234n39, 247n13 Ferree, Myra Marx, 185 fertility, see birth rates firefighters, exclusion revealed by 9/11, 75 Folbre, Nancy, 27 Freudian theory, 39 Friedan, Betty, 37 Fuchs, Victor, 235n2

Index Garfinkel, Irwin, 161, 163 gay men and lesbians, 6, 34 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 37 glass ceiling, 57 globalization, 23 Goldin, Claudia, 28, 29 Gornick, Janet C., 247n6 Griffiths, Martha, 104 Guttentag, Martha and Paul F. Secord, 34 Hamburg, Daniel, 236n23 Hartmann, Heidi, 4 Haworth, Joan, 240n12 Helburn, Suzanne, 199 Hill, Herbert, 238n10 Home Depot see discrimination lawsuits housewives as a caste, 38 displaced homemakers, 145 duties, 135 mobility problems, 136 physical hazards of the job, 137 proposal to tax, 148–149 sexual aspect of job, 135 taxes, 147, 148 wages for, 140–143 housework, 175–188 amount done by spouses, 180 and divorce, 184 as justification for pay gap, 54 minutes per day, 180 inclusion in GDP, 138–140 measuring value, 139–140 replacement by purchases, 189–194 human capital, 49, 50, 85, 86, 89, 92, 96 rusting, 50 husbands attitudes toward wife’s working, 21 possible shortage of, 33 serial polygamy, 33 immigration, 24 impaired children, services for, 217 Independent Women’s Forum, 138 inflation, 20 Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 238n

253

jobs suitable for women, 22 Kantor, Rosabeth, 67 King, Martin Luther, 104 Lewinsky, Monica, 67 MacKinnon, Catherine A., 111 marriage average age at, 26 benefits to both spouses, 157 duties of wife, 4 feminist criticism of, 157 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sex discrimination at, 59 men as enforcers of occupational segregation, 66–68 as rogue elephants, 8 as supporters of children, 2 in women’s ocupations, 70 slow change in roles, 7 see also fathers, husbands merit bias in assessing, 125 importance of, 126 merit goods, 217 Meyers, Marcia K., 247n6 Michel, Sonia, 199 Mill, John Stewart, 37 Mink, Gwendolin, 246n32 Mitchell, Clarence, 104 Myrdal, Alva and Gunnar, 205 National Organization for Women, 78 National Women’s Law Center, 83 Nelson, Julie A., 234n39 non-sexual harassment, 111 occupational segregation, 2 as a caste system, 49 effect on productivity, 93 effect on wages, 44, 88–90 extent of, 46 and human capital, 98, 101, 119, 130 men’s desire to maintain, 66–68 not understood as problem, 43–44, 63 and productivity, 68, 93–94 within places of work, 46

254

Index

Office of Federal Contract Compliance Policy, 104, 115–117 debarment from federal contracts, 116 lack of effectiveness, 116 on-the-job training, reserved for men, 81 see also apprenticeship Oppenheimer, Valerie K., 80 out of wedlock births see births to unmarried women parental leave, 143, 181 Family and Medical Leave Act, 144 and gender equity, 143–144 Parks, Rosa, 104 part-time workers, discrimination against, 214 pay equity, 129–132, 212 job evaluation, 130 Newman, Winn, 129 use in Australia, 131 pay gap, 43, 47 biblical prescription, 42 effect of education, 52 effect of motherhood, 51–52 portion due to discrimination, 50–53 see also discrimination, wages pensions, unequal, 107 Phelps, Edmund S., 241n5 Plato, 37 Polochek, Solomon, 87 poverty, measurement flaws, 156 pregnancy, employer treatment of, 111–113 Presser, Harriet, 179 promotion, 41 promotion opportunities, 79 protective legislation, 108 race discrimination, 52 Randolph, A. Phillip, 103 Renwick, Trudi J., 156 Reskin, Barbara F., 235n6, 239n7 Riach, Peter, 65 Rich, Judith, 65 Sanger, Margaret, 28 Sawhill, Isabel, 146 Sayer, Liana C., 247 Schlafly, Phyllis, 160

Schultz, Vicki, 241n20 seniority, 73, 109 sex-typing of occupations, 23 sexual harassment, 41, 76–79, 111 at Harvard and MIT, 77 in construction jobs, 74 Mitsubishi, 78 sexual revolution, 34 contraception, 158 single mothers benefits needed, 171–173 desirability of staying home, 169–170 difficulties, 155 growth in numbers, 154 need for good jobs, 170 poor jobs, 43 poverty of, 153 racial differences in incidence, 154 shortage of time, 154 single parenthood, causes of increase, 154–155, 167–169 decline in shotgun weddings, 158 rise in wages for women, 159 sexual revolution, 158 Skocpol, Theda, 246n22 social conformity, 24, 35, 65 “doing gender,” 65 social relations on the job, 68–69 Social Security privatization of, 151 treatment of housewife, 148–151 Sorensen, Elaine, 162 sports, equality for women, 42 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 37 Strober, Myra, 233n23, 239n27 statistical discrimination, 106 suffragists, 37 Sweden, 198 long parental leaves, 170 servicehus, 205, 216 taxes on individuals, 148 Taylor, Harriet, 37 Thomas, Clarence, 114 TIAA-Cref, 107 Title IX, 31, 42 Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald, 46, 88 training, women’s exclusion from, 45, 213 turnover, 81, 204

Index unions, 58, 63, 73–76 Veblen, Thorstein, 36 Violence Against Women Act, 138 vocational education, sex segregation in, 45, 83, 213–214 wages, 41, 85–93 growth of, 3, 16–17 see also discrimination, pay equity, pay gap Waldfogel, Jane, 236n21

Wal-Mart, 58, 79, 99 welfare as poverty trap, 165 welfare reform, 66–69, 154, 166 marriage promotion, 168 sexual sins, 168 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), 168 welfare, history of, 164–169 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 37 women supervising men, 69 work/family policies, 181–182

255

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