Excerpt:
[T]he January jobs report found that 275,000 women left the workforce last month, leaving the women’s workplace participation rate at 57%—a rate that pre-pandemic had not been seen since 1988. An entire generation of progress has been erased in two years....
Entrenched gender roles within different-sex couples can push women out of the workforce more readily and make it harder for them to return. A paper by sociologist Jessica Calarco found that different-sex, dual-earner couples grappled with the increased parenting duties of the pandemic in mostly unequal ways, even when that was a reversion from formerly more egalitarian relationships and even when those arrangements negatively affected mothers.
Are you "negatively affected" if you become the home-based partner in a single-earner household? I'd suggest that what's not egalitarian is the assumption that what is conventionally associated with women is negative. Such disrespect for single-earner households makes it even harder for the man to take the home-based position. Why the bias in favor of every adult working outside the home?
The article does go on to some decent discussion of problems women may have in returning to jobs when they do in fact want jobs. My beef is with the assumption that they do want to work outside the home or that they should.
Posts
51 comments:
i remember, listening to women complain; that they were paying nearly as much in daycare as they were getting paid. The idea of staying at home NEVER crossed their minds; 'cause they had been told, that it was A Woman's Place, to work outside the home. I thought at the time; boy are you b*tches Stupid
For All the Bad, that Covid has done, at least it's made people realize that They Aren't Their Jobs
I don't have to read the article to tell you how the reverse the trend. Here's the thing; at least a 1/3rd of the country warned you of this back in March 2020.
My wife lost her great, flexible job as a captioner either.co. because of California's AB5 bill. It was perfect because she could work when she wanted and was able. California does not approve of people being able to choose what works best for them.
Mothers spending more time at home with their kids
Women and children hardest hit
I'm a woman who voluntarily left the white collar workforce to become the home-based partner. I didn't want to work outside the home. It's an incredible privilege be home with my children, without the stress and strain of the rate race! I'd never trade my time at home for anything. (On a related note, the Left tells us that corporatism and greed are hallmarks of evil capitalist systems, but then turns around and denigrates those of us who opt out of that system! Which is it?) I wonder if this headline might be rewritten as "Children's time with their family members soars"!)
Today the BLS just released numbers that were obviously fraudulent.
The regime is getting desperate.
Imitate men in doing what interests you, not in doing what interests men.
The over reaction of Democrats like Birx and Fauci to the virus is what caused this. There was no reason for schools to be close after June 2020. There is no reason for children to be masked in school, in spite of teachers' union terrorism. Threatening to arrest children who do not wear masks even though the law does not require it.
I have no idea why we should want "Women's particpation in the workforce" to go up. Or go down. WHy would 60% be better than 57% - or worse than 57%? Are women being discriminated against? Show me the proof. Provide me with the details.
We should NOT be forcing women into the workforce - or out of the workforce. I thought that was point of Women's Lib. Choice. But it seems some think: women working = good. Women staying home - bad.
Its like this weird push to get women into STEM. As if women can be the majority in Education, and STEM and the Law, and Government and and and and.
"Why the bias in favor or every adult working outside the home?"
Feminism. The actually existing kind.
Wow, the BLS fraud is getting smashed all over.
It is interesting that they couldn't even make the job numbers somewhat reasonably possible.
It is like they are trying to collapse the regime.
I know this is a shameless plug on my part, but some of Ann's readers might be interested in my new ebook, The Seventh Millennium: A Look a Life's Possibilities in the New Age Before Us.
In it I explore a world of new country towns in which both parents work part-time outside the home (12-to-24 hours a week) and in their spare time build their own houses, cultivate gardens, cook and care for their children and grandchildren, and pursue hobbies and other outside interests. They live on small three-generation homesteads grouped around neighborhood greens, and get around town in light-weight electric cars that go 30 mph. So thoroughly are work and leisure integrated into the fabric of their everyday lives that they feel little need to retire, and they die at home in their beds, as a rule, surrounded by loved ones.
This probably goes over like a lead balloon, but the biggest failure of the feminist movement was that all the women were trying to become men. In the desire to promote women as equal to men, they used the man's scale to do it, so every woman was trying to do it "just as good as a man, only better". In that effort they completely devalued anything that makes a woman a woman. The goal should have been not to have 50% of our infantry women, but to redefine what value was and say that raising children was, in fact a more noble profession than law or garbage collection. Instead, they did their best to reinforce the idea that raising children was actually demeaning. The very best thing about a woman was now considered worse than valueless.
Sure, the messaging would have been hard, but it should have been worth it. Many people are starting to discover why the conservatives (what, again?) were right.
Now, that does NOT mean a woman could not be an excellent Dr. Lawyer, CEO, or any other thing, and that too should have been opened up to them as much as anything else, but the approach they took was wrong.
Fortune used to be very worthwhile reading. Now it is like Time: nearly worthless.
Want to end the trend? Get Biden out of the Whitehouse and the Democrats out of congress. Nobody knows less about how an economy works than a Democrat.
I call population anomaly- women of child bearing age currently represent over a third of the US population, which is the largest percentage on record….
If the feminist principle is that women should be able to choose how to live their lives, why is a decision to stay home a wrong choice? Isn’t the decision in question something each couple works out for themselves? There are manifold obvious reasons for couples equitably to conclude that they’re best served by the woman becoming the home-based partner.
Haven’t seen the study quoted, but, in addition to the biases you mention, it seems premised on Friedrich Engel’s concept of “false consciousness”—class members' adoption of goals that are presumed not to benefit them, the 19th century version of the “we-know-better” approach of the modern bien pensant.
.
An entire generation of progress has been erased in two years
Who is defining progress here?
My beef is with the assumption that they do want to work outside the home or that they should.
It's hard for them to get to the 50-50 "looks like America" everywhere if the women won't cooperate by being in the workforce. Of course the claim will be that they are leaving because they so badly treated at their jobs, while every big employer seems to be favoring women applicants.
Why the bias in favor of every adult working outside the home?
Because work inside the home does not generate taxable wages.
The idea that single-earner households are bad was simply assumed. You were supposed to agree with the author as a matter of course. Whether the rest of the article is supposed to involve any thinking on your part or if you were similarly supposed to accept everything as written, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Life is easier when everything has been decided for you. I mean until those ideas fail horribly and cause ruin, but avoiding that would take actual effort and courage and who wants all that bother?
Gonna go out on a limb and suggest lockdown had effect on women with children. Mom found she can kick back,enjoy kids, save on daycare, watch Days of Our Lives, drink wine,have an affair, visit friends, gossip and the bills still get paid.
All possible in areas where housing does not require two average incomes.
"Why the bias in favor of every adult working outside the home?"
That bias is a two-fer. It contributes to the destruction of the family, and it increases the competition for jobs, thereby lowering wages. Both parents now work for the same amount of money one used to get, while their kids are abused by Communists. What's not to like?
Two parents working and paying a third party to care for their child(ren) may not increase the net income of the family, but it does triple the taxes paid. So there's that.
Bitches get lazy. Biden need a strong pimp hand fee gonta claw back that femnis progress.
The covidiocy proved for many couples they don’t need to be a 2 income family to survive. On the overall, for workers of all kinds, this is a good thing. A decrease in the number of available workers will sooner or later drive wages up, or result in largely makework jobs disappearing altogether.
The bad thing from a feminist viewpoint is that men may start entering female dominated fields. What if they do a better job?
My better half has been a stay at home mom, and now housewife, since child one was born. All of our children graduated at or near the top of their class. Coincidence? I think not. We live in a small rural school district, now well less than 100 graduating seniors each year. Because it’s small I know that all the valedictorians and salutatorians in the last 25 years have had stay at home moms. Coincidence? I think not.
Every year newspapers across the nation search for and find (usually a female) a valedictorian who was raised in poverty by a single mother with no positive male role models, and how she’s got multiple full scholarship offers. They never report on the academic rigor of the school. And I don’t recall ever seeing a follow up 4 years later showing all her job offers with her newly minted engineering or computer science degree. Or even the can sleep through classes sociology degree. Gee, I wonder why?
1. Everyone saying that two incomes is preferred because it generates higher taxes, I agree. Who provides paid child care? Overwhelmingly women. So we still have women taking care of children, but because it's other people's children in exchange for money the labor can be taxed.
2. When the schools closed and kids had to learn at home, and be supervised at home, many people had to leave the work force. There are states where schools are not reliably open to the degree they were pre-pandemic. In order to commit to a job you need to know in advance where your kids are going to be during the work week. Many jobs don't have the flexibility to work from home with no notice or planning.
3. The "two income trap" is really about the debt people carry, which has to be serviced by paid labor and not by doing one's own work at home. After childcare and taxes the second earner is not left with much, quite aside from housekeeping and yard work going undone. But they have payments to make. Keeping your children home, not raised by strangers, and doing things for yourself don't bring in money to service debt. By keeping debt low, an one-earner household is quite doable.
(Yes I already know that everyone who is carrying too much debt for one income believes they have perfectly valid reasons for why it could never have been any other way. The choices one made long ago, however, constrain the choices available to one today, and that is simply a fact; circumstances can be tough and unchosen, but some of those circumstances WERE chosen in the past. I don't have a simple answer that anyone and everyone could apply going forward.)
Keep women appointed, available, and taxable.
That said, women and men are equal in rights and complementary in Nature/nature. A couple will reconcile as adults to.
An entire generation of progress has been erased in two years
Who is defining progress here?
Feminists
Let's get Governor Lepetomane to form a focus group. Then Hedley can compose some far reaching programs to address that very issue. Then we can staff shit out of the program with minimum wage immigrants. There! Done!
This is the work of that pesky patriarchy, isn't it?
Blogger Michael K said...
"The over reaction of Democrats like Birx and Fauci to the virus is what caused this."
And the now blossoming fact that Fauci funded gain of function research made it necessary for him to go over the top in lockdowns and such in a hail Mary attempt to minimize the damage he caused before it was discovered.
Really, what is the probability that a novel deadly virus would emerge from animals one mile away from the only level 4 facility in a country as large as China? (as I said 2 years ago)
Progress has been marching in place for two hundred years, feminism-wise.
Choreographies read 5 or 6 pages. Emma Goldman is brought up in the first sentence ("If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.")
My beef is with the assumption that they do want to work outside the home or that they should.
Bingo! A woman’s freedom to choose is not much of a freedom unless it includes the freedom to choose something that Gloria Steinem might deplore.
"my new ebook, The Seventh Millennium: A Look a Life's Possibilities in the New Age Before Us."
I'll take a look, I read "Notes Towards a New Way of Life in America."
My favorite approach is Asmovian, live on an Earthlike planet with a population density of one person per 500 sq miles and live a philosophical life by the labor of robots. But go on a quest every now and again.
Over the past two years, one of the unintended consequences of the lock-downs was that families discovered they liked having mom(or sometimes dad) at home all day and that expenses could be adjusted so it could happen. More families are homeschooling, cooking at home instead of eating out, and families have just scaled back their lifestyle.
It also helped that the government was sending $300 to $350 per month per child to families as an "earned income credit". That replaced some of the income from the second wage earner. You couple that with the savings on child care and other expenses of working, and families realized that they could afford for Mom to stay home. However, you may see some of those women return to work soon since those payments ended in December.
Are there young (i.e. under 40) working Moms visiting this blog, let alone commenting? I assume “no”, so I assume the responses will be mostly negative.
I bet Whoopi will be pissed if this topic comes up on The View while she's on suspension!
There is no reason for children to be masked in school, in spite of teachers' union terrorism.
Exactly.
The teachers just want to teach from their Home. One reason the Left wins is they're willing to say the same thing over and over and over again. Center-right people like me, get tired of pointing out the truth. Masked states and cities don't have significantly different Cv-19 death rates from those that are unmasked.
But pointing out the truth has ZERO effect. And one get TIRED of pointing it out.
They don't want other people to make decisions that make them happier. They want to look out on a society that they approve of, and feel happier themselves.
Overall workforce participation in the US has fallen to 59.1% of the population.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm
How high is the women's participation supposed to be?
If I were a cynical type of person I'd suspect that the declining workforce participation is a way to make the unemployment numbers look better.
There is no reason for children to be masked in school, in spite of teachers' union terrorism.
Exactly.
The teachers just want to teach from their Home.
If I didn't know any better, I would agree with you. But I do.
The simple truth that you and many others are overlooking is that most female teachers, and many male teachers, are literally hysterical over COVID. You have to understand, these are precisely the people that the Democrats targets all those "the Republicans will put women back in the kitchen, gays back in the closet and Black people back in the fields" ads at every election year. Why? Because they work. Well, the powers that be have thoroughly convinced these folks that COVID will kill them and their families. They aren't thinking rationally.
When I ask them "What needs to happen before we can get rid of the masks and mandates and go back to normal?" and no one has an answer.
(By the way, my new question is to ask them to define what a woman is...)
Why work, when Joe Bidens is handing out free money not to?? People decided during Covid that working isn't what life is all about, and if you get paid to stay home, why bother making the effort??
Luke Lea said: "They live on small three-generation homesteads grouped around neighborhood greens, and get around town in light-weight electric cars that go 30 mph. So thoroughly are work and leisure integrated into the fabric of their everyday lives that they feel little need to retire, and they die at home in their beds, as a rule, surrounded by loved ones."
You basically describe the life my husband and I are considering taking up in a few years. Our daughter and son-in-law recently moved to Texas to a large new housing development that puts an extra focus on facilitating community. For instance, they kept a large open area they call The Barnyard near their main community buildings, where they regularly host farmer's markets and live bands. The community buildings include their own restaurant/bar. There is a full-size elementary school within the boundaries of the community, and every day you can see the golf-cars line up in the afternoon as Grandparents wait to pick up their grandchildren when school lets out.
We are attorneys and so will have to be retired before we would move there, but otherwise the vision that you have for more life/work balance, and possibilities for multi-generational community is being enacted there. We are so torn because we love Pennsylvania for it's beauty and climate but don't want to be so far from our kids and I'm not a fan of flat, hot environments.
Anyone who denigrates parent/partners who decide to orient their lives so that one person is not a traditional "earner" can just BITE ME. I had a career that would be considered accomplished by feminists but decided to leave it when our kids began to go to school. My colleagues were astonished; no one they knew was making that choice.
I was out of the workforce for seven years and then had an opportunity to go back to the same office, which I took because the kids were old enough to be able to stay at home alone after school and by then we needed a second income. Those years when I was able to be home for the kids were vital for our entire family's balance and stability.
An entire generation of progress has been erased in two years
Who is defining progress here?
Exactly, unqualified monotonic change.
It's Really Rather Simple
There is a clear elevation of all-cause mortality in the 25-44 age bracket coinciding with Covid-19 showing up. There is also an elevation in the other age brackets, by the way.
...
We thus know that Covid simply doesn't kill people in this age group all that frequently -- and, in fact, the mitigations killed far more people than the disease.
But then..... Joe Biden's administration and private employers started issuing threats: Take the jab or get fired.
And.... there were a lot of jabs given to people who would have otherwise not taken them, most of which came after the big summer spike of Delta cases.
There was an exact correlation in the rise of deaths with the threats.
Take a knee... one step forward, two steps backward.
I have to add novelist Sarah Hoyt’s take on the article:
That’s one of more patronizing pieces of tripe it has been my misfortune to read. Who are they to determine in which way women should be happy or fulfilled? Go fish. Take Brandon with you.
(Her books are available via the Althouse Amazon portal. Start with Darkship Thieves.)
A much simpler way to reverse the trend is to encourage more men to identify as women, and voila.
Who WANTS to work in some traditional job? If I had a choice*, I would stay at home and do what I wanted.
Thus, isn't being the stay-at-home partner the ultimate antiwork position?
* "Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison."
Tim Allen
Post a Comment