Market-Friendly Versus Family-Friendly

Dana Goldstein:

By “argue big,” Obama meant expanding the terms of the pro-choice debate beyond access to abortion, contraception, and comprehensive sexuality education and into a larger discussion about family planning and work-life balance for women. He called for “updating the social contract” with gender pay equity, paid maternal leave, and longer school hours that make it easier for mothers to work.

From the latest Pew survey on working mothers:

Among working mothers with minor children (ages 17 and under), just one-in-five (21%) say full-time work is the ideal situation for them, down from the 32% who said this back in 1997, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Fully six-in-ten (up from 48% in 1997) of today's working mothers say part-time work would be their ideal, and another one-in-five (19%) say she would prefer not working at all outside the home.

There's been a similar shift in preferences among at-home mothers with minor children. Today just 16% of these mothers say their ideal situation would be to work full time outside the home, down from the 24% who felt that way in 1997. Nearly half (48%) of all at-home moms now say that not working at all outside the home is the ideal situation for them, up from the 39% who felt that way in 1997.

What Obama is proposing is a market-friendly program - a set of reforms designed to make it easier for women to work full-time while they have children. But what women actually want, the polls suggest, is a more family-friendly system, which makes it easier for them to work part-time or not at all while their children are young. If Republicans were smart, they would find a package of reforms tailored to precisely that desire: For instance, they could advance a significant Ponnuru-style (or Cesar Conda-style) tax credit for families with children; a health care plan that severs health insurance from employment, so women don't feel bound to jobs they dislike; and maybe even a package of tuition credits for women (or men!) looking to re-train and re-enter the workforce after staying at home for a few years. This would outflank the Democrats on an issue they think they own, and leave them stuck with the Linda Hirschman vote.

But, of course, it wouldn't do much to fend off the Caliphate, so why bother?

Comments

Potshots at pro-war Republicans won't help your cause anyway. Which is too bad, because your cause is just.

Posted by Adam Greenwood | July 18, 2007 12:10 PM

Talk about reading into something! Perhaps if Pew had asked questions specifically about "family friendly systems" (???) I would follow you but just asking moms about their "ideal" doesn't really strike me as a mandate for tax credits. The Healthcare idea is great but not gonna happen in today's gop.

Also, I don't think you're gonna outflank anyone on the "big ideas" front by promising tuition credits for re-training programs.

Posted by berger | July 18, 2007 12:35 PM

I think you might have things backwards. Have you considered that only 1 in 5 mothers consider working full-time ideal precisely because of the issues Obama is addressing? Have you considered that, perhaps if the market were more suitable to the needs of working mothers, the # of women who prefer that option would increase, perhaps greatly?

The Pew numbers don't necessarily tell the story you want them to tell.

Posted by Michael | July 18, 2007 1:15 PM

Or you could just have paid family leave, or a guarantee of return to the same job (similar to what we currently do for National Guard service). But of course rearranging that bit of the social compact isn't anything Republicans want to do. Your suggested fiddling at the margins might not be a bad idea in that case.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | July 18, 2007 1:19 PM

The problem with "paid family leave" and similar proposals is that it puts the cost on the employer who is unlucky enough to have hired the woman. Why punish an employer for doing something good? If we want to support mothers at with children, which I agree is a good idea, we should have the taxpayers in general pay through tax cuts or credits for people with children.

Also the mothers who choose to stay home shouldn't be forced to subsidize mothers who work, so we don't need a bunch of government benefits tied specifically to working mothers (e.g. childcare credits). Instead, the benefits should just go to mothers (or parents) overall.

This is a great post, Ross, keep up the good work.

Posted by ed johnson | July 18, 2007 1:51 PM

1. I am not convinced that huge numbers of women actually want to stay at home with their children for long periods of time and not work. Just as many women work because they have to in order to make ends meet, many women stay at home because they can't find childcare. If inexpensive and reliable childcare is made universal, it would be interesting to see which option is more popular with women.

2. You really can't accomplish what Ross wants anyway. The costs to women of leaving work are not simply that they lose the salary during the time they are away from work. The costs also include (a) the fact that once a woman leaves the workplace, it is difficult to regain her career track, thereby stifling her career ambitions; (b) the more women that do leave the workplace, the more sex discrimination there is going to be in hiring, which is very bad for women, mothers and non-mothers alike; and (c) having a job is not simply about making money, but about being independent from a male partner. Many women are not in the best relationships and marriages; an active career leaves open the possibility that they can leave their men if things get bad. Even for people in good marriages, it is not really a good idea to place yourself extremely economically dependent on your partner.

Also, the wage structure has adjusted to the entry of women in the workplace. For most couples, there is no way to maintain the standard of living they want without two incomes.

Thus, the two-earner family is here to stay. The question is whether we make it easier for women to be mothers and have careers, or whether we sit around pining for the "good old days" while mothers struggle to make ends meet.

Posted by Dilan Esper | July 18, 2007 2:33 PM

Re: I am not convinced that huge numbers of women actually want to stay at home with their children for long periods of time and not work.

I also skeptical on that. I suspect what many people want (not just mothers but maybe some fathers too) would be a viable part-time job. Now of course part-time work certainly exists, but with rare exceptions it includes no benefits of any kind, not even paid holidays, and it tends to be very low-paying (and not just as a sreult of fewer hours; the base wage itself is far inferior to full-time job wages). Universal healthcare and perhaps some mandated vacation days would go a long way to resolving the first part of this, but I'm not sure what we could do about the low pay issue.

Posted by Jonf | July 18, 2007 2:42 PM

Re: I am not convinced that huge numbers of women actually want to stay at home with their children for long periods of time and not work.

I also skeptical on that. I suspect what many people want (not just mothers but maybe some fathers too) would be a vaiable part-time job. Now of course part-time work certainly exists, but with rare exceptions it includes no benefits of any kind, not even paid holidays, and it tends to be very low-paying (and not just as a result of fewer hours; the base wage itself is far inferior to full-time job wages). Universal healthcare and perhaps some mandated vacation days would go a long way to resolving the first part of this, but I'm not sure what we could do about the low pay issue.

Posted by JonF | July 18, 2007 2:43 PM

So, once again the guys are arguing over what women want and ignoring what women tell them they want.

I'm a woman and I'm inclined to believe that 1 in 5 women DO want to stay home with their kids. I know I do. Those early years especially are too important developmentally to leave up to committee-- which is essentially what you'd be doing with something like a state-sponsored daycare.

Posted by Proud Daughter of Eve | July 18, 2007 8:34 PM

Eve:

That may be what you want, your rhetoric gives you away: "state sponsored daycare". For many parents, childcare (which can be subsidized in all sorts of ways, from state-run facilities to tax credits and vouchers to pay a babysitter) is essential and they simply don't view it in the terms you do.

In any event, you missed the point of my post. I'd like to see a fair fight, where there is enough "state sponsored daycare" that those women who want to go back to work can do it. Then, let's see how many of them stay home.

My bet is it is less than you think; there's a lot of people out there who love their kids but don't think that requires that the mother stay home.

(And by the way, (1) it's not clear that parents have the influence on kids that you think they do, even in the early years (see the work of Judith Rich Harris, for example), and it's also not clear that hiring childcare is at all harmful to a child's development.)

Posted by Dilan Esper | July 19, 2007 12:54 PM

Dilan, you and I have clearly been reading very different material. Unfortunately, I don't have any links at hand to point you to so all I can do is say that childcare is a many-splendored beast. Not all childcare is bad, no, but the corollary is also true. Not all childcare is good. It's too much of a roulette wheel; I can't be comfortable with it.

Your rhetoric is giving you away too. "I'd like to see a fair fight, where there is enough "state sponsored daycare" that those women who want to go back to work can do it. Then, let's see how many of them stay home."

I, and many others like me, find that kind of attitude every bit as frustrating and offensive as the old "bare-foot and pregnant" attitude. You speak as if the world of work were so wonderful, no one would stay away from it by choice. You speak as if the task of raising children were so mind-numblingly stultifying that women must really be desperate to escape it.

With attitudes like that around -- and I see that one a lot -- is it any wonder that there's not enough daycare available? Society says "taking care of children is boring, unfulfilling and a waste of time when you could be earning REAL money." Yeah, sure, sign me up for THAT job. Right.

Posted by Proud Daughter of Eve | July 19, 2007 6:58 PM

While we're at it, why not agitate for state-sponsored, or tax-credited or whatever cooks and house cleaners for working women too? If our goal is really fairness and equality then we need to admit that the majority of the household tasks still fall to women, whether they work full-time, part-time or stay at home. If we're so concerned about the drain on their productivity or self-fulfillment of raising children, then why aren't we seeking to liberate them from that particular task-load as well?

Posted by Proud Daughter of Eve | July 19, 2007 7:07 PM

The other things working mothers want is not to be hassled when they have to take off to stay home with a sick kid. That's one reason why I left the world of newspaper editing to be a secretary -- half the pay, half the responsibility, and all the same benefits. Except, when I have to stay home with a sick kid, the reaction is "of course" rather than "the sky is falling."

Posted by Diane Fitzsimmons | July 20, 2007 1:50 PM

Two points here:
1. women want the opportunity to participate in public life, the market, education and politics, as WOMEN, not as men in skirts. That means making it possible for us to have our children when we are still fertile, rather than waiting until we have established a career, and trying to have kids in our 30's. That career path was designed for men. We need to have easy access to getting back into the labor force. Sylvia Ann Hewlett's new book On-Ramps and Off-Ramps is excellent in this regard.
2. For the record, Linda Hirshman does not advocate a level playing field. Some of the posters here don't seem to realize that some advanced countries, like the UK, for instance, no longer have any tax recognition for married couples. Marriage is out; single-motherhood, or independent womanhood, is in. The state has its thumb on the scale. Linda Hirschman is now advocating that for our tax code too. I have a review of her book here. http://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.696/pub_detail.asp I expect to have another out soon.

The import of these two points is that the stability of marriage is a crucial variable in this whole mix. Women would be better off with stable marriage and flexible career paths.
The politician who grasps this combination of facts will be far ahead of the competition.

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