July 15, 2012 |
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Helping highly educated women have it all is a hot topic, from Anne-Marie Slaughter’s
Atlantic article, to Amy Chua’s book about Chinese child-rearing
Tiger Mothers to Pamela Druckerman’s
ode to French parents. The blogosphere is on fire.
Missing from this discussion is the plight of working-class women to have it
at all. Since the Great Recession, a larger portion of adults worry that they cannot afford children. Doing so often requires a
stark choice
between jobs essential to the family’s solvency or adequate supervision
of the young. The class contrasts are wide and growing starker.
The lives of upper-middle-class women have been remade to make two
high-profile careers the norm. Sociologist Paul Amato and his colleagues
found that those with the highest marital quality were the
upper-middle-class, two thirds of whom had dual income marriages (
Alone Together, 2009). The others have husbands with six-figure-plus incomes.
These couples marry and have children later. When they do, the
marriages are more stable and partners tend to be more supportive of
each other’s work needs. The men and women have made it into high status
positions with more flexibility in scheduling work activities, and they
have the resources to supplement parental time with high-quality
caretakers. If the women (and increasingly many of the men) must give up
the gold ring – the career capping position that includes ultimate
power, status or income – to meet their families’ needs, they can still
achieve the good life and manage it well.
In contrast, working-class women are in a bind. Relatively few can find
husbands earning income sufficient to support a family even in meager
circumstances. And working-class male employment has become more subject
to downsizing and layoffs even when the pay is adequate. Moreover, with
the majority of new jobs coming either in small business or services,
the employers may have less flexibility in accommodating children’s
school schedules or unanticipated child care and health emergencies than
large employers and professional offices. The result makes the class
divide in finding family friendly workplaces a chasm.
First, college-educated women are more likely to enjoy greater job
security and benefits such as family and medical leave. The U.S. Census
Bureau reports that almost two-thirds of new mothers with a college
degree or higher received any kind of paid maternity leave, compared
with less than one-fifth of those without a high school degree. In
addition, women with less than a high school education were four times
more likely to be let go of during their pregnancies or within 12 weeks
after the birth of their first child than were women with a college
education. (See
Table 7 of the report).
In part because they enjoy more flexible workplaces but also in part
because the price of leaving the workforce is so high in terms of income
loss and harm to career advancement, middle-class women have become
much more likely to remain employed after giving birth.
According to the Census Bureau,
28 percent of women with less than a high school degree worked during
their first pregnancies, 70 percent of those with some college, and 87
percent of women with a college degree (or higher) were in the
workforce.
Perhaps even more significantly, economist Heather Boushey found that
the “child penalty,” the extent to which having a child decreases a
woman’s odds of having a job, is negligible for highly educated women,
while it is considerable for women with less education;
employment rates
for women with less education who had children at home were 21.7
percent less than for those women with the same education who did not
have children at home, while for women with a graduate degree, the
“penalty” rate was 1.3 percent.
Growing class-based differences in the cognitive investment in young
children make these differences not just a problem for the parents, but
for the life chances of the children. Despite their greater work-force
participation, high-income mothers report spending as much time with
their children as the mothers of a generation ago, and the fathers spend
more time. “Helicopter” parents closely script their children’s
activities as they schedule soccer practice, piano lessons, tutoring,
and other activities, and juggle nannies, car pools and two-parent
chauffeuring.
In contrast, working-class children are more likely to be left on their
own or in the care of an unreliable cast of friends and relatives. They
are more subject to the negative influence of dangerous streets and
poor role models, and more likely to attend inadequate schools where
parent involvement is more critical to educational success. Princeton
professor Sara McLanahan observed that the class-gap in resources that
comes from differences in family stability, income and parental time
spent with children has
increased dramatically over the last 40 years.
So, too, has the achievement gap. As Harvard’s Robert Putnam (and author of
Bowling Alone) recently
pointed out
at the Aspen Ideas Festival 2012, there is an increasing class gap for
children in the time spent with parents as well as in enrichment
expenditures, and he concluded that the “bottom line” shows “growing
class gaps among American youth in all predictors of success in life.”
Remaking workplaces to accommodate families should be the ideal, but in
today’s marketplace such proposals are likely to exacerbate class
disparities. Instead, we should rethink family support at the societal
level. Separating health care from employment through Medicaid expansion
or insurance exchanges would allow employers to be more flexible in
designing part-time employment, and allow parents to cycle in and out of
the job market without losing healthcare benefits. Redefining
unemployment assistance to include parents temporarily out of work
because of family obligations would make it easier for families to
manage without placing additional burdens on marginal employers.
On a longer term basis, real solutions include extending state-funded
pre-school education and affordable child care and better coordinating
the school day with parent’s working hours. All three proposals have the
added benefit of addressing the cognitive development of the most
at-risk children.
Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey
Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School.
She is the author of numerous books and law review articles on gender
and family law. June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of
Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas
City. Cahn and Carbone are the co-authors of "Red Families v. Blue
Families."
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