From the Dollars and Sense blog:
Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative sent us this link to a recent article in Slate magazine. The article cites the curious phenomenon that professional baseball players are much more likely to be born in August than July. The author theorizes that August babies aren’t naturally better at baseball — they’re just older than their peers, because Aug. 1 is the normal cut-off date for youth baseball leagues.
The author concludes that this structural benefit for the August-born is a “small advantage can have an impact that lasts a lifetime.”
Which reminds me of this old cartoon of mine:
Your old cartoon doesn’t show up.
Your old cartoon doesn’t show up.
…which is a bummer, because it’s probably a good one.
I can see it.
I can too now.
The cartoon muddles its intended point. The cartoon frames economic competition as occurring between childrearing partners. She’s ready to compete on a fair and equal basis, but it’s shown that she can’t because her husband/boyfriend is way ahead of her in the game.
Yet, she isn’t competing with him, unless they’re trying for the same job. She’s competing with other people out there in the marketplace – and in that competition, it doesn’t matter how her husband/bf has been doing relative to her.
In fact, in that competition as depicted, she now has an advantage over other workforce members – her child is raised and no longer requires a bunch of time, and her husband/bf is now so successful that her income is not going to be a foundation of the family’s economic survival. She can negotiate on price much more effectively than someone who has to buy bread and pay rent with their salary – meaning that jobs with tremendous potential for learning or opportunity but that don’t have high salaries to start with are within her reach. She is starting her career with no family worries and with wealth at her back, and thus has a broader range of choices in the jobs she can seek.
The point you’re trying to make, I think, is that the tiny advantage the man has in the scenario ends up exempting him from childrearing responsibilities of the dawn-to-bedtime variety. That’s the unfairness; that the small economic advantage is semi-forcing a gender disparity in childrearing. But even that point is undermined by the biographical detail you provide in the cartoon: the woman likes doing the childcare. This woman ends up getting the best of both worlds; she gets to do what she wants in the childrearing department, isn’t forced to work when she’d rather be caring for children, and then, when she’s past the childrearing portion of her life, she has the world at her feet in terms of career options. Whereas her husband/bf, the cartoon clearly shows, never has that flexibility – he has to work from day one because (at that point in their biographies) they need every scrap of advantage they can get.
You’re attempting to show that even this small economic advantage ends up oppressing women. But the woman in your example, at least, is not oppressed in the slightest. She is, in fact, privileged.
Robert makes very good points – in fact, I’d say now at the end of the Cartoon, she is vastly privileged over the man. He’s high up on the pedestal – probably he is so high up he has no choice about taking another job that he might enjoy a lot more but pays a lot less. He’s got a family to support now. He’s trapped.
On the other hand, the woman is now free to pursue whatever avenues she wants. She could go back to school. She could start a new career doing her dream job, making very little money at it, because she has his support. Of course, if she chooses to go to school or work for little money (over a career that pays more) that just further traps the man on his pedestal, where he must remain to support them all.
And as Robert pointed out, she enjoyed staying home with the children – that was a valuable experience – I did that with my daughter when she was born and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. When it comes between enjoying time raising my family and being at work, work is a distant second. I always wish I could have more quality time with my children. I don’t wish I could spend more time at work.
I could go further, and claim that the cartoon is actually sexist, because it presumes that going out and working (a traditional “man thing”) is more important than staying home and raising a family (a traditional “woman thing”). But I wouldn’t do that. ;)
I really don’t think either of you understood what my intended point was. That doesn’t mean that your interpretations are wrong (although I think they are); but insofar as Robert infers “its intended point,” he’s wrong.
OK, well, what was your intended point, then? Your caption is “Another Mom Gets Screwed Over By A Tiny Advantage”. How is this mom getting screwed over?
How is this mom getting screwed over?
The dad gets known as a success in his work and gets kudos for being a wonderful dad if he sacrifices himself so far as to play with his kid once a week. The mom gets told that she’s lazy for never holding a job or having one only early and late in life. The dad gets to do something he wants to with his life, something he considers important and interesting, the mom only gets to prepare the next generation for doing something. The dad has a large 401K, the mom might have a minimal amount of social security for retirement and gets trashed if she asks for any money from the dad after they divorce (and they will divorce: he can’t even hear her anymore.) Etc.
He’s high up on the pedestal – probably he is so high up he has no choice about taking another job that he might enjoy a lot more but pays a lot less. He’s got a family to support now. He’s trapped.
Nonsense. The family did ok when junior was a baby and the dad was far lower down. They can do ok again on what he would make if he changed careers. Better, in fact, because they’ve probably saved some money that could help them during the transition.
Dianne – That’s all your addition. I’m inquiring about the cartoon, which shows the woman getting to do what she wants to do.
Robert: I’m too busy on “Hereville” stuff to put time into participating in this thread right now. I may come back to it later… but I’m gonna be very busy until after Stumptown is over, at least.
A few points:
The cartoon husband and wife have a common interest here: the household’s net income.
The tiny disparity in their salaries at the beginning of the story is not what creates the huge disparity at the end of it – it’s the fact that the woman has been out of the workplace for so long to attend to child-bearing and -rearing. That would be just as true if their initial salaries had been 100% equal.
If the husband had, when they were planning their family, said: “OK, the gap in our salaries is tiny, not enough, by any means, to determine which of us goes out to work and which of us looks after the kids. I propose that I do the child-rearing and that you attend to your career” – if he’d said that, do you think she would have been happy to act on his suggestion?
I’m finding it hard to see what point the cartoon is making.
I’m inquiring about the cartoon, which shows the woman getting to do what she wants to do.
Heh? The only panel which could be construed as her getting to do what she wants to do is #3, and even there it is highly ambiguous: she accepts it when her partner says she must stay home with the baby because of his higher income. Maybe she really likes baby care, maybe she is just rationalizing because she doesn’t feel she has any reasonable choices. Maybe she likes baby care but would also like to do something else as well. I enjoyed baby care when I had a baby, but would have hated doing nothing else.
The dad gets known as a success in his work and gets kudos for being a wonderful dad if he sacrifices himself so far as to play with his kid once a week. The mom gets told that she’s lazy for never holding a job or having one only early and late in life. The dad gets to do something he wants to with his life, something he considers important and interesting, the mom only gets to prepare the next generation for doing something. The dad has a large 401K, the mom might have a minimal amount of social security for retirement and gets trashed if she asks for any money from the dad after they divorce (and they will divorce: he can’t even hear her anymore.) Etc.
There’s a lot of presumptions in this that there’s no evidence for. For all you know, the guy is in a miserable job that he considers unimportant and gets no fulfillment from. It may easily be that it pays decently but that he hates it. There’s absolutely no way to infer that he’s regarded as a success; he may simply be viewed as adequate. He may only be staying in it because his family needs the money and his wife has (for whatever reason) no immediate prospects of being able to make up the difference between the salaries of the job he has and the job he wants. There’s also no way from this cartoon to tell whether or not he even has a 401(k), never mind a large one.
For all you know, the guy is in a miserable job that he considers unimportant and gets no fulfillment from.
Naw, then he’d jump at the chance to go part time and possibly quit altogether. Who’d stay in a job they hate if they had other options? Also I think one might reasonably assume that the “advantage” being noted is in prestige, interest level, and other perks, not just salary.
I sense that Amp is remarking on how small, logical points of distinction become amplified into lifelong social patterns.
That’s the initial premise of the post: that a kid that’s born just after the age cut-off for baseball (and soccer, as discussed in the linked article) receive a boost in their early years. They excel relative to their peers who are, on average, six months younger. This seemingly trivial advantage appears to trigger a cascade of benefits that ultimately influences who becomes a professional athlete.
Amp then notes how a similar dynamic influences the relative career success of men and women. Men tend to earn more than similarly-situated women, even upon entering the workforce. Thus in any male-female couple, if one party must drop out of the wage labor force (to care for an infant, for example), it is likely more profitable for the woman to do so. This arrangement then becomes self-reinforcing. Compensation will tend to correlate with years of experience in a given profession. Thus even after a child has grown out of infancy, whenever one member of the couple must take time away from paid labor to attend to the child’s needs – or for any other reason – it will likely make economic sense for the woman to do so.
Consequently when we look at disparity in earnings (and everything that correlates with it) disaggregated by gender, we observe a big difference. The mom is “screwed over” as a result of the (relatively small) advantage that men start with relative to similarly-situated women in the paid labor force. In this sense the cartoon illustrates how disparities in the compensation rates for men and women, even when initially small, have large consequences for society.
But, as Tom Nolan suggests, it illustrates others dynamics as well. It suggests that there is a systemic need for some part of the labor force to dedicate its time to child-rearing. It suggests that people who later leave child-rearing to pursue another profession may be at a competitive disadvantage relative to others who have never left the labor force.
Amp seems to regard this situation as unjust, but there is some ambiguity about where the injustice lies: Clearly there appears to be injustice in wage disparities between similarly-situated men and women entering the paid labor force. But arguably there is injustice in the manner in which we compensate people who rear children, regardless of gender. And perhaps there is injustice in the fact that people tend to get paid for their years of experience in a given profession. Imagine Amp had drawn a lesbian couple in the cartoon, thereby eliminating the issue of gender disparity. Would the stay-at-home mom be any less “screwed”?
I understand the male figure to represent both a male mate (with whom the woman has some common interests) as well as all other rivals in the job market (with whom the woman has antagonistic interests). This isn’t a problem if you’re trying to show how disparities by gender arise. But, as Robert and Disgusted Beyond Belief argue, it may be a problem if you’re trying to demonstrate that one gender is getting “screwed.”
Wow, that sounds great. Personally, my financial anxieties only deepen as my kids get older. I kinda doubt that either my wife or myself will be feeling indifferent to the need to maximize our incomes when my kids start moving out. But maybe your 529 plan has performed better than mine.
Is the woman privileged? Sure, she has freedom in the “nothin’ left to lose” sense. But this illustrates an ambiguity in the cartoon: what are we measuring? Clearly if we’re measuring her individual wage income (and things that correlate with it), then she’s not privileged. But what makes that the relevant point of comparison? Sure, as Dianne points out, the analysis becomes different when you assume that the couple has disparate interest, including getting divorced. That’s a big change, and generally the woman ends up the worse for it. But absent that dynamic, the woman is not obviously “screwed;” she is part of a couple that has maximized its collective welfare to their mutual benefit.
FFS. My spouse is at home with the kids full-time, and that doesn’t make him “vastly privileged”. If he goes back to school, he has to arrange childcare himself and work around my job. If he wants to take a part-time job or home business making ‘little money’, ditto. Assuming, of course, that he can get my buy-in because guess whose name is on my paychecks? And if he decides to fuckitall and go back to work full-time, he’s behind all his peers who didn’t take time off work–as well as behind me.
Robert, I think “competing” is probably a poor choice of words by Amp, but he’s correct that the ‘tiny advantage’ can become greatly magnified over time. For want of a nail the kingdom was lost, and all that.
Really, the greatest inaccuracy in the cartoon is that in panel 6 the woman still has the start she had in panel 1. In real life, she would have been entirely on the ground or (more likely) in a hole by the time she finished raising the child. Because if you take time off to raise a child and want to go back later, you’ll get told that your skills are out of date, that you weren’t “passionate” about work in the first place (because otherwise they wouldn’t have taken time off), that they won’t be able to work long enough to be worth hiring, etc.
I really don’t see how the cartoon can be so confusing.
The woman is out of the workplace for so long that when she starts working again, she is way behind the other people (mostly men) who never left the workforce. Her career has been stagnant for years while others’ have been moving forward.
By the end of the cartoon, the tiny advantage the man had has now become a HUGE advantage–an advantage shared by many others with whom the woman will be competing. It will be hard for her to advance her career when she is at such a disadvantage. But I repeat myself.
There is just no way she can be “vastly privileged” over the man–his earning power is greater, his seniority ands thus respectability is greater, his work experience is greater… plus whatever institutional sexism gets thrown the woman’s way.
There’s a lot of presumptions in this that there’s no evidence for. For all you know, the guy is in a miserable job that he considers unimportant and gets no fulfillment from.
If we’re going to kill all presumptions (even Dianne’s generally reasonable ones), then please don’t use “he may hate his job.” He may, or he may not. It’s really not the point.
Okay, but we’re not comparing her to most other workforce members. Taking her to be a typical suburban white mom, that advantage was there to begin with. No doubt she will have an easier time getting a mediocre-paying but otherwise cushy job at the local library easier than an immigrant worker or some random person who was poorer than her to begin with. But she is disadvantaged with respect to men like her husband, in the sort of high-flying career paths that men like him are pursuing. That’s the point, and it’s silly to try to deny that this is true. Those sorts of career paths may be what she wanted.
The dad could quit his job anytime he wanted for something more fun, just like the mom could re-enter the workforce at any time if that’s what she really wants. There’s no law acting against either of them. But you’re discounting social pressures that keep the man in, which are just as strong as those keeping the woman out. The dad can take a lower pressure, lower paying job anytime he wants – at the cost of nosy busybodies questioning his worth to his gender. This sort of pressure can be quite non-trivial for dads and moms alike.
Overall, though, I personally don’t buy the argument that living under a roof of another breadwinner is actually the sweeter deal. There’s a similar economic arrangement with loved ones that allow one to take lower stress jobs, pursue hobbies, and spend more time with family. You could move back in with your parents. Do you consider this an acceptable arrangement for yourself?
Probably not, because no matter its other appeals, no matter how much your benefactor loves you, you lose some crucial independence if someone else is paying your way. With different earning power comes a power differential. Some women may not want this, and for them the situation in the cartoon is a genuine problem. Stop pretending the power differential doesn’t exist.
Great point. I also think there’s a third injustice here: the way subjective prestige is assigned to certain jobs. It hurts men who don’t want those kind of jobs, and it hurts women who may not necessarily like giving power point presentations for the rest of her life but nonetheless wants a share in the power and deference that comes with such a position – a perfectly reasonable desire.
The dad could quit his job anytime he wanted for something more fun, just like the mom could re-enter the workforce at any time if that’s what she really wants. There’s no law acting against either of them. But you’re discounting social pressures that keep the man in, which are just as strong as those keeping the woman out.
I see your point and think it partially correct, but not entirely. There is an additional constraint on the mother’s behavior that there is not on the father’s: the need to have someone taking care of the child. If the father doesn’t agree to take part of that work, then the mother is basically screwed. First, she has to find daycare for the child, a non-trivial problem in many places, even if one is willing to put up with bad daycare. Then she has to find a way to get the child from school to daycare every day, which means that she has to have a job that will allow her to take time off at about 3 pm every day to get the child from point A to point B. And she’ll probably be responsible for taking the child to school and picking him up from daycare, all of which take time and cut into the work day. Then too she’ll probably be the one who ends up taking care of the house, cooking, putting the kid in bed, etc. (She almost certainly was when she stayed at home and old habits die hard, even if her partner is willing in principle to take on some of the work.) So without her partner’s help (or the help of another relative or friend), she is basically limited to a part time job. The father, on the other hand, just has to have the intestinal fortitude to put up with people making snide comments if he quits for a job he likes better. And he will probably get a certain number of complements as well of the “Bob is really brave to have quit his job as an investment banker to pursue his dream of becoming a partical physicist.” I don’t know how that’s going to stack up against the “That unmanly nut Bob quit a $200K/year job to go play with bosons–can you imagine?” comments, but I wouldn’t expect either to strongly dominate.
There still exists a corollary with the father’s situation. Again taking the “traditional suburban household” as the model (which I recognize represents a minority of all households), the father’s income is more likely to be seen as that which provides for the family, while the mother’s income is more likely to be seen as extra – certainly for the case where the mother has stayed at home for some period of time and then re-enters the workforce. Whatever job he takes, the father has to figure in providing for all the family’s expenses (college, mortgage payments, plasma TV’s, etc.) much more than the mother, who may not have to do so at all. I’d probably agree with you though if you said the daycare situation for mothers is worse – are there any FC people here willing to weigh in?
I’m not sure what to make of your last statement. Certainly, there will at least be some people saying “Jen is really brave to get out there and reach for those stars”. I think the naysayers will predominate over the cheerleaders, if only because negative words scar more than positive words heal, for most people. I don’t share your confidence that the situation would be markedly better for Bob.
“There is just no way she can be “vastly privileged” over the man–his earning power is greater, his seniority ands thus respectability is greater, his work experience is greater… plus whatever institutional sexism gets thrown the woman’s way.”
Maybe some people don’t prioritize earning power, work respectability, seniority, in life. I certainly don’t. Getting enough income to get by is fine by me. Wether I get it on my own, from my partner, or a joint thing with both incomes together – the important thing for me is to not be homeless, without food, etc – not important for me to be the one to wake up at 5 or 6 in the morning and to take the traffic every morning and evening.
I don’t have a driver’s license, nor do I plan on ever getting it. I could still work, but forget the traffic. I won’t spend 100$ worth of gas every week on a 300 or 400$ paycheck, that’s nonsense to me, not including repairs, changing tires, insurance, car checks every 3000 miles and such.
I prioritize:
1) Not being homeless, having enough income to survive (wether alone or not)
2) Free time, time for hobbies, time off work.
3) Distance from work (given I’m on foot or public transportation – I might prefer work from home too).
4) Work conditions (BIG difference between warehouse and office, besides the AC), type of work, co-workers being friendly enough, bosses being friendly enough (don’t need to invite me to their place, but only be on my back if I did something wrong).
5) Income from work, insurance benefits
6) A far distant 6): retirement funds
Notice I didn’t mention childcare. I can’t have biological children, nor do I plan on adopting. I love children, I just fear I wouldn’t do them justice.
I think what is missing from the cartoon is how many men actually see the situation, which is why so many guys — not the rabid, foaming at the mouth, MRA types, but Joe Shmoe, Family Guy — are hurt by the entire divorce, custody, and support biz. For some value of brainwashed, guys are still being brainwashed to believe that their contribution to “child rearing” is “bring home the paycheck.”
What is not happening in the States is any kind of financial planning that would even allow Dad to stay home with Junior while Mom starts her career. With the majority of American families living at or beyond their means, from the very first day that Mom decides she’s going to stay home once Junior reaches tadpole size, Mom and Dad have made a decision, given how Americans plan their finances, that means Dad cannot give up his “small” advantage. And while that advantage grows, so do the family obligations. What was once a cozy starter home grows with the ability to lock in the latest ReFi, Dad’s commuter mobile and Mom’s 4 door sedan with room for Sis and Junior’s carseat becomes the Home Theatre On Wheels, complete with built in ice cooler, 7.1 channel surround and a 17″ flat panel. Or maybe two 9″ screens in the headrests.
Exploiting the advantage ceases to be a freely made decision and becomes one that is coerced by the decision that externally visible wealth must have some kind of relationship to monthly paycheck.
Yes, sexism sews the seeds that cause women to earn less during the DINK years which led up to Junior being born, but if they lived within the confines of those early years, paid cash when possible, lived more modestly, and didn’t treat Home Equity as the Giant Cash Jackpot, by the time Junior isn’t in the most expensive forms of daycare — the ones where ratios are 4 or 6 or 8 to one — there’s nothing keeping Dad from cutting back while Mom brushes up her skills and then joins the workforce. Nothing but massive credit card debt, a taste for new cars, big houses, and little or no savings for even the gentlest sprinkle of a rainy day.
I think that if men were asked, many would honestly answer that the inequality isn’t driven by sexism, but by NEED. They NEED the big house and the mortgage. They NEED to drive new cars. They NEED to make all that money because they NEED to pay for their NEEDS. It is not sexism that someone with 10 years experience earns more than someone with none. How much a man makes over a woman when both have 10 years — yes, sexism.
So the question to me becomes — how do we educate people to have fewer needs? To get children to understand that a $150 pair of sneakers (my first car cost me $200, BTW) is not a need, but a WANT. That not being driven around in an Escalade means a better chance of going to college at all? For Dad to drive a commuter mobile until it has to be replaced, not until the model is outdated?
Schala, having children (biological or otherwise) tends to strongly affect that “I don’t care how much I make” approach. Just “getting by” is far more expensive with children–and there’s a difference between deciding what kind of lifestyle I will have, and what kind of lifestyle I will impose on my kids.
Except that we link childrearing with gender, and gender with the value of compensation. “Women’s work” isn’t seen as valuable or worthwhile as “men’s work”–see pay-equity suits in which janitors and housekeepers in the same business were compensated very differently, even though their work was virtually equivalent.
Wow, way to miss the point.
The cartoon is about why there is that “10 years vs. none” gap in experience.
This analysis is wrong. The problem is that husbands and wives are not anywhere near ‘similarly situated’, people don’t marry opposite gendered versions of themselves. Men systematically tend to marry younger women, or alternative put, women tend to marry older men. The proportion of the wage difference between husbands and wives when they first partner up which is attributable to the gender-wage gap (i.e how much the gap would be reduced were the wife a man, or the husband a woman) is tiny. The real source of the difference comes from husbands tending to be three years older, three years more advanced in their careers, and having gotten three extra years of pay rises and promotions. It’s something to do with the cultural dynamics of partner choice, rather than wage discrimination against women.
It’s perfectly true that with a earning differential comes a power differential. But if people don’t want this, they can avoid it by the simple expedient of not partnering with someone richer than them. It’s hardly a difficult problem to avoid.
I merely seek to clarify where the problem lies.
In brief, I hypothesize that a job applicant with less experience in a given field faces a disadvantage when competing against an applicant with more experience. Presumably this is true in the child-rearing market, too: all else being equal, I’d prefer to hire a nanny with more experience to one with less. But when people transition from one field to another, employers may not value a job applicant’s experience in another field. I find no gender disparity in any of this.
As noted above, a gender disparity arises from the fact that we link childrearing with gender – that is, women perform a disproportionate share of the child-rearing – AND that many of these women subsequently seek to transition into other fields of pursuit. If full-time child-rearers could make that job a life-long pursuit – entering the nanny business after their own children were grown, say – they might avoid some of the disadvantages that come from changing fields mid-career.
What remedy? Typically when employees conclude that they are being inadequately compensated, they tend to quit (or decline to enter the field in the first instance). Arguably that is the optimal time for achieving a different outcome: if you don’t like the terms of being a stay-at-home caregiver, don’t become one. And the simplest way to achieve this outcome is to refrain from having kids. Ever more Western women are making precisely this choice. And the more women do so, the lower the supply of potential moms becomes and the higher the premium I would expect to be paid for their services. This premium might come in the form of potential stay-at-home caregivers having an increased range of interested mates (and, ideally, being able to negotiate explicit terms in a pre-nuptial agreement). It might come in the form of public support for subsidizing child-rearing (child tax deductions, welfare payments, school funding, etc.). Or it might come in other forms.
Alas, I suspect the cartoon illustrates a market failure resulting from Galbraithian-induced supply and demand. In other words, people make choices (such as whether to start smoking or have kids) based on mistaken (and often emotion-drenched) ideas. Western notions of romantic love equate marriage and family with crossing the “happily ever after” finish line, and give almost no attention to rest of the relationship. This dynamic may distract a couple from even discussing future plans, let alone reducing them to legally-enforceable terms. And romantic notions arguably inflate the supply of people in certain professions (moms, nurses, soldiers, restaurant owners), thereby depressing the compensation that these people might otherwise demand. Education can remediate this problem to some extent. (Consider the Army’s challenges making recruitment targets in the face of a labor supply that has been educated by current news reports.)
So arguably with the aid of enough information, the cartoon woman could have said, “I’m not willing to be a stay-at-home mom unless I’m guaranteed 50% of your income.” The rest of the cartoon could play out the same way: the mom would still be at a competitive disadvantage when she sought to re-enter the work force. But at least the cartoon would recognize that the mom owned 50% of the pillar the man was standing on.
Alternatively she could say, “I’m not willing to be a full-time stay-at-home mom. I’m not going to have kids until we can negotiate terms for full-time child care.” The woman would still face the challenges of gendered income disparity. But she’d build her own pillar.
But either scenario would require the woman to identify a price below which she would abandon child-rearing. If she’s not really willing to abandon her own ambitions to be a mom, then she’ll need to be satisfied with receiving a heavy dose of her compensation in non-financial forms – forms that Amp regards as being “screwed.”
IN ADDITION TO all of that, is traditional “women’s work” less well compensated than “men’s work,” independent of the labor supply issue? I suspect it is, and this dynamic would exacerbate the gender disparity problem. But fixing this problem would not fix the other systemic problems noted above.
For the subset of people who want to avoid having a career, don’t care about the repercussions, and are happy to stay home, it is a benefit to be able to do so.
For the subset of people who want to have a career, it is likewise a benefit to do so.
But i think that on average, there are more men AND WOMEN in the second category. IOW, there are more women who are frustrated in their desire to have a career than there are men who are frustrated in their desire to stay home.
Obviously there are people on both sides: working dads who wish they were at home, etc. And on an individual basis, I think that their pain is just as great as anyone else’s pain, whether man or woman. But on average I think that is less true, so on average I think the burden is disproportionately borne by women.
Also (and how did this not come up yet?) i’d like to note that having financial earning power is a huuuuuuuge benefit if the marriage doesn’t work. Which happens all the time–what is the divorce rate, 50% or close to it? It’s clear that–as with work–there are costs to both sides. But it seems that on average, it’s much more beneficial to be the divorcee who has money and an income-generating future than to be the “lucky” one who “gets” to collect child support.
Not only does this apply after the divorce, but the disproportionate issue of income also tends to bias the divorce process, because at some level power = money, and if only one spouse is earning money… well, there’s a lot of slimy shit that goes down which doesn’t technically fall into the “abuse” category, but which makes me wonder why the people were ever married in the first place. Which is why i don’t do divorce law.
So that’s yet another manner in which the disporportionality of working roles has a significant effect. Is the agreement “you stay home and raise the kids; 10 years from now we’ll be rich and you can get that PhD you always wanted?” Better hope you’re still married in 10 years, or that you have a promise in writing, if you see what I’m saying.
(and yes: it happens in reverse, too. Sometimes it’s “I’ll raise the kids and go to work in 5 years so you can work half time and hang out with the kids” and he agrees to work 60 hours/week to support them all. Then 5 years later she divorces him, decides not to go back to work, gets full custody, and takes child support. So he has to keep working, and doesn’t get to see the kids. Like I said, on an individual level it sucks just as badly when it’s reversed. It’s just that it is reversed less frequently to the bias still exists on average.)
I’ve acknowledged that there is potentially some tension in having the cartoon male represent both the woman’s mate as well as all competitors in the labor force. To the extent that the cartoon man represents the woman’s mate, and therefore probably has more experience in the labor force than the woman does, you raise a fair point.
And along with “getting” to collect child support is “getting” to shoulder the majority of the childcare…which heavily impacts one’s ability to earn a living.
james, the age gap is not as great as you make it out to be; it’s a couple of years, not ten years.
mythago writes:
No, I didn’t miss that in the least. It exists because many people live in such a way that they have no choice but to go in a direction that causes it to exist.
mythago, just in case you didn’t realize it, the scare quotes in my post were meant to be cynical–I don’t actually think it’s lucky. (I think you know, but just making sure…)
It is comforting to think that the people in Amp’s cartoon got there because of their insatiable lust for consumer goods, isn’t it?
Well…didn’t they, to some degree? Although I wouldn’t say lust for consumer goods so much as “unwillingness to be perceived as poor”. Middle-class Americans in 1960 lived a pretty decent life, and you can acquire that level of material comfort for pretty modest work in 2008 – certainly, two working parents who have non-crazy jobs can manage it together without having no choice but for one of them to do the 70-hour crazy job routine.
It’s just that they’d be poor by the standards of their neighbors – driving the same car for 20 years, wearing clothes until they fray to nothing instead of hitting the Gap twice a year, having three channels of TV and no Internet instead of a $150/month cable bill, getting books at the library instead of at Amazon.com, eating what was on sale at the grocery store instead of t-bone twice a week, and so forth.
Nobody has ever died because they didn’t have an iPod or an LCD monitor or a computer. But they have felt poor for not having those things, and feeling poor does suck.
I don’t think so. The reality that is actually different than the cartoon’s portrayal, is that both spouses do work and in general the woman earns less under any circumstances than her male counterpart. That’s just how it is statistically speaking. Maybe it’s because usually it’s the woman who’s expected to pick up the kids after school, if they’re ill and need to be taken to the doctor, who cooks the dinner and does the laundry…? and therefore will miss more time from work than the male who isn’t expected to do these things.
At the same time (forgive me for this personal note) I remember in the early days of my work life, a man was hired several months after I was in almost the same position that I had when I started. I had already proven myself and been promoted twice in those months. One of the company’s policies was that we weren’t to discuss our salary and I soon found out why. When I argued with another female coworker that we were all given equal opportunity on this job, she let me know that the man who had been hired after I had been was making half again as much as myself. I found that hard to believe, so I asked him when I had the chance to do so discreetly, and he confirmed that his salary was what she said it was. Although this was several years ago, I don’t think that things could have changed that drastically.
Probably not. Except I’ve yet to meet a lesbian couple with a stay-at-home mom. For a number of reasons: likely if there are children, one or both of them were working moms before they met; the pressures on a lesbian marriage are much greater than on a heterosexual one, so they both know they’ll need to support themselves whatever happens with the relationship; and finally because just one of their salaries would not be enough to support the family as might be possible in a heterosexual marriage with only the man working. (Because he earns enough to do so.)
james, you bring up a couple of good points, but I have reason to doubt that they make much difference when all the differences are averaged out to a society-wide level. If there’s a significant class disparity between two spouses, I’d say the odds are much greater that the man was richer – but I think these types of couples taken as a whole represent a minority, and that most people tend to marry within their class. Similarly, if there’s an age difference between the couples, I’d guess that the woman is younger. However, as has been pointed out, this isn’t a large difference when it’s all averaged out.
It’s actually quite disconcerting that our economy suffers the ravages of consumers who can’t say “No” to a credit card offer or “Interest Free” purchase.
Those consumers boost our economy, not ravage it.
You can make up any imaginary “they” and project them as you like, I suppose. I didn’t see any iPods in Amp’s cartoon, but apparently FurryCatHerder is one of those who thinks any discussion touching on family/work issues is a reason to launch into a screed how women could contendedly stay home with their kids if they weren’t shopaholics.
Well, FCH can defend herself, but I didn’t read her post as a screed, simply as an exposition of the fact that people make choices. When folks are living in beautiful homes that would have made their grandparents eyes’ pop out and also are saying how broke they are and how they have to work nine jobs…well, things cost. Decisions cost. You can’t have everything.
No, Robert, your post is a somewhat platitudinous but still coherent exposition of the fact that people make choices. FCH’s post was a rant that assumed everybody in a particular subset along the lines of Amp’s cartoon are making the choice “conspicuously consume stuff we can’t afford”.
And of course it’s always more fun to play defensive attribution and assume that anyone with financial troubles did so through prideful overspending–not like us, who are frugal and smart and therefore will never be in their situation.
Mythago,
Apparently you are unfamiliar with my view of American family economic stupidity. I will now explain it for you.
I hold the average American consumer, of all races, genders, and most socioeconomic conditions, universally in low regard based on their apparent inability to comprehend that one can purchase more with CASH than with CREDIT.
It is a mystery (no, it really isn’t — there are things about your writing that make your biases very obvious to me) how you concluded that I am anti-women when men and their bass boats and penis-substitutes, I mean, Giant Monster Trucks, are no less a part of the problem than women’s tendency to never pass by a sale.
Yes, it is true that the consumer makes the economy go ’round, but it is also the consumer who is greatly in debt who makes it crash and burn. I’d be happy to explain this to you, but you’d have to change your writing style so your bigotry doesn’t come screaming through all the time.
Oh — and if men didn’t need their penis substitutes, miracle of miracles, even men could sometimes decide to stay home with the kids. Any kind of real feminism means having the ability to make decisions that are feminist. Not some abstract desire, but decisions that are consistent with a feminist outcome.
I defend a lot of people in foreclosure and often deal with people in bankruptcy. I also serve on a few nonprofit boards.
On that note–perhaps a topic for another post?–there is not only an impact of small advantages, but a HUGE impact of small DISadvantages. To the degree that people manage to avoid getting into trouble, they tend to overestimate how simple it is to do so.
Our nonprofit had run very nicely for many decades. but a bad month, combined with three totally random expenses, almost sent us completely under. We HAD planned for contingencies… just not three, at the same time. It would be easy to use 20/20 hindsight to suggest that we should have saved more in the contingency fund, but that’s not necessarily correct.
With people, it can be the same thing. You’re fine–until your car breaks and your sitter quits in the same week that your 2 kids get sick and can’t go to school. You have planned for all those things, or even two of them, but not for all three.
And maybe you even DO squeak by through that week, but hiring an expensive temporary sitter eats up all the money that you would normally save, so the NEXT time that your car breaks you can’t fix it. And then you’re screwed.
I see it all the time. You’ve got $150 in your account and you write a $100 check and a $60 check, thinking you’ll deposit $10 in a day or two. Then the $60 check bounces because you deposit the $10 two days late, and you get charged $20 for the bounce, but the notice takes 4 days to get to you in the mail so now you’ve got a -$10 balance and you don’t know it. So you make a $200 deposit (your new balance is actually $190, but you don’t know that yet) and write a couple of other checks, and those bounce too. So your budget which is just enough to pay your bills maybe doesn’t cover the new $100-300 in fees because the bank AND the companies are charging you every time they try to deposit a check–usually three times per check. So your account gets drained pretty fast: if you don’t happen to understand exactly what’s going on (and few people do, educated or not) then you may not realise it unti your monthly statement arrives.
And by that point it’s often too late to save you. Next thing you know you’re in default on your mortgage, you’ve got $1000 of accumulated late charges and bank fees, your credit cards are all charging 29% interest, and your life is pretty much gone, in a financial sense.
Happens all the time–because people make a deposit 2 days late.
Sailor,
I doubt “it happens all the time”. Most people who are in financial straits aren’t that close to NOT being on the brink of disaster.
It isn’t the number of small contingencies, like a sick kid and a new water pump for the car, that is “planning”, it’s planning for the single largest (and possibly second largest) contingency that is the difference between surviving disaster and not. This is why the common advice is “6 months savings” because the single largest contingency, for most people, is a period of unemployment. Yet, very few Americans can put their hands on 6 months of income, and so foreclosures begin after far fewer than 6 months of unemployment because they couldn’t operate the household for even a month without a job.
I wonder. To be sure, I expect the average American consumes more than he needs to to have a 1960s existence. But how much more? What’s a fair basis of comparison?
For example, in 1960, what percentage of Americans with nothing more than a high school diploma were covered by comprehensive health insurance? What level of education is needed today to achieve the same outcome? And how does the cost of achieving that level of education today compare with the cost of achieving it in 1960?
I don’t mean to compare the health care or educations available in 1960 to those available today. But I do mean to contrast the motives that people had for working longer hours in 1960 to the motives people have today. There was a much lower disparity in living standards in the 1960s, even when race relations are accounted for. If my kid got cancer in 1960, my social class would help determine the lavishness of the funeral. If my kid gets cancer today, my social class may determine the kind of treatment she receives, and therefore whether she lives or dies. I guess it’s possible to characterize such concerns as an “insatiable lust for consumer goods,” but I think it misses some of the nuance.
How is it that Europeans have a lower “lust for consumer goods,” as evidenced by their shorter work week, lower labor force participation rates, smaller houses and smaller cars? And is it merely a coincidence that a European’s access to education and health care is not influenced by the size of her paycheck?
“FurryCatHerder Writes:
April 29th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Sailor,
I doubt “it happens all the time”. Most people who are in financial straits aren’t that close to NOT being on the brink of disaster.”
I don’t get what the “not” is for; as a result, your sentence makes no sense to me. Can you explain?
I will say that a large number of people–perhaps even a majority–who get into trouble are acting perfectly rationally, in a manner we would ordinarily support, and taht the main reason we would even vaguely consider them to have been on the brink of disaster is 20/20 hindsight.
Sailor:
Most people who are in financial straits aren’t people with $200 in the bank, $10 in a deposit that may be a little late, and $210 in bills to pay. They’re people with $12 in the bank, $10 in a deposit that may be a little late, and $1700 of bills to pay. They’re not on the brink of disaster — they’re way, way, way past the brink.
Therefore, the situation you posited doesn’t happen all the time, because it’s far too rosy an outlook for most folks.
At least, that’s how I read it.
In my experience, people who criticize the poor for being financially irresponsible often vastly over-estimate the financial, emotional, educational, and temporal resources that the poor have. They might say, “all you have to do is A, B, and C; it’s easy!” without realizing that the reason it’s easy for them is because they already know how to do A, they have free time available to do B, and they’re not so worn out from their three jobs that they have the energy to do C.Those “small advantages” — education, time, energy — can make a huge difference in someone’s life, but they get ignored by (relatively) rich folks who take them for granted.
A lot of those people come to my office.
What I was commenting on–apparently not in a clear fashion–was how astoundingly easy it is to start with “$200 in the bank, $10 in a deposit that may be a little late, and $210 in bills to pay” and get to “$12 in the bank, $10 in a deposit that may be a little late, and $1700 of bills to pay.”
We’re not interesting in averaging it out. We’re talking about specific couples, and it is a large difference in these terms.
A two year age gap is nothing by anyone’s standards. But if you’re a 29 year old woman who finished her education at 21, then your 31 year old partner has 25% (!) more experience than you. That’s a huge advantage. Which is why the age-pay gap swamps the gender-pay gap for the couples in the situation Ampersand illustrates.
“A two year age gap is nothing by anyone’s standards. But if you’re a 29 year old woman who finished her education at 21, then your 31 year old partner has 25% (!) more experience than you. That’s a huge advantage. Which is why the age-pay gap swamps the gender-pay gap for the couples in the situation Ampersand illustrates.”
This all assumes both found a job right after they graduated, that both are in the same field (or a comparatively similar field in terms of pay), that both graduated at the same time. It makes a lot of assumptions. Many people don’t find a job for years in their field, and when they finally do, they have years behind others who did find it early on.
There’s also jobs where experience matters little. For example minimum wage labor. You can have worked there for 20 years in a row and still be below 15$ an hour. At my last job, which was one of the few unionized warehouse job places; the 20 years veterans and the new employees were getting their pay evened out over a plan of 4-5 years (which started before I got the job).
There were 6 different scales of pay depending on year of entry, then it narrowed it down to 4, then 2, and would have continued to 1 if I stayed there.
So the one who made 13$ an hour and me who made 8.85$ an hour, 2 years later I was at 12$ an hour and them at 13.35$ an hour, 1-2 years later we would have all have been at 14.25$ an hour. So in that case experience was moot except for vacations. 1 year for 2 weeks, and 25 years for 5 weeks (there was a more scaled thing but I forgot the details, but yes there is a 3 and 4 week vacation).
FCH said: This is why the common advice is “6 months savings” because the single largest contingency, for most people, is a period of unemployment.
Yep – that would be a large part of why my husband and I were up to our eyeballs in debt (and still are, but digging out slowly). Because despite being eminently employable, every job change meant a move, and every move meant debt. All it took was one company downsizing, followed by another going bankrupt, and a third cutting its entire engineering department (at about three year intervals) to snow us under. It’s rather remarkably hard to put together a 6-month’s salary pile of cash when you have a debt already to pay off (college loans anyone?), and only two-and-a-half years to accumulate it in.
No thanks, I worked my way through college. It took me a few years longer that way, and I have some truly scary stories from working blue collar jobs to make ends meet, but I left college with no debt of any kind.
Today’s kids, in contrast, leave college with massive piles of debt that take years to work off. My point, in all of this, is that people have been trained to have debt.
FCH, your view of American economic stupidity was evident early on. You used a wholly different topic as an excuse to threadjack into it, after all.
Actually, FCH, you’re not really correct.
6 months savings, socked away and earing 2% interest in a bank? Graduating college a couple of years late? Those choices carry their own (sometimes very expensive) sets of opportunity costs.
It can be and often is perfectly rational to go into debt, so long as it coincides with a better opportunity to make money. The main reason folks seem to be against it is that they adopt a MORAL (not rational) view that debt is somehow intrinsically “bad.”
If I get cancer (as did one of my friends) then my life is going to fall apart. But I’m a very low cancer risk. So the existence of a risk doesn’t mean that I should diligently plan for every contingency without taking into account the planning costs.
Sure, someone could look at me if I got cancer and say “dudw, you sure made some stupid decisions. You should have planned your life around the 1% chance of getting cancer, and it’s your fault” that person would be wrong.
If you plan for no cancer and no unemployment, when you have the broken arm you also didn’t plan for, the money you didn’t sock away for cancer or unemployment can’t be used to pay for the broken arm. The problem is … most people don’t plan anymore, they keep turning to the government or someone else for a bailout. Or they don’t actually plan for Dad to quit his job in 5 years when Sis and Junior aren’t in a nursery and Mom wants to get some workplace experience to increase her earning potential and get away from screaming kids.