Instead of trying to walk the tightrope known as work family balance, maybe we should seek work family justice—something we all deserve rather than something we are easily blamed for not achieving on our own. This reformulation, inspired by a great book by Caitlyn Collins, Making Motherhood Work, defined a plenary session of the Work Family Research Network conference June… Read more →
Category: work-family policies
Cut Child Poverty by Half
The United Kingdom did it between 1999 and 2008. The Canadian government implemented a plan to do it in 2016. The U.S. almost did it between 1967 and 2016: cut the incidence of child poverty by half. Right now about 13% of U.S. children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. One could quibble with this number (based… Read more →
The Childcare Conundrum
Like one of my journalist faves, Katha Pollitt, I would like to move public support for child care higher on the progressive wish list. So I was happy when Senator Elizabeth Warren stepped up with a specific proposal; I hope she has garnered enough publicity to send other potential presidential candidates to their drawing boards and spreadsheets. The Warren proposal gets good marks… Read more →
Care, Affluence, and Development
I am gearing up to attend the annual meetings of the Indian Society of Labour Economics in Mumbai, with support from the Canadian International Development Research Centre. This seems especially important to me because several South Asian scholars are doing important research on the mis-measurement of women’s work, including Indira Hirway (sketch here, from the Mexico City Gender Statistics Conference),… Read more →
Developing Care
The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada recently commissioned me to review some empirical research they have funded on the care economy in developing countries. It was exciting to wade into field studies attentive to qualitative as well as quantitative indicators, with important policy implications. Many of the studies have experimental designs (such as examining the impact of child… Read more →
The Massachusetts Pregnant Workers Fairness Act
Guest post by Laura Sylvester, graduate student at the Center for Public Policy and Administration and the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Laura drafted the initial version of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and has been actively involved in organizing and advocating for its passage for the past 18 months. The Massachusetts Pregnant Workers… Read more →
The Opt-Out Elite
Claire Cain Miller’s recent article on mothers’ “career pauses” reminds me of Lisa Belkin’s controversial piece, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” published about twelve years ago. In both instances, women’s expressed preferences get more attention than their particular economic circumstances, making it difficult to assess the choices available to them (a point Myra Strober made in a previous post and that Pamela… Read more →
Options Other than Opting Out
Joan Williams of the Hastings College of the Law at the University of California has some very specific advice for lawyers considering the kind of career “pause” described in Claire Cain Miller’s recent New York Times article. In “Don’t Leave When You Leave” over at Huffington Post, Joan describes five new companies that offer legal firms “accordion” services–curated access to… Read more →
Millennial Women and “The Pause”
Guest Post by Myra Strober, Professor of Education and Economics, Emerita, and founding director of the Michelle Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Kicking in the Door. Her recent work on the economics of work and family can be viewed at gender.stanford.edu/work-and-family. Claire Cain Miller of the New… Read more →
When Family-Friendly Journalism Backfires
Poorly–designed policies that may initially appear “family-friendly” can impede progress toward gender equality in two different ways—by making it costly for employers to hire or promote workers suspected of having costly family commitments (e.g. women of childbearing age) or by encouraging workers with such commitments to drop out of paid employment for so long that their prospects of advancement on… Read more →