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 →
In Defense of Valuation
I think that estimates of the market value of non-market work are a worthwhile exercise (as my last two posts suggest) as long as they are done carefully and presented as an approximate lower-bound. But conceptual resistance to valuation remains remarkably fierce–which is a big reason we don’t see more of it. One common objection is that estimation is just… Read more →
The Temporal Constraints of Child Care
Time-use surveys measure the number of hours devoted to care of family and friends, making it possible to estimate what it would cost to purchase an approximate substitute for them. Such a “replacement cost” estimate of adult care services in the U.S. featured in my last post. However, most time-use surveys continue to emphasize time in specific activities–like feeding or… Read more →
The Dollar Value of Grown-Up Care
I love the title of the regular–and recently updated– AARP Public Policy Institute report estimating the value of family care for adults with limitations in daily activities: “Valuing the Invaluable.” It calls attention to the estimated replacement cost without fetishizing the dollars. If those family members were not on the case, money expenditures on health and long term services would be… Read more →
Heads Ups
* Save the date for the 2015 meeting of the Child Care Policy Research Consortium (CCPRC) December 2 – 4, 2015. A treasure trove of summaries and presentations from the 2014 CCPRC Meeting including the plenary and workshop sessions are available on Child Care & Early Education Research Connections at: http://www.researchconnections.org/childcare/meetings/ccprc/2014/. * Writer/journalist Elaine Clift is seeking submissions for a possible anthology titled TAKE CARE:TALES,… Read more →
Elect for Child Care
Like a little kid who has just gotten a grip on the monkey bars, universal childcare has finally made it to the national political arena. President Obama has been cheering it on from his oddly sidelined position, and his office has effectively summarized the definitive economic case for public investment. Hillary Clinton puts child care front and center in her… Read more →
Bargaining up to $15
Big victory for home workers organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Massachusetts, who just successfully bargained a new contract that will bring their wages up to $15 an hour by 2018. As an article in the Boston Globe points out, home care workers joined the national Fight for $15 about a year ago, forming a political coalition… Read more →
The Best Care Work Reporting of the Year
The British newspaper famous for its courageous investigative journalism on many different fronts wins my prize for the best reporting of the year on paid care work. A series of related articles, available in gallery format, address the underpayment of care workers in the U.K., recently dramatized by a report that 100 care agencies in the country are under investigation… Read more →