- I wanted to start today by asking a question
about something that's run through our course
but is on the agenda again today in our present moment
and that's the tension between work and family,
sometimes also called the work-life balance
and I wanted to start by asking what exactly it is we mean
when we say work-family tension or work-life balance,
what are speaking of when we talk about this issue?
- Well this is one of the most intriguing questions
because of course 20 or 30 years ago,
the idea would have made no sense at all
because people were either designated to take care
of their homes or to take care of the jobs
and whichever one they weren't doing was secondary
so men helped out at home and women helped out
by earning what we used to call pin money
in the wage labor force, but as women have more and more
entered the workforce as permanent members
of the wage labor force and as their wages have become
not helping wages but absolutely essential
to running families, so in almost 1/3 of all families
now where there are husbands and wives both earning wages,
women earn more than their partners earn.
On the other hand, there are of course millions of families
where there is only one wage-earner
and that wage-earner is often a female.
Now here's the problem: if you're working out in the labor
force, not just 40 hours a week, but 40 plus hours a week
and often commuting an hour or more each way
and you have people at home, generally small children
to take care of, how do you juggle those two things?
How do you keep them in tension?
Well it used to be that if a woman earned wages,
she would earn wages at a part-time job
and now she earns wages at a full-time job
and the family can't live without those wages
so the work-family tension is literally what it says,
it's a tension between, I suppose you might say
it's a tension in time, it involves having to make
decisions about time and thinking about time
as a scarce resource and then trying to come up
with a way to stretch time so that it meets the needs
of both segments of one's life.
- It strikes me that motherhood is sort of at the center
of this time problem, this conundrum of work-family tension,
both biologically speaking, as women are the only sex
that can become pregnant and have to at some level
have some kind of time off to have a child,
to care for a child, and yet there are also the gendered
social expectations about motherhood that presume a woman
might prefer to stay home with her child
or might rather work a lower pressure, lower stress job
in order to be both mother and worker.
And these become entangled in very complicated ways,
it seems, and yet untangling them and finding solutions
to them seems to be one of the most pressing issues
facing American political and social movements.
- It is, it's not only one of the most pressing issues
but it's the most tension-producing issues,
but it's one of the most tension-producing
of all the issues that men and women or women or families,
however they're constructed, face.
And here's the problem, it used to be that motherhood
was thought of as work and that the male wage,
family wage, we used to call it, was intended to support
the mother, child, or the mother, children,
in order to make sure that women were appropriately
and carefully reared, but of course, now motherhood
and parenthood in general is in passing, if you like,
so whereas a man was a man if he was a good provider,
a woman was a woman if she was a good mother.
Now those two things have absolutely overlapped
and intersected with each other and a woman, in order to be
a good woman, must be both a provider and a nurturer.
A man still can be a man only by being a good provider,
although it's very nice if he's a nurturer,
now that situation can't continue unless we move
to families that don't have male providers
or don't have male carers, that is, all female families,
which I don't think we're quite ready to do.
There's a big problem here and there's a piece of me
that thinks that motherhood is really the issue
for the next decade or two, that we will need to decide
who can mother, who should mother, what it means to mother,
not in terms of what the child needs, but in terms of
the scarcity of time to both mother and to earn wages.
- It seems to me that this tension raises questions
both about the workplace and about government policy
and I wanna ask about government policy first.
How is it that in the United States,
we are still the only, what you might call major
or developed or there are other words for it,
but only nation with any kind of GDP or industrial
development of our size, not to provide any kind
of comprehensive parental leave, childcare,
or similar kinds of benefits for families.
- Well of course that derives from our notion
of individualism, our notion that individuals are personally
responsible for themselves and for their families,
so as long as a man was meant to take care of his family
and a woman was not meant to be out in the workforce,
providing parental leave would only encourage women
to do the wrong thing, if you like,
so countries like France, for example, after World War I
adopted its national crash system,
which we all know so well, precisely because they needed
women in the workforce.
Sweden adopted its childcare policies,
which were very generous, after World War II,
because in the 1950s, they preferred to have women
enter the labor force than to have immigrants
do the jobs that other countries were getting done.
In the United States, we assumed, not always rightly
and certainly not with respect to the poor
and many African-Americans, we assumed that women
could not and should not be in the wage labor force
and therefore providing parental leave for those women
would provide an incentive to do
what the nation didn't want them to do altogether.
One of the most interesting things about this
is how that ideology has built up, if you like,
and been perpetuated in the last 40, 50 years or so
with the rise of a free market fundamentalist,
anti-big-government sensibility.
The notion that even though we now understand
that men cannot support whole families,
we do not want the government interfering
in family functions at all, and therefore this has been
the entirely wrong time to open up the question.
It's a conundrum, if you like, that just at the moment
in the late '60s throughout the '70s and '80s
when married women with children are entering the labor
force at the largest rate ever,
that at that point, we, we meaning the United States,
develops and begins to adhere to an ideology
which argues that the government has no business
supporting families, not poor families,
not any kind of families, so at exactly the moment
when the government should have entered the marketplace,
as it were, and provided childcare or provided hefty
tax deductions for childcare, it did the opposite,
it began to withdraw its support
from poor families who needed it.
- And there's sort of a cruel irony here
because of course the free market promises equal rewards
for equal work, perfect rationality, and yet,
as you've written about in pioneering fashion,
we know that a woman's wage is still a fraught social
construct and that in fact a wage gap continues to persist.
How does a wage gap persist in the punitively free market?
- A wage gap persists because people still imagine
that women and women's jobs are not worth
as much as men and men's jobs are worth.
A wage gap persists because occupational segregation
still exists and the majority of women are still working
in jobs in which a majority of women work.
And those jobs are paid less than the jobs in which men work
so in the '70s when the subject of comparable worth came up
instead of equal pay for equal worth,
it was equal pay for jobs of comparable worth.
People began doing studies that compared the amount
of responsibility and skill and education required
for one job or another, and they discovered that a garage
attendant who was assumed to need the same skill
and education as a childcare carer
were paid at different rates, the garage attendant
was paid almost double the rate paid to the child carer.
Now, how do you explain that,
how do you assume that somebody who's taking care of a child
can only be paid, or is only worth half
of what a garage attendant is worth?
Only because in one's head, in one's imagination,
the worth of a woman, the worth of caring is less
than the worth of automobiles.
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