Women Are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy

By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published by New York Times: July 22, 2008

Across the country, women in their prime earning years, struggling with an unfriendly economy, are retreating from the work force, either permanently or for long stretches.

Fewer Women at Work

They had piled into jobs in growing numbers since the 1960s. But that stopped happening this decade, and as the nearly seven-year-old recovery gives way to hard times, the retreat is likely to accelerate.

Indeed, for the first time since the women’s movement came to life, an economic recovery has come and gone, and the percentage of women at work has fallen, not risen, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Each of the seven previous recoveries since 1960 ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began.

When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many suggested that the pullback from paid employment was a matter of the women themselves deciding to stay home — to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households.

But now, a different explanation is turning up in government data, in the research of a few economists and in a Congressional study, to be released Tuesday, that follows the women’s story through the end of 2007.

After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while.

“When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids,” Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which did the Congressional study, said in an interview. “We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.”

Hard times in manufacturing certainly sidelined Tootie Samson of Baxter, Iowa. Nine months after she lost her job on a factory assembly line, Ms. Samson, 48, is still not working. She could be. Jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour are easy enough to land, she says. But like the men with whom she worked at the Maytag washing machine factory, now closed, near her home, she resists going back to work at less than half her old wage.

Ms. Samson knows she will have to get another job at some point. She and her husband still have a teenage daughter to put through college, and his income as a truck driver is not enough. So Ms. Samson, now receiving unemployment benefits, is going to college full time — leaving the work force for more than two years — hoping that a bachelor’s degree will enable her to earn at least her old wage of $20 an hour.

“A lot of women I know, all they did was work at the Maytag factory,” said Ms. Samson, who joined Maytag’s assembly line 11 years ago. “They can’t find another job like it and they deal with this loss by dropping out.”

The Joint Economic Committee study cites the growing statistical evidence that women are leaving the work force “on par with men,” and the potentially disastrous consequences for families.

“Women bring home about one-third of family income,” said Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York and vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. “And only those families with a working wife have seen real improvement in their living standards.”

The proportion of women holding jobs in their prime working years, 25 to 54, peaked at 74.9 percent in early 2000 as the technology investment bubble was about to burst. Eight years later, in June, it was 72.7 percent, a seemingly small decline, but those 2.2 percentage points erase more than 12 years of gains for women. Four million more in their prime years would be employed today if the old pattern had prevailed through the expansion now ending.

The pattern is roughly similar among the well-educated and the less educated, among the married and never married, among mothers with teenage children and those with children under 6, and among white women and black.

The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of the men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today. But while men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out.

“A woman gets laid off and she stays home for six months with her kids,” Ms. Boushey said. “She doesn’t admit that she is staying home because she could not get another acceptable job.”

The biggest retreat has been in manufacturing, where more than one million women have disappeared from payrolls since 2001. Like men, many have not returned to jobs in other sectors.

Wage stagnation often discourages them from pursuing new jobs, says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “While pay was rising solidly in the 1990s, you had women continuing to move into the work force,” Mr. Katz said.

Pay is no longer rising smartly for women in the key 25-to-54 age group. Just the opposite, the median pay — the point where half make more and half less — has fallen in recent years, to $14.84 an hour in 2007 from $15.04 in 2004, adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (The similar wage for men today is two dollars more.)

Not since the 1970s has that happened to women for so long a stretch — and because this is a new experience for them, “women may be even more reluctant than men to accept declining wages,” said Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts.

Joyce Call, 39, of Howell, Mich., near Detroit, certainly fits that description. She took an accounting job in January 2006 at Forming Technologies, which supplies plastic to auto companies.

The pay, $14 an hour — more than $25,000 a year — was acceptable, she said, but not the raises, which came to only 28 cents an hour over two years, or the Christmas bonus: $150 the first year and nothing the second.

“I was treated poorly,” she said, explaining her departure.

For the moment, Ms. Call is home-schooling one of her two sons, falling back on her husband’s $70,000 income as a plumber, and looking for another job, to return to a work force she has seldom left since finishing high school in 1988.

“People are just not hiring in Michigan,” she said. What’s more, she is reluctant because of the high cost of gasoline to commute more than an hour each way to the next job. “It would be a tough decision to accept a job that required me to go farther,” she said, adding that she and her husband were cutting back on discretionary spending until she is employed again.


What helped drive up the percentage of women in the work force were the thousands who came off welfare and took jobs in the 1990s, pushed to do so by the welfare-to-work legislation. A strong economy eased the way. So did tax credits and more subsidized child care. Now as the economy weakens and employers shrink their payrolls, many of these women struggle to find work.

Lisa Craig, 42, is among them. Raising three sons in her native Chicago, she had worked only occasionally since high school and started receiving welfare benefits in 1993. For the next seven years she took courses in office skills, was a volunteer in a day care center and served for a while as an unpaid intern for a college vice president.

And then in 2000 she went to work. For most of that year she earned $10 an hour as a salesclerk at a duty-free shop at O’Hare Airport, selling luxury items, but left the job to move to Milwaukee with her children to be near her sister.

“I was in a bad marriage,” she said, “and I was getting a divorce.”

Over the last eight years in Milwaukee she has worked only sporadically although, as she puts it, she has applied for hundreds of jobs, struggling to supplement a $628-a-month welfare check that goes almost entirely to rent, plus $500 a month in food vouchers. The longest tenure, 11 months, was as a salesclerk earning $7.75 an hour at a Goodwill Industries clothing store.

She lost that job last November, but is volunteering at the Milwaukee office of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, hoping to draw a modest salary soon as a community intern.

Ms. Samson, the former Maytag worker, says she can afford not to work because she qualified under the terms of the plant closing for two years of unemployment benefits as long as she is a full-time student. She lost health insurance but shifted to her husband’s policy.

His $40,000 income as a truck driver and her $360 a week in jobless benefits gets them by while she takes an accelerated program at a William Penn University campus near her home. Graduation is scheduled for January 2010.

“If I were a single parent or did not have benefits,” Ms. Samson said, “I would have had to find a job. I could not have gone back to school to get my degree and the promise it holds of a better job.”

That for Ms. Samson is a good reason to drop out. Just working, which she has done nearly all of her adult life, is unappealing, she says. Even interior design, for which she once earned an associate’s degree, does not excite her anymore, she says, mainly because people can no longer afford to fix up their homes.

“A business degree will put me in a position to work for any company,” Ms. Samson said, “and put me in a position to work up into a well-paid human resources job.”


copyright New York Times

Senate Fails to Move Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to a Vote

It's hard to believe we're still fighting for pay equity. We've been disappointed for the second time. Last week by the NY State Senate, this week by the US Senate.

Yesterday there was a vote in the US Senate to end debate and move to a vote an the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It takes 60 votes to succeed. We only had 57, so Majority Leader Reid voted with the Republicans -- a procedural move that will allow him to bring the bill up again at a later date.

You can see how the senators voted here.

Remember, it's an election year. Senator McCain didn't show up for the vote. How would he have voted?

Both our senators voted in favor, of course. You can send them a thank you note through the AAUW take action link.

This weekend Lilly Ledbetter is the keynote speaker at the NY State AAUW Convention. I look forward to hearing her story firsthand.

Pay Equity sidetracked by NYS Senate

Hi Pay Equity Supporters,
Well, the NYS Fair Pay Bill is still held hostage in the Labor Committee but the Senate has pushed a bill the falsely claim addresses pay equity (S7521 Robach) into the rules committee today so it could be voted on. It came to the floor and passed unanimously. The Senate Majority then claimed that pay equity had been passed. Craig Johnson, sponsor of the Fair Pay Bill debated with Robach very strongly about what he was doing. This is the web site that has Irene Liu's account of what happened this afternoon and also the story that ran into day's paper. I am also attaching it. If you go to the web site there is a video of the session. http://blogs.timesunion.com/capitol/ All of this activity is a compliment to our successful events. Please pass this along to your networks - Best, Lois (Hagniere)

NB: Thanks to all KAAUW who called our NYS Senator Monday. Pay Equity is still an issue - Garnette

Phone Senator Bonicic Monday for Pay Equity

Call your state senator right now! Senator Bonacic's number is 518-455-3181 in Albany and 607-746-6675.
The New York State Fair Pay Act (S. 3936), which would amend the State Labor Law to ensure that employers pay jobs where women and people of color predominate comparably to jobs of equivalent skill and responsibility, is being held-up in the Labor Committee. The New York State Senate will hold a vote on a petition to discharge the bill from committee on Tuesday April 15 at about 2 p.m so that a vote on passage can be taken by the Senate.
Take Action!Call your state senator today to urge him or her to vote for the discharge petition and on passage of the bill.
You can find the phone number for you senator and online at http://capwiz.com/aauw/utr/1/GIOKIHYARP/HGNLIICPOR/1897440121. There is a ZIP Code look-up and a district map if you do not know your senator's name and need to look that up.
When you've called your senator, please tell him or her:
"I strongly urge you to support the New York State Fair Pay Act (S. 3936) by first supporting voting for the motion to petition expected on Tuesday, April 15, and then by voting for bill's passage when it comes to the floor."
"The New York State Fair Pay Act (S. 3936) would amend the State Labor Law to ensure that employers pay jobs where women and people of color predominate comparably to jobs of equivalent skill and responsibility."

77 Cents on the Dollar --And Lip Service from Albany

More than 40 years after passage of the Equal Pay Act the average women continues to earn only 77 cents on the dollar to their male counterparts. Minority women face an even larger wage gap.

Just one year out of college, women working full time earn only 80% of what their male counterparts earn, even when they work in the same field. Ten years after graduation, the gap widens. Pay disparities affect women of all ages, races, and education levels-regardless of their family decisions.

AAUW believes that pay equity is a simple matter of justice and continues to support initiatives that seek to close the persistent and sizable wage gap between men and women.

In NYS it's time to take action.

It's time for us to take action because Albany apparently won't.

It's the same thing every year -- the pay equity bill passes the House but never gets out of the Labor Committee in the Senate. For six years our elected representatives have been giving us nothing but lip service.

Bruno won't comment. Robach, Committee Chair, talks out of both sides of his mouth.

Read the AAUW Educational Foundation's research report, Behind the Pay Gap for more information information on the pay gap.

CALL Senator Joseph Robach, Chair,Senate Labor Committee
518.455.2909 (preferable) and ask for his Chief of Staff

or write him at 902 LOB, Albany, NY 12247

or e-mail robach@senate.state.ny.us.

Tell him you want the NYS Fair Pay Bill (S3936) out of committee and on the floor of the Senate for debate. We want to know where our elected representatives stand on pay equity. When will that happen?

Photo by Anyaka

Not 'Just'; a Homemaker -- Gloria Steinem Pay Equity Day

From Ruth Wahtera:

April 2nd is Gloria Steinem Pay Equity Day in Albany. I've been bothered lately by several discussions where younger women devalue 'cranky old feminists' like me. I've felt that we haven't done well in transferring our experience, our views, or our agenda.

I came across this blog posting which I think proves my point. The moms that read this blog were amazed and delighted that Gloria Steinem had this to say about stay-at-home moms. They thought that 'cranky old feminists' took the position that all women should work outside the home.

I guess we have some work to do.

Mom-101: Ask (Gloria Steinem) and Ye Shall Receive

How does a stay-at-home mother espouse feminist values to her own children without diminishing the legitimacy of her own decision?

Her [Gloria Steinem's] answer, verbatim:

The goal of feminism is to honor and value all productive human work and open it up to everyone -- including work that has been devalued because women, the de-valued half of the species, do it. To say that homemakers “don’t work” is a form of semantic slavery.

Actually, homemakers work longer hours, for less pay, under worse conditions (more violence, depression, drug and alcohol addiction etc.) -- and less security (more probability of being replaced by a younger worker!) -- than any other class of workers in the country. So we can help a lot if

1. we never say “I don’t work,” but rather “I work at home;”
2. never put “just” in front of homemaker;
   
3. expect and require men to be homemakers and nurturers, too, whether that means husbands who cook, or sons who do their own laundry, or single moms who find male baby sitters and “mannies” so their kids grow up knowing that males can be as loving and nurturing as females -- just as women can be as accomplished outside the home as men.

If you decide to go back or into the paid labor force after your kids are more on their own, you could turn your homemaking life into a business-style resume: for example, you contracted for services, ran a budget, socialized new humans, did volunteer work that was a job in itself – whatever. We can do all that as individuals.

As a movement, we can also pass legislation to attribute an economic value to care giving at replacement level (whether care giving is raising children, talking care of elderly parents, AIDS patients; whatever), make this amount tax deductible in a household that pays taxes, or tax refundable in households too poor to pay taxes (thus substituting for the disaster of welfare reform). This Caregivers Tax Credit unifies the so-called soccer mom and the welfare mom because both benefit. You can find out more about this legislation, which just expands the refundability principle we won in the Child Tax Credit – though a lot of people don’t know they’re eligible; you should publicize that – to care giving. The website for the tax-credit campaign is caregivercredit.org.

For the global and economic implications of valuing what women do – a third of the productive work in developed countries and 2/3 in agricultural countries where women also grow much of the food their families eat – plus attributing economic value to the environment, you can see “Revaluing Economics,” an essay I wrote in Moving Beyond Words. Or you can find still more in If Women Counted by Marilyn Waring.

This post isn't about passing the pay equity legislation, but I think it captures the spirit of the issue. I encourage you to share it with young women you know.

Miss Pettigrew and Pay Equity

Do you read Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster especially Howard’s End, Jane Austen and enjoy the film Cold Comfort Farm?

If your response to the above list is positive, read on. And go see Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, now playing in Woodstock. The main character reminds me of the AAUW mission, spirit and spunk. The underlying theme relates to our recent telephone conference call on Pay Equity – something only distantly addressed in the ‘merry romp’ as the Washington Post critic called it. Neither of the women character’s have economic safety nets, hence their desperation as well as their wiles.

Click here for a cheeky review anti-ageist although it means to be cute. Read it, if I haven’t convinced you that you might enjoy this bittersweet comedy on the last few moments before Hitler’s Blitz. Somehow we leave the cinema knowing Miss Pettigrew and her ilk will triumph over inequities, as we will in this epoch as well.

Feb. Branch meeting on pay equity - as scheduled!

On Tuesday, Feb. 26th, a handful of intrepid AAUW members defeated yet another blizzard to participate in our first branch meeting by conference call.

Our February program, Pay Equity Status Report, a presentation by Lois Haignere, Ph.D., had already been rescheduled once due to snow. Determination can make many things happen. We met despite the snow via conference call.

Lois is a respected researcher in pay equity issues. Some of the points she made:

• There's a significant difference between equal pay and comparable pay.
• In the private sector you can be fired for disclosing your pay to others, so there's often no way to know whether you are paid unequally; the 2007 Supreme Court decision made it virtually impossible to bring a successful private sector suit.
  
• In NYS, the existing law covers only equal pay.
• To correct this, in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, the NYS Assembly has passed the NYS Fair Pay Bill with bi-partisan support and great fanfare
• Every year the NYS Senate kills the NYS Fair Pay Bill in committee.

This year a broad based coalition of women's groups, including AAUW, are committed to getting the bill out of committee. This call/branch meeting was a prelude to Pay Equity Day in Albany on April 2, featuring Gloria Steinem and others who will join with us to lobby the State Legislature on the upcoming vote for pay equity.

You can download a pdf of Lois' slides here.

Women and minorities have long received lower pay than their counterpart males. According to recent research by national AAUW, women now earn 77 cents to every one dollar men earn, yet do not pay correspondingly less at the cash registers. This year, the focus for Pay Equity Day in Albany will be on improving the lot of librarians and library aides, teachers' aides, nursing aides and food service workers -- often women, often supporting families and children.

This free program is open to the public. Donations will be accepted to provide scholarships for those wishing to join the lobbying in Albany on Wed., April 2. For more information, contact AAUW Kingston Branch President Garnette Arledge (845-702-2120, kaauw12401@gmail.com).

Pay Equity & AAUW Make the NBC Nightly News

"The Truth About Boys and Girls" AAUW's Behind the Pay Gap report and the subject of pay equity was prominently featured on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams special series "The Truth About Boys and Girls." The segment features Catherine Hill, author of the report and AAUW director of research, and Janet Conney, a former LAF plaintiff and an AAUW member.



Here is the longer interview with Catherine Hill:

Nonprofits Still Compensating Women Less Than Men

This chart is only one of several published in GuideStar's Nonprofit Compensation Study. There's no question in this arena that equity is still an issue.

GuideStar - News - Articles - Highlights of the 2007 GuideStar Nonprofit Compensation Report: "Highlights of the 2007 GuideStar Nonprofit Compensation Report The 2007 GuideStar Nonprofit Compensation Report is based on 102,414 observations from 56,228 Forms 990 filed by 501(c) organizations with the IRS for fiscal year 2005. Among the highlights:

• Median compensation of females continued to lag behind that of males when considering comparable positions at similar organizations.

• Females held 50 percent of CEO positions at organizations with expenses of $1 million or less but only 34 percent at organizations with expenses of greater than $1 million. Overall, women held 41 percent of the positions reported upon but received only 32 percent of the total compensation.

• As has been the case in the past few years, female CEOs at larger organizations are making slow but steady progress at closing the gender gap when it comes to compensation. Incumbent female CEOs at organizations with expenses of $25 million or greater had a higher median compensation increase from 2004 to 2005 than males. Results are mixed for smaller organizations."

Read more and review other graphs and charts by clicking the link above.

Pay Equity for Some Young Women

From the AAUW Public Policy & Government Relations Dept.
A recently released analysis of U.S. census data shows that young women in certain major American cities are actually earning as much as 117 percent what their young male counterparts earn. The new data shows that women age 21-30 out-earn men in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, and Dallas, according to the New York Times. However, the trend does not hold past the age of 30, and the study does not compare women and men in similar jobs. Possible explanations for the trend point to the fact that more women are graduating college than men and are often flocking to urban areas. Others claim that women are more likely to be ambitious and career-driven earlier in their career in order to position themselves to have children later on.

The AAUW Educational Foundation’s report, Behind the Pay Gap, examines the wage gap between men and women nationwide and shows that just one year out of college, women working full time already earn less than their male colleagues, even when they work in the same field. Ten years after graduation, the pay gap widens.

ACTION: AAUW strongly supports legislation that seek to end wage discrimination and close the persistent and sizable wage gaps between men and women, and minorities as well. If you haven’t yet done so, please use AAUW’s Two-Minute Activist online to urge your members of Congress to support the Fair Pay Restoration Act (S. 1843) - the companion to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (H.R. 2831) - as well as the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 1338/S. 766) in the House and in the Senate. To learn more about pay equity, read AAUW’s position paper.

Photo by beckytekkie