SAHM vs WOHM? 'Choice' Would Be a Fine Thing

This barf-inducing letter from a working mom to a stay-at-home mom was doing the rounds of social media recently. Some choice quotes:

"Dear Stay at Home Mom
Some people have been questioning what you do at home all day... I admire your infinite patience, your ability to face each day cheerfully and bring joy into your children's life even when they wear you down..."

and

"Dear Working Mom...
I know that when you are at work you don't waste a single minute. I know you eat lunch at your desk, you don't go out for coffee and you show complete dedication and concentration to your job..."

Of course. Motherhood is martyrdom, no matter what kind of mother you are!

As the currently non-earning-on-a-kind-of-sabbatical-and-parenting (the phrase 'stay-at-home-mom' gives me the dry heaves) member of our household, obviously I have a lot of time on my hands to while away on Twitter and Facebook, getting annoyed about things.

Life as a CNEOAKOSP person is actually pretty sweet. When I'm not sipping a grande half-fat decaf vanilla latte in Starbucks or working out in pilates class clad head-to-toe in Lulu Lemon, I spend my time judging working parents, sneering at their daycare-raised spawn and admiring my martyr-like countenance in the mirror.

It's not that I think I'm perfect. I just know that I personally made better choices for me and my family, you see. And I don't need to earn money for holidays and cars because I'll get my reward in heaven. Wherever heaven for atheists might be (Richard Dawkins' living room?).

Seriously though, why do we have to label each other as SAHMs or WOHMs or even CNEOAKOSPs? These days it's pretty rare for anyone to be either a working or stay-at-home parent completely. The role of 'housewife', outside of reality TV, is largely a thing of the past.

Most parents only go down the stay-at-home route for a few short years while their children are babies or in preschool, at most. Many working parents will take career breaks from time to time, if they can afford to, or will switch to part-time hours or opt to work from home, if they can, too.

A whole host of women who call themselves SAHMs are in fact community volunteers, writers, bloggers, activists and educators who just happen to not have much of a pay check to go with the work that they do.

So why assume that WOHMs or SAHMs are some kind of species coming from different planets who need to reach out to one another or who judge one another for their choices?

'Choice' is a misleading word anyway. As parents, we are operating within a pretty limited range of choices to begin with. Most of the non-earning parents that I know are out of the workplace for practical reasons. Childcare is too expensive or their former employer didn't support flexible hours or they moved to support their spouse's career and haven't been able to maintain their own or whatever. 

Very few SAHMs that I know have made their decision for ideological reasons, out of some activist 'choice'. The few that did and that emphatically say they want to be hands-on for their children's early years are usually teachers or social workers by profession and so have a professional interest in child development already.

Mostly though, it's just about the practicalities of life. Working mothers run the gamut from high-powered executives with full-time nannies to struggling single parents working two jobs on minimum wage and leaving their kids with relatives to make ends meet.

Stay-at-home mothers run the gamut from high-powered corporate wives with live-in nannies and endless charity lunch dates to women in low-income households cutting coupons and trying to stretch a tiny income because their own income doesn't cover childcare.

I've seen all sides of the debate and only a tiny number of people I know are working because of some feminist ideology or staying home because of some conservative ideology. So why stick labels on one another? It would be much more productive to have a discussion about why choices for parents are so limited in the first place.

Are Female Employees More Costly and Troublesome Than Others?

Another day, another CEO being chewed out for clumsy comments. This time it is Tim Armstrong of AOL who ignored his PR person and ad-libbed on an agreed company statement. In speaking about AOL's plan to cut 401(k) benefits for employees, Armstrong lamented the high cost of staff benefits to AOL. 

His example of those high costs? Saving the lives of distressed babies born to AOL colleagues at a cost of about a million dollars each. 

 


Ouch.

Needless to say, he was condemned for his callousness across the media. He later made a kind of non-apology apology for his comments and decided to not cut staff benefits at AOL after all.

What's interesting to me here is how Armstrong's comments reflect a common prejudice among business owners and bosses that I have encountered. When thinking about expensive staff benefits, the first thing that he chose to highlight was 'high-risk pregnancy' and 'distressed babies'. Would he have dared to mention the high cost of treating a staff member's multiple sclerosis or kidney transplant? Would he have dared to point out the high cost of remodeling an office to accommodate a staff member in a wheelchair? 

This is a growing trend now in business that portrays women and their 'choices' (that they make in a vacuum without their partners, it seems) as high-cost and burdensome. From Fox News anchors lamenting that women take up too much of their 'fair share' of healthcare to businesses panicking about the prospect of a federally mandated paid family leave, employers are encouraged to view women as particularly high-cost and troublesome employees.

This kind of mindset has real-world consequences. Slate journalist, Dana Goldstein, uncovered a story relating to Armstrong's time at Google when a senior salesperson was demoted as a result of complications arising from her 'high-risk pregnancy' (that dreaded burden on corporate America!).  Her pregnancy did not actually impact on her job apart from an inability to travel for a few months but it seems as though Armstrong panicked at the mere mention of a staff member's high-risk pregnancy and took drastic measures. She took a case against Google for pregnancy discrimination that was settled in arbitration. 

Preconceptions about women, pregnancy, and childcare commitments are what lead to employers shunning women of child-bearing age. When businesses want to complain about the burden of administration or healthcare, it's always women-specific benefits that are wheeled out as an example of burdensome spending.

Of all the benefits that corporations offer to their staff, those relating to the cost of childbearing and child-rearing seem the most resented. And yet while few of us in life will experience serious disability or illness that affects our ability to work, over 80% of Americans are parents. 

There is a subtle sexism in play here. While anyone can get cancer or be in a car accident, only women get pregnant and bear children. By highlighting this kind of female-specific cost, as Armstrong did, CEOs seem to believe they can divide and conquer their employees.

Yet the woman in question, as she explains in this article, was not actually an AOL employee. The health benefit came via her husband who was employed as an editor by AOL. So despite all the talk about the burden of female employees, businessmen would do well to remember that whenever they discriminate against a woman who is bearing a child, that child has a father. 

Fathers care just as much about the well-being of their children as mothers and a callous attitude from CEOs affects them as much as it affects women. If I were a man, I would not want to work for a company that talks about a 'distressed baby' as a cost to their bottom line. Again, more than 80% of us are parents. 

Balancing employee benefits and company profits is a reasonable thing for a corporate CEO to want to do. Trying to pin the blame for excessive costs of those benefits on women and babies is not the way to do it, however. 

Newsflash!! Sick Oregonians Getting Healthcare They Don't Deserve!!

Recent coverage of the outcome of a two-year study into the impact of an expansion of Medicaid in Oregon had me laughing out loud. Apparently, despite the expansion of Medicaid there was - get this - an increase in ER visits and the usage of healthcare services. I had to nearly pull over the car when I heard that one on the radio.

Those sick bastards! Being sick and going to use healthcare services to which they are entitled!! Next thing you know hungry children will be going to food banks and getting fed!! It's practically communism!!

Seriously though, the coverage of the 'Oregon Experiment' as it is termed puzzled me a little. This healthcare expert writing in Forbes, Avik Roy, breaks down the data in the study for Forbes readers. He concludes that the central premise of Obamacare - that expanding healthcare coverage will reduce overall costs and decrease the use of expensive ER services - to be a myth, as demonstrated by the outcomes in the Oregon Experiment. 

Yet if you read the actual results of the study in the abstract of the paper, it notes that while ER visits did not decline, patient health outcomes were improved and there was a lesser chance of a diagnosis of depression for patients with Medicaid as well as a higher chance of being diagnosed and treated for diabetes. That sounds like a good outcome to me. Roy overlooks these outcomes in his analysis. 

There is an ongoing strand in the US debate on healthcare that sick people who can't afford insurance are freeloaders. It's as if healthcare is a scarce commodity like say, diamonds, and poor people who get access to it without paying their fair share are like jewel thieves. 

The mindset here is flawed. Healthcare is not a commodity. It is (kind of) a public good. Some of us get more cancer than others and so we consume more than our 'fair share' of healthcare but that's hardly a privilege worth envying. Illness is not evenly distributed throughout the population and if your neighbor gets cancer and has his healthcare paid for by your taxes, you are not 'benefiting' in the way that we all benefit from street lights or national defense but we all benefit from living in a humane society where we don't leave sick people to die by the side of the road because they are poor. Healthcare options for the poor is the cost of living in a civilized society. 

So back to Oregon. Does it matter that ER visits increased once these awful dreaded sick poor people got access to Medicaid? Ideally they would be accessing their healthcare through primary care rather than the ER, yes. Ultimately, however, the study shows that:

"[there were] no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain."

The overall outcome of the Oregon Experiment was therefore either neutral or positive. Yes, more people accessed healthcare but if they needed it, then surely that's a good thing? Costs were not significantly lowered to the overall healthcare system in Oregon but surely they were reduced individually for the needy people who finally could get the care they required? I think that counts as a success and I'm flummoxed by the mindset of people who would think otherwise and still claim to live in a civilized society. 

In Praise of Daycare

When you say you have your child in daycare around here you often get a little sniffy reaction. Daycare? Really? Wouldn't a nanny be preferable? Daycare damages children's brains.

Before I moved to the US and gave up my right to work, I had my life as a working parent all planned out. I would work three days per week while my spouse worked four days a week and our child would then only have to go to daycare for one day per week when he was young. This was in librul commie pinko Europe of course where I would have had a year off on maternity leave, in theory, although only about four months of that would have been paid.

Daycare did not appeal to me. I worried that my child couldn't possibly thrive in such an environment. I assumed that the ideal situation for a working mother would be to hire a nanny rather than subject her child to group care. How could group care be good for a young child with so many intense needs and an inability to verbalize them? Surely one-on-one care in the home would be best?

Now that I am a parent, however, and a stay-at-home parent at that, I see the benefits of daycare more than I did before. Firstly, being at home full-time has made me realize what atomized lives we all live these days. Traditionally a woman raising children had extended family nearby and would have lived as part of an established, traditional community.

She would have known and trusted her neighbors. She would most likely have had many more than just one child. My grandmothers had five and eight children each. Children typically grew up in a group setting with cousins, neighbors and siblings providing their social context, not solitary interaction with one caregiver. Many people still are fortunate enough to be able to raise their children in such tight-knit families and communities but I, and many other mothers I know, don't have that option.

So who takes the place of grandparents and siblings and cousins in the small nuclear families we now have? I think daycare is a good substitute. If it is a good daycare facility, your child can bond with his caregivers and make friends among the other children. Even if he is too young to have 'friends' as such, these children will be familiar faces for him.

In his new preschool my son interacts with children his own age and learns how to sit quietly at circle time, how to share toys and how to wait his turn. In his life to come these will be important skills and if we do have another child, he will hopefully be able to transition better to the idea of sharing.

As individuals we all exist within the context of society. Group interactions are the norm in society, whether at work, school or in sports or science. Despite our obsession with lone geniuses like Einstein or Steve Jobs, even 'lone wolf' high achievers like this will sometimes have to work alongside others.

Negotiating group situations and managing other people are very valuable skills that my son will need in today's competitive world. I'm very happy that we can afford to send him to a good daycare  for a couple of mornings a week to help him develop socially. Parents who send their children to a daycare facility full-time shouldn't be made to feel that they are making an inferior choice. In the context of our past, children being raised in a group environment like daycare are closer to the traditional style of child-rearing than anything else in our modern, atomized society.

The Flip-Side of the European 'Job for Life' Economy

Recently I've been enjoying the new longform, multimedia reporting that the New York Times has introduced. Combining lengthy in-depth reportage with video and audio features, this kind of reporting is perfect for lingering over with a pot of tea and a notebook. 

One of best reads I've had recently is their multimedia report on youth unemployment in Europe. They speak to people in their twenties across Europe, mainly in the peripheral countries like Spain, Greece and Ireland, about their experiences in a moribund labor market. Most of the young people featured have had to move out of their country to get a job or are struggling along on social welfare payments. 

This story really struck a chord with me because ten years ago, I was in a similar position to these young people. After graduating, I left my home country to work in Germany and while I found good career-building opportunities, I was only able to find short-term contracts, nothing permanent. This suited me at the time as I was planning to go back to graduate school so I didn't want a 'proper' job. On the other hand, it was a struggle to secure any work of value and I had to fight my corner in each job I had. 

It was not a great start to my career and I always regretted my decision to start out working in Europe rather than America. It wasn't that there were no jobs in Germany and in Belgium but the workplace was dominated by older people. Good work was a privilege heavily guarded by a generation of lucky Europeans, who enjoyed conditions and benefits that were rare for the younger generation. This is an aspect of the European labor market that the NY Times article overlooks. There are plenty of large corporations and successful businesses still in Europe. They are not hiring young people, however, or if they are, they are only hiring them on temporary contracts or as interns.

There is a two-tier labor market in Europe. For those who have been in their jobs for a long time, the older generation who are established in their careers, the benefits and conditions are impressive, the stuff of American liberal media legend. For those who are marginal to the labor market - young people, part-time workers, immigrants - conditions and pay are very poor. There is no dynamism in the labor market. Employers are conservative in their hiring policies and if you are hired at all, you are expected to serve your time rather than being promoted based on ability.

Yet there is no incentive for the trade unions and ordinary employees to campaign for change to create more dynamism in the labor market because the 'job for life' system works just fine for them. Once you do have a permanent job and are in it long-term, it is a job for life, more or less. The Europeans I worked with were terrified of changing jobs and risking unemployment, which made for a sluggish, dreary work environment. 

One of the main differences I have noticed between Europe (continental Europe) and the US is the dynamic labor market. Here in Silicon Valley at least, young people are entrusted with real responsibility and high-level work straight out of college. More often than not that college will be Stanford or MIT so we are hardly talking about a paradise of equal opportunity here but it is still encouraging to be in a place where young people are given a chance to prove themselves, to learn and to progress in their careers. 

Having a bad start to your career where you are looked down on for being young, expected to defer to your elders and be grateful for any scrap of work thrown your way crushes your sprit. Sure, the young people in this feature mainly had Arts backgrounds and were not exactly flexible in their approach to working life. Not finding employment in film production, arts curating or journalism, does not make you a victim of a weak economy, it is just a symptom of being in a very limited field. Still, my heart went out to these young Europeans as I remembered being in their position. It is not a good way to start your working life and the loss of talent and energy for European economies is saddening.

What I'm Watching and Reading: 'The House I Live In' and 'The New Jim Crow'

The House I Live In - Official Trailer 

Eugene Jarecki's documentary about the war on drugs was very unsettling. While I already knew about some aspects of American justice such as California's 'three strikes' law and the problem of overcrowded prisons in this state, I was unaware just how many life sentences are being served in American jails for relatively minor drug offenses. I was also unaware of how arbitrarily draconian drug laws can be and how unaccountable police forces sometimes are, depending on state laws.

Jarecki does a great job of peeling back the layers of the War on Drugs, revealing bit by bit just how out of control drug laws have become. And yet despite the waste of $1 trillion of tax revenue for a cause that is no longer even top priority for most Americans, no politician is doing anything to initiate reform. 

Part of the reason for this is that 'judicial reform' is such an abstract concept that it just doesn't have much real meaning for most of us. Drug crime is also an issue that makes us switch off. Nobody has sympathy for potheads and crack addicts who end up in jail, let alone drug dealers. They chose to take the drugs, after all, didn't they?

One speaker in Jarecki's documentary, Michelle Alexander, was convincing enough to make me reassess this attitude, however, and I recently read her book 'The New Jim Crow' for my book club. It is a great companion to Jarecki's documentary as it highlights how the 'War on Drugs' has disproportionately affected people of color in America.

Alexander uses her considerable legal expertise through work at the ACLU, among other roles, to show how drug laws have been manipulated to corrupt the judicial system and condemn entire swathes of the poor in America to permanent social exclusion as felons. While the title of Alexander's book is inflammatory and the thesis that drug laws were deliberately engineered to oppress African-Americans not completely convincing, her point that the poor and marginalized are unfairly targeted for persecution under those laws is valid. 

As Jarecki points out too in his documentary, this is how police states start out. The Nazis didn't start with extermination immediately. Persecution in Nazi Germany started with a propaganda program to clean up society so that Germany could achieve its world-historical destiny as a great power. As part of that, certain groups were designated 'undesirables' whose removal from society would be a good thing.

Once these 'undesirables' became set apart from others, subject to different laws and sent to camps that were far away from the German heartlands, nobody really cared to ask what happened to them. It wasn't necessary for the Nazis to do very much to then progress to the extermination of these people. The apparatus of setting people apart, subjecting them to different laws and creating the camp apparatus in the first place was the key step, not the Wannsee Conference or the development of Zyklon B.

This for me was the main value in the work of Jarecki and Alexander. By highlighting the way that drugs laws can be applied arbitrarily or unconsciously to achieve very sinister social outcomes, it makes us all more aware of how fragile and precious our social freedoms are. 

Feel-Good Story of the Week: Expectant Models

Whenever I find stories like this one in the New York Times, it makes my day. It profiles Expectant Models, an agency that represents pregnant women as models to the fashion industry. The agency was set up by Liza Elliot-Ramirez, herself a model at the time, who found she was unemployable once she became pregnant.

Instead of throwing up her hands and resigning herself to 6+ months of confinement with no income, she decided to set up her own agency that would represent pregnant models only. 

I loved this story because it is a great example of how women can turn a sexist problem - nobody wanted to hire a pregnant model - into an opportunity that also changes the fashion industry mindset. 

So now, not only do I feel more empowered to change the world, I also finally know where all the beautiful sleek pregnant women come from who populate maternity clothing catalogs and Ergo baby carrier manuals.

Result: Feel-Good Story of the Week