Food stamps and irregular verbs

Posted on 1 December 2009 by Allison

Along with Saturday’s New York Times article about the growth in food stamp use, you should read Jill Filipovic’s reaction at Feministe. This is the best part:

The article is also interesting because of its unspoken undercurrent of “this is now notable because white people do it.” Food stamps are now for “regular folks,” instead of those other people who usually rely on public assistance. And it contains some staggering statistics — like the fact that half of all Americans, and 90 percent of all African Americans, will rely on food stamps before they’re 20.

Much of the post is about how strangely judgemental one of the recipients they interview is about others in the program. And along those lines, we get this fantastic comment from Katherine:

This is one of those irregular verbs isn’t it? I am down on my luck, you are feckless, they are fraudulent money-grubbers.

Someone get this woman a blog.

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Feminizing contract teaching

Posted on 30 November 2009 by Allison

This video – an interview with Michelle Masse about gender and higher education – popped up on a feminist economics mailing list, but didn’t inspire any discussion, which surprised me.

I am not, honestly, a huge defender of the humanities. I don’t think we should dismiss “rigour” as gendered and therefore not a useful goal. But quite aside from that, if it’s true that contract teaching is being feminized, I’d like to talk about the structural factors that make this happen. For example, it’s pretty hard to schedule pregnancy into an academic life. I haven’t found similar stats for all disciplines, but as an example, according to this 2003 US study, the average history professor was hired into a tenure-track position at almost 39.

If female PhDs decide not to delay childbirth until after hiring or tenure – probably a good idea, if they won’t be hired until almost 40 – they increase the chances that they will end up stuck as sessional instructors, which is a terrible waste of human capital, among other things. Research shouldn’t be incompatible with having a family.

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Money, happiness and gender

Posted on 28 November 2009 by Allison

Economix, which is becoming a consistent source of news about gender and economics, has a post up about income and job satisfaction by gender. Their data is from a website called PayScale, where users share their salary and related information. In other words, the workers that make up this data set had to seek out PayScale and then fill out a survey. Most survey research suffers from low response rates, but this is a decidedly non-random sample. Among other things, we are only learning about people concerned enough with their salary to discover a site like PayScale. So this isn’t an ideal research environment.

That said, the Times economics editor, Catherine Rampell, makes a couple interesting observations.

Men and women are about equally likely to say that they are satisfied with their jobs; about 65 percent of both sexes say they are satisfied. Plus, for both sexes higher job satisfaction is associated with higher job pay. But it typically takes a lot less money to get women to say they are satisfied with their work than it does to get men to say it. [...] Bumping men into a higher-satisfaction group requires a bigger increase in pay than women would need to in order to go up a ’satisfaction’ level.

One of Rampell’s suggested explanations rings particularly true for me:

Perhaps this difference is reflective of the men’s and women’s divergent priorities in their career choices. After all, much of the overall gap between men’s and women’s earnings can be explained by the types of careers they choose (or others might argue, the types of careers available to them). Women are more disproportionately represented in industries like health care and education, for example, that are less lucrative than some male-dominated fields but that are — as public subsidies might indicate — generally viewed as contributing to the public good. Supporting this theory is another PayScale statistic: Women were more likely to tell PayScale that say they find their jobs “very meaningful” than men were, with 35 percent of women and 27 percent of men describing their jobs this way.

But the commenters are even cleverer. Cathy A. reminds us that a better study would correct for occupation categories:

At 40,000 a year, a woman may have the same job as a man making 60,000 a year (or close to that). Your simple analysis fails to account for the type of job a person is doing. For 40,000 a year, a man may be a laborer. But a woman making 40,000 a year (or even less) may be helping to manage a research project at a university.

And “Another View” points out that men and women face different substitutes:

Women are accustomed to doing a considerable amount of unpaid work at home; that is, time away from the office is not necessarily time off.

Beautiful. Read the comments, folks.

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On chickens and The New Yorker

Posted on 27 November 2009 by Allison

I don’t know why, but I delight in discovering a past iteration of a current fad. Take this passage, which could be about our current fascination with the backyard chicken:

At first, as a boy in a carefully zoned suburb, I had neighbors and police to reckon with; my chickens had to be as closely guarded as an underground newspaper. Later, as a man in the country, I had my old friends in town to reckon with, most of whom regarded the hen as a comic prop straight out of vaudeville… Their scorn only increased my devotion to the hen. I remained loyal, as a man would to a bride whom his family received with open ridicule. Now it is my turn to wear the smile, as I listen to the enthusiastic cackling of urbanites, who have suddenly taken up the hen socially and who fill the air with their newfound ecstasy and knowledge and the relative charms of the New Hampshire Red and the Laced Wyandotte. You would think, from their nervous cries of wonder and praise, that the hen as hatched yesterday in the suburbs of New York, instead of in the remote past in the jungles of India.

Pronouns aside, I might guess I was reading Susan Orlean, who tweets prodigiously about her own chickens and wrote 4000 words about them for The New Yorker in September. But this is actually another New Yorker staff writer, E.B. White, writing in 1944 for the preface to A Basic Chicken Guide.

(I stumbled across this while re-reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. If you write anything – don’t we all? – and you aren’t familiar with this book, do yourself a favour and pick it up.)

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Setting the bar low for corporate boards

Posted on 27 November 2009 by Allison

You know that an institution is lagging behind when this is considered good news:

A report last year by search firm Spencer Stuart found women accounted for 21 per cent of new directors added to boards of Canada’s 100 largest companies between 2006 and 2008. That was up from 14 per cent between 2002 and 2005.

That’s from this week’s Globe feature on the gender balance in corporate boardrooms. There’s nothing revolutionary here, just a reminder that at least in the private sector, it doesn’t take much to distinguish yourself as a leader in women’s leadership. And why should we care about getting women on boards? We’re told they can be a competitive advantage:

Aiding the battle is more research suggesting the presence of women on boards can actually boost a company’s bottom line. Research firm Catalyst Inc., for example, completed a U.S. study in 2007 on Fortune 500 boards, which found that return on equity was 53 per cent higher at companies with the most women on their boards compared with those with the fewest women. The argument is that people with different perspectives can improve the quality of decisions made by a board, says Deborah Gillis, Catalyst’s vice-president of North America.

I am not altogether convinced by this study, as it is summarized. I’d rather see something longitudinal, showing that companies that add women to their boards do better after diversifying. Otherwise, you have to wonder whether causality runs the other way, and better-performing firms are just the ones in a position to challenge the male status quo.

If this stuff interests you, you might want to drop by a live chat at The Globe, happening right now. If you miss the chat, a transcript will be available online later.

EDIT: In the live chat, Catalyst’s Deborah Gillis expands on their 2007 study. I still don’t find this especially compelling. Here’s the relevant section of the chat:

[Comment From Allison] Deborah, are there any longitudinal studies showing that women’s membership on boards makes firms more competitive? I’m not all that convinced by a simple cross section regression, which is what the article seems to summarize from your 2007 US study.

Deborah Gillis: Hi Allison, thanks for the question.   You are right that Catalyst released a study in 2007 that looked at the correlation between more women on board and financial performance of Fortune 500 companies in the US.   We did look at several years of data and what we found was that on average, those companies with the highest representation of women directors, as compared to those with the lowest, had stronger financial performance.   Return on Equity was 53% higher; Return on Sales was 42% higher; and Return on Invested Capital was 66% higher.   The numbers were even higher when there were three or more women – the critical mass that we hear so much about.    We found a similar correlation in an earlier study that looked at women in executive roles.

Claire Neary: Do you draw any direct conclusions from these correlations, Deborah? Do you think the companies with more women on their boards have other things in common as well?

Deborah Gillis: I think that what we’re seeing here is that when you have more diversity reflected around a decision-making table – and I am talking about diversity in the broadest sense – the way you look at problems changes.   Different questions get asked.   Different points of view and experience are brought to the table.   And when that  happens,  innovation and creativity  increase, as does the commitment and career satisfaction  of  employees.    Another point is that  Catalyst research would suggest that when there are more women directors, there will be more women corporate officers in the future.   Again, as the board is more diverse, there are more role models and the board has more interest and credibility in raising questions about diversity in the organization as a whole.

Gillis is explaining how causality might plausibly work, but she hasn’t provided real empirical support. This isn’t to say that I think it’s a bad idea to appoint women as board members. It would just take a better study to convince me that the benefits of hiring women are this simple and immediate. Gillis certainly isn’t alone in telling the corporate world that women will help their bottom line in the short run, but I’m not sure that’s the right strategy, especially without stronger evidence.

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Women’s happiness, part one: Background

Posted on 23 September 2009 by Allison

We have a zombie meme on our hands, folks. Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers’ paper, The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, has been debated online since October 2007, and now it is back and stumbling among us, thanks this Huffington Post piece by Marcus Buckingham, a “leading expert in personal strengths and bestselling author.” (Is that a bio that inspires confidence, or what?) Stevenson and Wolfers’ paper is so obviously relevant to this blog that I am starting to feel silly for not weighing in. I realized that at its core, this debate is inspired by a knotty econometric problem, and there’s nothing I enjoy quite like a knotty econometric problem. So, this afternoon, I read the paper, and a good chunk of the commentary inspired by it.

I have to say, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the paper, if not all of the commentary. This post mostly summarizes a debate that took place online back in 2007, because I think it is worth understanding. I’ve mixed up some chronology because I assume you are more interested in content than timing. I will make later posts with some more original insights.

Just in case you’ve been living in a cave: Stevenson and Wolfers find that women’s happiness, in total and compared to men, has been declining steadily since the 1970s. Women, on average, used to be slightly happier than men, and now, on average, they are slightly less happy than men. (Slightly is a key word here, and we’ll return to that.) The researchers look at a few different studies, but most of their results are from the General Social Survey, based on a simple question about subjective well-being: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days, would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”

This is not a fluffy trend piece, though it has inspired a lot of fluffy trend pieces. I only have an undergraduate degree in economics, but I’ve read my fair share of econometric papers, in and out of class – I’m reasonably familiar with all the methods used in the paper – and Stevenson and Wolfers’ work does not look like statistical sleight-of-hand to me. The trend is real, but whether it is big enough to worry about is a more complicated question. Here is part of a blog post by Wolfers:

Let’s think of lining up all the men in 1972, in order of their happiness. In 1972, the median woman ranked between the 53rd and 54th man, happier than a slight majority of men.  By 2006, the median woman is somewhat less happy, ranking between the 48th and 49th man.

That does not sound like much. But his next point is a bit more convincing:

We know from prior studies that unemployment lowers average levels of happiness.  Comparing estimates across studies, we can say that the relative decline in women’s happiness that we document is equivalent to the decline in average happiness that would occur in a state if its unemployment rate rose by 8-1/2 percentage points (from, say, today’s 4-1/2% to 13%).

Another concern with the mainstream interpretation of this paper, stated best in this Language Log post (though note that other arguments in this post were later revised) is that the gap between the genders seems even smaller when you compare it to variations in happiness overall. In effect, the distributions of men’s happiness and women’s happiness overlap substantially. In statistical terms, Wolfers notes:

The relative decline in the happiness of women is roughly one-eighth of one standard deviation of the distribution of happiness in the population.  If you think there is a lot of variation in happiness in the population, this is big; if not, it is small.

I think that 1/8 of one standard deviation is pretty small whatever the standard deviation, frankly. Certainly this sort of substantial overlap is not what the Huffington Post et al imply, and that’s important. Language Log has some great suggestions on how to better describe this sort of research:

When we’re looking at some property P of two groups X and Y, and a study shows that the distribution of P in X is different from the distribution of P in Y to an extent that is unlikely to be entirely the result of chance, we should avoid explaining this to the general public by saying “X’s have more P than Y’s”, or “X’s and Y’s differ in P”, or any other form of expression that uses generic plurals to describe a generic difference. This would lead us to avoid statements like “men are happier than women. [...] The reason? Most members of the general public don’t understand statistical-distribution talk, and instead tend to  interpret such statements as expressing general (and essential) properties of the groups involved.

It’s hard to abandon a sentence construction entirely. But there is no doubt that we can do a better job pointing out the subtleties of this sort of statistical analysis. I thought Steven Levitt summed up this debate the best, so I will let him have the last word:

Is this a monumental shift? Maybe not. But compared to how much other factors move happiness metrics, it is pretty large. [Stevenson and Wolfers] are quite honest about the magnitudes in the paper. To the extent their results are being exaggerated, it is by people like me who write blog posts about their paper without being explicit about the size of the effect. The authors can’t reasonably be blamed for that.

Now that we’ve covered some of what the paper actually says, I’m going to move on to what it does not say. Stay tuned for the next post in this series.

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Demographers on family policy in Germany

Posted on 19 September 2009 by Allison

Commenting on Doug Saunders’ article, discussed here earlier this week, Randy McDonald at Demography Matters compares Germany’s family policies to those in France. He concludes that if women are not given the opportunity to pursue both education/career and childbearing, large numbers of them will opt not to have children.

This growing body of research points towards a strong conclusion: if a developed country, or at least a country well advanced in the demographic transition, wants high cohort fertility, it has to support alternative family structures in such a way that women will have the autonomy necessary to combine participation in the work force with motherhood. Times have changed, and if any number of countries–Germany included–are to avoid very prolonged demographic winters they’re going to have to adapt.

I don’t know how much I care about ensuring population growth. I know that population decline has serious economic consequences, but I still came of age as an environmentalist. But I do think we should err towards policies that give women the greatest number of choices.

Demography Matters looks interesting throughout if you’re interested in fertility rates, demographic change, gender imbalances, etc.

(H/t to @DougSaunders.)

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Give your daughter an edge: Name her Cameron

Posted on 18 September 2009 by Allison

Female lawyers with names perceived as more masculine have a better shot at judgeships, according to Bentley Coffeey of Clemson University and Patrick McLaughlin of George Mason University. The study [gated], based on data from South Carolina, was written up in the Vancouver Sun in August, and has circulated widely since then.

In the American Law and Economics Review, Coffey and his co-authors report that changing a woman’s name from something feminine, such as Sue, to a gender-neutral name, such as Kelly, increases her odds of being appointed a judge by five per cent. A predominantly male name, such as Cameron, triples the odds of becoming a judge. And a swap from Sue to Bruce, a name used almost exclusively for men, increases the odds of judgeship by a factor of five.

According to Canwest, a later study controls for debt on graduation and experience, and still finds a significant effect. I can’t locate that paper, though – perhaps it’s still unpublished? Those controls are important, obviously, since given names vary between classes.

What is the mechanism here? Is there some immediate positive feeling we get from assuming that someone is male, in the brief period before our first impression is corrected? I can’t think of another explanation. This is interesting, because law is a field where women have made a lot of progress. We’re supposed to believe that women – who are well represented in the legal profession – don’t make it to the highest echelons in large numbers because they drop out to have children. But clearly, that is not all that is going on.

This is nothing new, of course. Commenter Victoria Pynchon at Legal Blog Watch points out that blind auditions increase the number of women in symphonies. This study [gated] of academic hiring found that men and women were both, on average, biased in favour of male applicants. Of course, we cannot assume that unconscious (or conscious!) bias comes into play in every situation. This paper on blind marking for UK A-level exams [gated] finds no effect.

If I can be forgiven for broad application of these fairly narrow results, I there is an argument here for gender blind hiring. Reviewing a resume without knowing the applicant’s gender might seem pointless since gender will (generally) be pretty obvious at the interview. But if that brief period of impartiality is what is giving these South Carolina judges an advantage, maybe it’s worth the hassle.

(H/t to Marginal Revolution and TaxProf Blog)

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Job Voyager: Watch women’s voyage into the labour market

Posted on 17 September 2009 by Allison

image

This Flash visualization shows the proportion of the US working population in different occupation categories from 1850-2000. A screen capture cannot do this project justice, so you should click over to the Job Voyager itself. There you can hover over the Flash visualization to locate smaller occupations, and see the gender split for different time periods. You can switch from data for women to data for men and the full population. And you can also search for particular occupations, and look at that data alone.

The “manager/owner” slice has grown noticeably since 1970, reflecting, I assume, the rise of female entrepreneurship.

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Just the magnitude of gender segregations is striking when you see it graphically. For classic cases, look at secretaries and carpenters:

image image

We can see women making real progress in some professional careers – but when you look at the labour market as a whole, these high pay and high respect jobs are so tiny you can’t locate them without carefully hovering over the graph. Most women, most men for that matter, do not have access to these high reward occupations.

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But this graph isn’t the coolest part – Flare is a library for building Flash data visualizations. That means that you can build your own.

(H/t to Chris Blattman, lately my favourite blogger.)

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In Germany, mothers struggle to return to the workforce

Posted on 13 September 2009 by Allison

The Globe has been running some impressive coverage in its World section lately, branching out into cultural issues as well as hard news from abroad. One case in point is Doug Saunders’ piece about working women in Germany.

It turns out – and this is news to me – that Germany has lagged way behind the rest of Western Europe in integrating mothers into the workforce. Working with children is both financially difficult, with childcare expensive and rare, and socially unacceptable for married women.

The ideology itself was Ms. Hoffritz’s biggest barrier. When she talked about her frustrations, her friends and relatives openly denounced her as a rabenmutter – literally “raven mother,” a woman who abandons her children, like the mythic ravens throwing their chicks from the nest. It is a term routinely applied to working mothers in Germany.

Rather than focusing exclusively on policy, Saunders takes a broader view, tracing attitudes about working mothers back to the Cold War. It’s an interesting angle, though I’d like to hear more about women in what was East Germany, since at least pre-unification they would have been expected to work. Have attitudes changed on that side of the wall, or is this article mostly relevant in the West? I’m also interested in differences in workplace participation and childcare across classes – do they follow the same patterns as, say, Canada 30 years ago?

In any case, the article is thoughtful, and well worth reading.

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The financial crisis and Scottish money

Posted on 15 July 2009 by Allison

I’m visiting with my partner’s family in London and then Edinburgh this month, and last night at dinner I discovered an interesting little currency puzzle.

To understand it, you need some background. It won’t surprise you to hear that Scotland andEngland, both being part of the UK, use the same currency – pounds sterling. But if you haven’t visited Scotland, you might be surprised to see Scottish money. While paper money in England is issued by the Bank of England, in Scotland three large banks issue notes, complete with their logos: the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Bank of Scotland, and Clydesdale Bank.

By my entirely unscientifics survey of the dinner table, it is becoming increasingly difficult to use Scottish bank notes in England. When I last lived in Edinburgh and visited London, in 2006 and 2007, the odd ornery English shopkeeper would refuse to take Scottish money. But now the practice has apparently become so widespread that Scots are in the odd position of having to change their Scottish money into English money before travelling anywhere in England.

It turns out that Scottish bills are not legal tender. No one is compelled by law to accept them. Instead, they are promissory notes, literally a commitment by the issuing bank to pay a debt. Wikipedia gets into the specifics of this, which is confusing – the Bank of England’s notes are legal tender in England only, but not Scotland or Wales, though they are accepted anywhere.

So why is it so difficult to spend Scottish notes? I see three possible explanations:

  1. Irrational anti-Scottish prejudice.
  2. The belief that Scottish bank notes are easier to counterfeit than those issued by the Bank of England. (This is something usually offered as explanation by aforementioned ornery English shopkeepers, but it may or may not be a variation on #1.)
  3. Lack of confidence in the Scottish banks issuing promissory notes.

Any of these are plausible, but the one most likely to have changed since I last lived here is #3 – Scottish banks have been hit hard by the financial crisis. Really, what we may have here is two currencies pegged together but not moving together. At least one hotel in Hong Kong has come to the same conclusion, offering a different exchange rate for Scottish and English notes. Since that practice is preposterous in the UK – Scottish bank notes deposited into a Scottish bank could be withdrawn as English notes at any bank machine in England – the only option is to refuse to accept them.

What I cannot determine, this fine drizzly morning, is what would have happened to all those Scottish notes issued by RBS if that bank had not been bailed out. Commenters?

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Other blogs: Nancy Folbre at Economix

Posted on 27 May 2009 by Allison

Feminist economists are continuing to make inroads in the blogosphere. Earlier this near, Nancy Folbre, an econ prof from UMass Amherst, joined the blogging team at the New York Times’ Economix. (I’ve written about Folbre before, linking to her own blog, Care Talk.) She’s posted a steady stream of intelligent content, and anyone reading this blog should definitely be reading her as well.

Here’s a taste, from a recent post about the Child and Youth Well-Being Index, and the impact of the recession on children:

During this recession, many other problems, including huge bank bailouts, are competing for public attention and taxpayers’ money. Sometimes I wonder how closely the Child Well-Being Index would mirror an Adult Wrong-Doing Index. If I were going to construct such a new index, financial malfeasance would rank high among the measurement domains. But in the composite, apathy among those who could do more to help poor children would receive at least an equal weight.

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More on negotiation, the wage gap, and self-help nonsense

Posted on 27 May 2009 by Allison

During my long hiatus, I received an email about negotiation and the wage gap (emphasis mine):

I attended a session last week in which the basic premise was, “A woman earns 77 cents for every dollar a man makes and here’s how to fix that”.  The presenter then went on to discuss negotiating a young woman’s first salary out of college since that forms the basis for all subsequent salaries.  OK, that makes sense in context. However, when I asked what other factors contributed to the disparity, the presenter basically said that there weren’t any except women not valuing themselves enough to negotiate good salaries.

That didn’t make sense to me, so I did a bit of Googling and kept seeing the same statement without a lot of critical analysis.  Your blog was one of the few that seemed to take it on and one post I noticed said you would have more to say.  However, I didn’t spot anything after that.  Do you know of any articles, blog posts, whatever that addresses the issue of what other causes there may be for the 77/100 problem?

The facilitator of this workshop probably meant well, but he or she was teaching something false and quite possibly harmful. As regular readers know well, the wage gap is not entirely due to  negotiation – it’s also the result of straightforward discrimination, occupational differences between genders, the housework and childcare that working women are expected to take on, the cumulative effect of time off for maternity leave and childrearing, and much more. It is true that women are less likely to negotiate a higher starting salary, but women are also more likely to be penalized for negotiating.

A lot of people like to argue that women can overcome sexism through personal action, like developing better negotiation skills. This can be an empowering message, but it’s not really true – becoming more assertive in isolation from the rest of the culture will only get you so far. Addressing the wage gap, if that’s something we want to do, requires big policy changes and new cultural norms.

Too often, messages of personal empowerment become about blame. (Barbara Ehrenreich really skewers the self help movement on this point in Bait and Switch.) If all you need is a positive attitude, then you don’t have child care/a promotion/help around the house because you don’t want it badly enough. Want harder! Stop talking about social change!

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Abortion and the recession

Posted on 18 May 2009 by Allison

Estimates vary, but it  looks like the abortion rate has ticked up with the recession. Would it be too crass to call abortion a countercyclical asset? Of course, it’s hard to be  more offensive than the anti-choice movement, as quoted at Double X:

“Americans, coming off years of hedonism and credit card spending orgies, are now increasingly aborting their babies who were unfortunate enough to be conceived during this economic recession,” Christian radio show host Ingrid Schlueter writes on her blog. “Gone is anything remotely related to the spirit of America past where difficulties were not solved by taking the coward’s or murderer’s way out, but by fulfilling one’s duty and taking responsibility for loved ones, no matter how hard the challenge.”

And who is Schlueter beating up on? Well, here’s a few heart-wrenching examples:

A pregnant woman in Oakland, Calif., already struggling to support three children and an unemployed boyfriend, couldn’t afford bus fare to the abortion clinic. “I just walked here for an hour,” she tells the clinic’s doctor. “I’m sure of my decision.” The same article quotes Stephanie Poggi, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, who says her clients are telling her: “‘I’ve already put off paying my rent, my electric bill. I’m cutting back on my food.’ They’ve run through all the options.”

Let me get this straight. It’s selfish and unpatriotic to have more children than you can support yourself, but both contraception and abortion are murder? Radical social conservatives present so few options for their followers; I really wonder how they manage to attract any supporters outside the top tax bracket.

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The Bergmann Effect

Posted on 16 May 2009 by Allison

The Bergmann Effect is a phrase used frequently by feminist economists, but as far as I can tell  it isn’t defined online, so I’ve been asked about it a few times. Here, at long last, is the sketch of a definition.

The Bergmann Effect is named after Barbara R. Bergmann, Professor Emeritus at the American University and the University of Maryland, and a pioneer of feminist economics. She didn’t coin the term herself, of course, but when I emailed her she was kind enough to sift back through mailing list discussions and come up with a definition: 

The harm done to gender equality in the work-place, and gender equality more broadly, by workplace policies that allow parents time off or allow them flexibility, when such opportunities are utilized by women more than men.

If you’re not used to thinking about incentives, this sounds crazy. How could so-called “family-friendly” workplace practices, which allow women to balance work with childcare, possibly hurt? Bergmann explains in a paper published by Politics & Society in 2008, called Long Leaves, Child Well-Being, and Gender Equality:

Female jobholders would increase their time
at home to a much greater extent than would male jobholders, increasing the
share women do of child care, cleaning, cooking, and laundry. In the workplace,
employers would become more reluctant to place women in nonroutine jobs,
where substitution of one worker for another is difficult.

Of the measures for resolving work–family conflict proposed by Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers, government programs that provide or pay for nonparental child care would advance gender equality. However, paid parental leaves of six months for both parents, and the encouragement of part-time work, would retard it, and possibly reverse some of the advances toward gender equality that have been made in the home and the workplace. Female jobholders would increase their time at home to a much greater extent than would male jobholders, increasing the share women do of child care, cleaning, cooking, and laundry. In the workplace, employers would become more reluctant to place women in nonroutine jobs, where substitution of one worker for another is difficult.

So long as women are much more likely to take advantage of family-friendly workplace policies, and so long as those cost firms money, then those policies make it rational for firms to discriminate against women in hiring and promotion. 

I’m not entirely on board with what Bergmann sees as the solution to this dilemma – government-funded childcare, paired with the end of paid parental leave. To be clear, I’d love universal childcare – I  hope it exists by the time I need it. But I’m not sure I want to live in a world as stark as Bergmann and many of her colleagues imagine, where we stop looking for ways to support women with the perfectly reasonable desire to stay home for a few years with their kids. 

That said, naming the Bergmann Effect trains us to look for a particular unintended consequence that might come with a lot of the policies that the women’s movement advocates for. It lets us think about whether these policies are worth their downside, and we can also look at ways to mitigate unintended consequences. 

This brings me to last week. Kate, a guest poster over at Feministe, is furious, surprised and terrified (?) to see an ABC News segment asking whether the Pregnancy Discrimination Act could hurt women. Here’s the contrarian argument presented by Carrie Lukas, interviewed in the piece: 

“I understand the desire for people to have the government step in and try to protect women, but there’s real costs to government intervention.” According to Carrie, those costs are that because there’s now a law, employers might worry about being sued if they break it, and therefore be hesitant to hire women.

Lukas isn’t my ideal spokesperson, as VP of the Independent Women’s Forum, a fundamentalist free-market think tank prone to bizarre press releases like Obama Transnationalist Agenda Undermines US Sovereignty.

But seriously, Kate, you don’t have to be a “self-loathing pregnant lady”, “anti-woman”, or “anti-feminist” to ask this question. It wouldn’t be easy to prove or prevent this sort of systematic discrimination. I’d like to think we’ll always ask the question, and in many cases decide that it’s worth the trade off. Let’s all take a deep breath.

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