And the reason this video’s popularity irks me is that I see this backsliding everywhere around me. I see all the blogs and books about being single and finding a husband and surviving divorce, written by educated women in this world in which women can do anything and I wonder if the 1960s ever happened. There is an obsession with romantic commitment in the air again.

If it’s true that women are more concerned with finding the right mate than they used to be, and I don’t know how you would measure that, I wonder if it’s a natural consequence of our expanded opportunities. Smith’s ideal modern woman, as I understand her, has ambitions and desires at both work and home. We want, and are expected to want, more than a nice guy who makes enough money to put us up in the suburbs.

We want to do something that matters, maybe something that requires extended training or time to get established. We need to fit in kids while we’re relatively young, but we can’t or don’t want to quit our jobs at that point. So we need a partner who can share housework and childcare; someone who might consider moving for our job, not just his. We want someone who is emotionally available to us and the kids. We have come to expect a fulfilling sex life, but most of us also want a mate who won’t harass us or cheat in the years when we’re most exhausted from the second shift.

It isn’t easy to strike a balance between these sometimes contradictory desires and the similarly contradictory desires of the ideal modern dude, who (we can hope) has his own ambitions and desires at work and home and is also (we can hope) figuring out what a kinder, gentler, more fulfilling masculinity might look like. Nasty break-ups, serial cohabitation, divorce, couples’ therapy, vapid self-help relationship books—maybe this is just what happens while we figure out what love and marriage is supposed to be, in world where, as Smith says, “women are just as capable of being busy and distracted by histology or the futures market or electoral reform.”

I was happily surprised. Necessarily, the segment only skims the surface of the question, but does so in a reasonably even-handed and intelligent way. Take a listen.

The long-term solution is for men, in the aggregate, to take as much responsibility for child-rearing as women. That doesn’t mean that every family must split childcare 50/50 – in fact, for many families that wouldn’t make sense. But we need to make paternity leave socially acceptable.

Shifting from maternity leave to parental leave is a symbolic step in that direction, but on its own, we shouldn’t expect it to change care giving patterns. That’s one point I took away from this thorough and revealing Times piece about fatherhood in Sweden.

Despite government campaigns — one featuring a champion weightlifter with a baby perched on his bare biceps — the share of fathers on leave was stalled at 6 percent when [Bengt] Westerberg entered government in 1991. [...]

“I always thought if we made it easier for women to work, families would eventually choose a more equal division of parental leave by themselves,” said Mr. Westerberg, 67. “But I gradually became convinced that there wasn’t all that much choice.”

Sweden, he said, faced a vicious circle. Women continued to take parental leave not just for tradition’s sake but because their pay was often lower, thus perpetuating pay differences. Companies, meanwhile, made clear to men that staying home with baby was not compatible with a career.

So Westerberg, as deputy prime minister, started phasing in some heavy-handed policies in 1995. Now two months of parental leave is reserved exclusively for men. This has substantially increased the number of fathers taking time off work, and that has had an impact on wages.

A study published by the Swedish Institute of Labor Market Policy Evaluation in March showed, for instance, that a mother’s future earnings increase on average 7 percent for every month the father takes leave.

That’s great, but I’m also interested in women who do not have children. If women who don’t intend to have kids or take maternity leave are being hurt by their potential children, by assumptions that come from other women’s behaviour (and the evidence suggests that they are) then this sort of broad social change should help.

Along those lines, the parental leave policy is apparently shifting gender norms for men:

Birgitta Ohlsson, European affairs minister, put it this way: “Machos with dinosaur values don’t make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women’s magazines anymore.” Ms. Ohlsson, who has lobbied European Union governments to pay more attention to fathers, is eight months pregnant, and her husband, a law professor, will take the leave when their child is born.

“Now men can have it all — a successful career and being a responsible daddy,” she added. “It’s a new kind of manly. It’s more wholesome.”

I think we don’t say enough about how restrictive gender norms limit men’s choices, pushing them to, for example, focus exclusively on work when they might be happier spending time with their kids.

(Hat tip to kottke.)

I have to say, this surprises me, but two of the explanations offered are compelling. First, it may be that wages were below equilibrium to begin with:

Wages in Indonesian TFA [textiles, footwear, and apparel] factories were very low prior to the onset of the anti-sweatshop campaigns; vendors for Nike were able to implement significant wage increases before even approaching the average wages across the Indonesian manufacturing sector.

Second, the companies targeted have brand power which gives them unusually high margins. For the non-economists in the audience – by some theories, being a powerful brand is a little bit like being a monopoly, because you’ve distinguished your products to the point where they’re not competing with generic alternatives.

Another key consideration is that many of the goods produced in Indonesia’s TFA sectors ultimately end up in expensive retail markets in the U.S. and the EU, where profit margins are relatively large, brand identity is paramount, and the firms clearly have the financial resources to improve labor conditions in their factories. In industries where more firms compete for market share, profit margins are smaller, and there is no brand recognition, anti-sweatshop campaigns may not be as effective.

So what was the mechanism? Apparently, activism increased compliance with minimum wage laws at the targeted companies. While increases in the minimum wage decreased employment overall – this is no surprise – the increased compliance with the minimum wage at a limited number of companies didn’t seem to reduce employment.

This part is just my own conjecture, but I’d assume that companies wouldn’t respond to these campaigns with wage increases unless they could afford the wage increases. That means there’s almost a built-in safety valve to avoid unemployment.

Not all the news was rosy, though:

While anti-sweatshop activism did not have additional adverse effects on employment within the TFA sector, it did lead to falling profits, reduced productivity growth, and plant closures for smaller exporters.

So taken together, this isn’t exactly bad news, but I’m not sure it’s widely applicable.

(Hat tip to Chris Blattman, as usual.)

All of the women in this photo work or used to work at Newsweek. And yes, all of them are white, but you should really read the piece for some context. The photo isn’t meant to illustrate the face of feminism, it’s actually just a link to the package … True, there probably aren’t enough people of color working here—or in the media in general—just as there aren’t enough women. And for the record, the few women of color who worked at Newsweek during the 1970 suit declined to sign the complaint against the company.

The subtext here is that the women of colour on staff weren’t good warriors, and therefore don’t deserve to be celebrated today. I hope that’s not what was intended, but in any case this highlights a missed opportunity in the original article.

Why didn’t the women of colour on staff sign the complaint in 1970? Were they approached by the white women organizing the action? Did they feel less secure in their jobs, or less supported by the broader feminist community? Had they made less progress? Have they made less progress since? A look, however brief, into these questions would have given us a really interesting angle on the conflict, and would have touched on one of the defining feminist issues of the last 40 years – the intersection of sexism and racism.

And then there’s this:

What bothers us most about their post, though, is that it’s important for feminists to stick together—especially when there’s not much discussion of the F word in the mainstream media at all.

For a long time, marginalized groups within marginalized groups have been told to sit down and shut up, lest they make the broader movement less palatable to the masses. So let’s be clear – when we throw women of colour under the bus, that’s the very opposite of “sticking together.”

Finally, I just don’t accept the premise that feminism is an easier sell without anti-racism. All of the major outstanding feminist issues are deeply entwined with issues of race, in ways that I think a broad, mainstream audience understands. By ignoring race, we only make ourselves more irrelevant.

No one would dare say today that “women don’t write here,” as the NEWSWEEK women were told 40 years ago. But men wrote all but six of NEWSWEEK’s 49 cover stories last year—and two of those used the headline “The Thinking Man.” In 1970, 25 percent of NEWSWEEK’s editorial masthead was female; today that number is 39 percent. Better? Yes. But it’s hardly equality.

Bennett, Ellison and Ball seem to have come to this conclusion gradually – as successful young women, they grew up believing that they could do anything. As Echidne, commenting on the piece, writes:

Outside the question of sexuality, the culture now does tell younger women that they can be anything they want if they work hard enough, though this suggestion is made before one enters the labor force or has any children. I suspect that the transition from college to the labor force is when some women hear that feminist alarm clock ringing.

This is exactly right. I have watched my friends’ ideas about gender shift perceptibly between high school, university, and now the working world. They are not alone. For many women, feminist perspectives on pop culture are not as compelling as what we have to say about the day to day challenges of work and family life.

Excluding vehicles, single black women have a median wealth of $100 and Hispanic women $120 respectively, while their same-race male counterparts have $7,900 and $9,730. The median wealth of single
white women is $41,500. To put it another way, single black and Hispanic women have one penny of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by their male counterparts and a tiny fraction of a penny for every dollar of
wealth owned by white women.

There’s a really illuminating graph on page 7 of the full report, which you should check out – it doesn’t really fit on this page – which reassured me that this isn’t an isolated statistic. A large gap holds for married and cohabiting couples, and, for that matter, for men of colour, though not to the same extent.

The data is from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, conducted by the Federal Reserve Board. (If, like me, you are excited by this sort of thing, you can download the raw data here.) As the authors point out, since the data was collected, the recession has probably changed things for the worse.

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.

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.

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.