Somehow, though, despite all this equality infrastructure, the UK still has a lot of inequality.
For example:
Almost exactly as in the U.S., the percentage of wives earning more than their husbands has increased from 4% at the end of the 1960s to 19% in 2006-7. (And just like here, it’s pitched as a tipping point. The Sunday Times combined the 19% of wives who earn “more” with the 25% who earn “the same” to conclude, “Breadwinner wives reign in 44% of homes.”)
The UK’s overall income inequality is pretty high – 7th among OECD countries with a Gini coefficient about 33 (the U.S. is 4th, at about 38).
Their income inequality has been rising, and is now the highest it’s been in the past 50 years.
But I was struck by the family transmission of inequality pattern, which shows dramatic differences in measures of school readiness at very early ages according to family income:
According to the report, these social class education gaps widen through childhood rather than narrowing – an indictment of the leveling capacity of the school system:
The evidence we examine confirms that social background really matters. There are significant differences in ‘school readiness’ before and when children reach school by parental income and mother’s education. Children entering primary school in 2005-2006 whose mothers had degrees were assessed 6 months ahead of those who had no qualifications above Grade D at GCSE. In addition, every extra £100 per month in income when children were small was associated with a difference equivalent to a month’s development. Rather than being fixed at birth, these differences widen through childhood. … Children with a higher social class background who start with a low assessment of relative cognitive ability when young eventually overtake those with a lower social class background who were initially assessed as having high ability.
In contrast to social class, educational gaps associated with ethnicity or national origin appear to close as children age through the school system. Someone who knows more about what’s going on over there than I do will have to explain that.
As the date for legal gay marriage approaches in Mexico City, conservative opposition builds.
Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera:
Today the family is under attack in its essence by the equivalence of homosexual unions with marriage between a man and a woman.
The language on adoption by same-sex couples – also to be legalized – is especially vitriolic. The Catholic opposition says it will subject children to…
violence of all sorts (such as psychological), as their fragile condition as children is taken advantage of in order to introduce them into environments that do not foster their full development.
Legal challenges to follow.
Opponents of the the gay marriage law see themselves as fighting a rising tide of rights, following Mexico City’s legalization of early abortions in 2007. These limited abortion rights have unleashed a “plague” of abortions, they say (about 35,000). On the other side, feminist groups are trying to take the issue national.
Whenever people use raw numbers to show the extent of a problem, it’s a good idea to pull out your crayon and napkin and see what they’re really talking about. It’s one thing to say, morally, one abortion is too many. But if you will concede that two abortions is worse than one, then it’s worth comparing rates.
So, on the “plague” idea, a rough calculation. Let’s say:
and there were 27 million women in the country ages 15-44 in 2008, so
there should be about 5.4 million women ages 15-44 in the Mexico City metro area, and
at average international rates they would be expected to have about 150,000 abortions per year.
Looks to me like they are averaging about 12,000 per year (35,000 from April 2007 to December 2009). Round numbers. So if it’s a plague, it’s a much-smaller-than-average plague.
Remember the embarrassing non-response of Dick Cheney and John Edwards to Gwen Ifill’s question about Black women with HIV/AIDS in the vice presidential debate in 2004? They had no idea. Today, the racial disparity in the impact of the epidemic remains shocking, yet the absence of shock is still palpable.
February 7 marks National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, reports the Centers for Disease Control. Among all race/ethnic groups, HIV prevalence is highest among Blacks, whose 12% of the population account for a shocking 46% of the population living with HIV.
Preventing transmission of HIV in the Black population requires concerted efforts, because the disease is not narrowly concentrated in one group or associated with a single risk behavior: “Among black males, male-to-male sexual contact accounted for 63% of new infections; among black females, high-risk heterosexual contact accounted for 83% of new infections.”
A few issues merit special attention.
Since the epidemic began, routine HIV testing and medical treatments in the U.S. have largely curtailed the spread of HIV from mothers to their children. Still, that requires good prenatal and preventative care. Shockingly, the perinatal transmission that remains is highly concentrated among Blacks, with 69% of all cases. Another 16% is among Latinas. The race-ethnic gap in perinatal transmission rates appears to be narrowing in recent years, but it remains more than 20-times higher among Blacks than Whites.
HIV/AIDS is also apparent – and unequally distributed – in U.S. prisons, where an estimated 1.5% of prisoners are HIV-positive. In prison, the Black AIDS death rate is almost three-times higher than Whites’, and twice as high as Latinos’. Still, prison rape makes for great jokes; correctional officers aren’t even shy about telling them in public.
The good news is prison deaths from AIDS-related causes are dropping. Because they are increasingly concentrated among older people – those over 55 – it looks like deaths reflect infections that predate current treatments. But infection puts many more at risk. Although the percentage of HIV-positive prisoners is not great, millions of people churn through the prison system, experiencing periods of high risk that may affect them forever.
A couple new reports from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research are worth reading.
Man-woman-cession
For the in-depth economic story of the recession, in historical context, for men, women and gender – see the new report by Heidi Hartmann and colleagues at the IWPR. Includes long-term trends in employment, unemployment and wages by race/ethnicity and gender, and policy recommendations for both the short- and long-term. They hope to offer a counter-balance to the narrow focus on men’s job losses in the recession.
They show that men’s labor force participation rates have been falling for decades – so that’s not surprising. But it’s remarkable that women’s labor force participation rates are lower now than they were 12 years ago – and that’s not because of the recession, which has only brought a slight dip (“participation” includes unemployment people and those with jobs).
When training is tracking
Another new report from IWPR finds that “women’s and men’s participation in training for traditionally ‘female’ and ‘male’ occupations is a major factor contributing to the earnings gap between women and men who received [Workforce Investment Act] services.” Thus, the job training program may be increasing occupational segregation and contributing to the gender pay gap in the long run.
That reminds me that a few years ago I reviewed a book by Sharon Mastracci called Breaking Out of the Pink Collar Ghetto, which promoted training programs to get non-college-educated women entry into male-dominated blue-collar jobs. If that doesn’t seem practical (which it didn’t to me), Mastracci argued, neither is a strategy to promote “college for all,” which we are not close to guaranteeing, while neglecting those women who end up with less education.
Amidst the horror and heartbreak in Haiti, there is the added atrocity of children losing their parents.
Because there are no real numbers to put on the death and destruction from Haiti’s earthquake, the estimators have free reign. With regard to orphans – children who lost one or both parents in the earthquake – there is a claim that a million children were orphaned. Such estimates are almost certainly too high, says the charity SOS Children’s Villages – who report that the number of orphans who can’t be reunited with family members after such a disaster is usually closer to 5% of the death toll, though it could be somewhat higher in this case. If they’re right, the wild estimates could be costly:
The less accurate and more exaggerated the figures, the more risk of rapid removal of children, who may still have parents searching for them, from their country, their culture and their family. Some children already in the process of adoption out of Haiti should of course be allowed to leave. Perhaps ones already identified as orphans before the earthquake. But children who may have just been orphaned should be cared for, counselled and loved locally, whilst family is traced…
Those expedited adoptions have led to a group of 53 orphans coming to Pittsburgh, children who were already in the adoption pipeline but whose paperwork was accelerated by the Haitian government. The news prompted hundreds of calls from other potential parents interested in fostering or adopting the children of disaster – and a similar operation was underway to the Netherlands.
Without a stable government, aid agencies warn, Haitian children are at dire risk of trafficking – for labor, sex slavery, or adoption – and there is no way to administer international adoptions with adequate safeguards. Case in point is the group of American religious zealots who attempted to drive a bus load of children over the border into the Dominican Republic – without adoption documents – in what they describe as an effort to rescue them and care for them in a a new orphanage, as reported by the Associated Press:
It has since been reported that the Americans lured parents to relinquish their children on the promise that they would return after gaining education in the Dominican Republic – so not only did many of them have families, but those families did not intend for the children to be adopted.
The U.S. has pledged to do all it can to facilitate these adoptions quickly without compromising international standards for adoption procedures – as of late January, the State Department reports, ”humanitarian parole has been granted to almost 500 Haitian orphans in the process of being adopted, several hundred of whom are now in the United States,” and the U.S. is working with the Haitian government to “establish a transparent and orderly procedure for securing departure approval for children already in the adoption process.” Such efforts presumably would not include the ambitious archdiocese of Miami’s plan to airlift many Haitian children to Florida, as was done with thousands of children after the Cuban Revolution, in a secret operation dubbed Operation Pedro Pan.
Haiti is currently the #8 source of international adoptions into the U.S., with 2,712 children entering as adopted orphans in the past 10 years. There are half a million Haitian-born Blacks in the U.S. at last count, but more trace their ancestry to the first former slave republic.
Disaster’s children
The earthquake recalls the controversy over orphans from the South Asian Tsunami in December 2004. Some of the affected countries’ adherence to the Hague Convention – which includes standards of verification that children are truly orphaned – along with opposition by some Muslims toward adoption by non-Muslims, blocked the attempts of would-be parents from the U.S. and other rich countries to adopt children who had lost their parents in the tsunami.
Such disasters seem to provoke some religiously-motivated parents into considering international adoption-as-rescue mission, discussed ably by Adoptiontalk. She quotes a religious adoption charity’s note of caution – one you’d hope wasn’t necessary:
While it is entirely possible that the Lord is using this tragedy to open your eyes to the needs of orphans and the possibility of adoption, you may want to proceed with caution if this tragedy is the first time you have ever considered adoption. . . .
Losing family members – parents or children – takes many tolls. Parents and children often support each other economically, at different life stages, so such losses exacerbate poverty. And lost family members mean lifetimes of love, parenting and caring lost too. When the family loss happens with a traumatic event such as earthquake or tsunami, the hardship is compounded by disrupted housing, schools, healthcare, other friends and relatives, and semblance of routine. (Devastating mental health impact has been documented from the tsunami, including post-traumatic stress in many children, but we’ll never know the full extent of that damage because of the limited services to treat as well as document it.)
Unfolding at a slower rate but ultimately more catastrophic, the AIDS epidemic has left millions of orphans. The United Nations estimates more than 11 million children in Africa alone lost one or both parents to AIDS. There is a reasonable debate over these estimates, since lack of health care services goes along with poor data quality, but “millions” is good enough to make the point. (In the U.S., about 100,000 children have lost their mother to AIDS.)
Whose suffering?
The crisis predictably brings out one of the dark sides of international adoption – the attitude that international adoption is rescuing children from inferior cultures, and that delays and “paperwork” in the process, which are hopefully designed to insure the wellbeing of the children, create hardship for adoptive parents. After the earthquake, the suffering of the waiting parents – with which I sympathize, especially for those whose future adoptees have already been identified – has drawn dramatic media attention. That storyline is bitterly captured here:
…this story is not about the children, or their future. White adoptive parents are the real victims of this tragedy, and it is their pain, and their experience of trauma that propels the story. If the children mattered, following up the trauma of a devastating earthquake with the trauma of complete cultural, racial, linguistic, and geographical displacement would be questionable if not unthinkable.
Spotlights
The Haitian earthquake calls attention to global problems, and highlights the particular risks of family loss and disruption for children, which can be positive. As with global poverty, however, even when international adoptions are great for children – with proper safeguards and support – this can’t be seen as a solution. After all, 1.4 billion people live on less than $1 per day (the children of whom often labor to help make possible the standard of living that will support their orphaned compatriots after they are adopted abroad).
The adoption response reminds me of the rescue scenes. As the second week after the earthquake dragged on, the resources – including media spotlights – poured into saving a tiny handful of possible survivors still buried in the rubble may have produced positive attention among potential charitable donors. And how can you not celebrate the survival of a child pulled from that debris? But it also represented efforts diverted from the cheaper, more effective work of providing clean water and shelter to thousands of people just blocks away.
Women’s average pay is less than men’s. One reason for this is that the average pay in jobs dominated by women is less than that in jobs dominated by men. (The other reason is that, within a given job, men earn more than women, which is when women can actually claim wage discrimination – but that’s another story.)
So why do female-dominated jobs pay less? A new analysis of Census data from 1950 to 2000 by Asaf Levanon, Paula England and Paul Allison in Social Forces, gives us perhaps the best test yet of two different explanations:
Queuing: Women enter jobs that already pay less, either because employers hire them last (in the “labor queue”) or because the things women value in a job are “non-pecuniary” (such as career intermittence, or a love of cleaning).
Devaluation: The pay in jobs that women hold is lower because women hold them. “Women’s work” is valued less either because there is a cultural bias resulting from women’s lower social status, because it’s similar to unpaid work that many women do for “free” (like childcare), or because women are politically weaker and employers take advantage of it.
By tracking jobs across six waves of the Census, the authors can use analysis of change in the pay and gender composition of jobs to answer which came first, the women or the lower pay.
The answer (mostly): Women came first. It’s devaluation, not queuing. (This is the wagon to which Matt Huffman and I, apparently wisely, hitched our previous work.) This is especially true in the later decades.
One thing devaluation does is create a struggle to define jobs as not women’s work. A nice new analysis of that struggle, by Rachel Sherman, appears in Work & Occupations. She shows the creative ways that “personal concierges” — most of whom are women — try to sell their services without revealing that they are essentially trying to get paid for doing women’s work (to oversimplify the story).
Note this doesn’t mean devaluation is why women get paid less overall. This can also happen for other reasons, including wage discrimination within jobs. But the conclusion is important, because devaluation is much harder to sue for under current law, which requires individual acts of discrimination either in hiring (the labor queue) or wage setting (within-job pay) – both of which are hard to document.
Because it’s not about individual discrimination, policy-wise, the devaluation thesis brings us back to “comparable worth” — the legal regulation of job pay based on the qualifications and requirements of the job — which I rather weakly advocated when the Democratic majority held hearings on gender inequity way back in 2007. (Contrary to Obama’s assertions, this would be the real equal-pay-for-equal-work). Comparable worth requires government intervention in wage setting, making it the bogeyman of anti-discrimination policy.
A new review of several dozen parenting studies attempts to assess the popular claims that married, biological, two-parent families are “best” for children. This conclusion is a familiar mantra, repeated by pundits, politicians and scholars alike. And it is based on evidence. But that evidence is mostly from comparisons of married-couple families with single-mother families. The authors of the new review, sociologists Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey, examine outcomes such as behavioral problems, psychological adjustment, and closeness of parents and children. They argue:
Current claims that children need both a mother and father are spurious because they attribute to the gender of parents benefits that correlate primarily with the number and marital status of a child’s parents since infancy. At this point no research supports the widely held conviction that the gender of parents matters for child well-being. To ascertain whether any particular form of family is ideal would demand sorting a formidable array of often inextricable family and social variables. We predict that even “ideal” research designs will find instead that ideal parenting comes in many different genres and genders.
For example, have any studies actually compared parenting among stably married, two-parent families who had planned biological births, to see whether same-sex couples produce different outcomes than male-female couples? In the absence of such studies, the common assumption remains untested.
After combing through the studies – many of them small, based on convenience samples, some larger and including legally-married gay couples (in the Netherlands) – they report that more than three-quarters of the studies find no significant differences in genuine apples-to-apples comparisons of parent gender composition. That is probably the most important conclusion – differences in children’s outcomes result more from factors such as economics, relationship history and family disruption than from the gender of parents. Still, they identity some patterns, albeit tentatively:
Evaluating the importance of being parented by both a female and a male parent requires research on families with the same number and status but a different gender mix of parents. Our review of research closest to this design suggests that strengths typically associated with mother-father families appear at least to the same degree in families with two women parents.
That said, two-parent families seem to confer benefits over one-parent families in some indicators. But beyond that, most of the differences have to do with gender, rather than sexual orientation:
Based strictly on the published science, one could argue that two women parent better on average than a woman and a man, or at least than a woman and man with a traditional division of family labor. Lesbian coparents seem to outperform comparable married heterosexual, biological parents on several measures, even while being denied the substantial privileges of marriage. This seems to be attributable partly to selection effects and partly to women on average exceeding men in parenting investment and skills.
Note that they included only studies of lesbian couples who planned to have children together, not the more common cases of women with biological children from straight marriages now parenting with another woman. In the end, they conclude:
Every family form provides distinct advantages and risks for children. Married heterosexual parents confer social legitimacy and relative privilege but often with less paternal involvement. Comothers typically bestow a double dose of caretaking, communication, and intimacy. … Gay male–parent families remain underresearched, but their daunting routes to parenthood seem likely to select more for strengths than limitations.
The new research follows up on an analysis I have been using in class for years, “(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?” by these authors in 2001. Without reviewing them, I should also note that the Journal of Marriage and Family, which published the study, also published several critical commentaries and a response in the same issue.
One of those responses juxtaposes Biblarz and Stacey’s approach with true meta-analyses, which actually aggregate the data from previous small studies to draw more robust statistical inferences. One of these has found, for example, that “No differences were found between children raised by heterosexual or same-sex parents in the following four areas: cognitive development, psychological adjustment, gender identity, or sexual partner preference.” The only clear difference that did emerge was positive for gay couples: “nonheterosexual parents on average indicated significantly better relationships with their children than did heterosexual parents.”
Good news? Sure. But — tempting as it is to consider the possibility that “God and nature actually short-changed children by giving them biological parents” (wait, how is it “God and nature”?) — we should not rush to apply such results to current political and legal debates. Straight male-female couples do not (usually) have to prove to anyone that they are good parents – or that their “kind” are good parents – before being allowed to produce children (adoption is a different story). Which is good. It is better to devote energy and resources to supporting parents and children in whatever kind of family they have than it is to police the type of person or couple that is allowed to raise children. That doesn’t mean ignore bad or dangerous parents, but treat those as individual cases rather than impose proscriptive blocks to parenting based on family category.
The post on Haiti’s orphans has gotten more hits than anything else on Family Inequality this month. My traffic is tiny, of course, but more broadly, the mind of the American public experienced a seismic event on January 13, when the earthquake struck. Google searches for the word “Haiti” suddenly surpassed searches for the word “sex” for the first time in recorded history.
“Haiti” searches remained higher than “sex” for most of the next 10 days, though it appears likely “sex” may be back on top by next weekend’s Friday-Saturday spike.
For details on the measurement and scale, you can repeat my search here or read Google’s About file here.
The Pew Research Center put together some trends from Census data in a new report, which is getting covered by the NYTimes and others. The underlying facts for the last four decades are:
1. Women’s earnings have risen faster, as their employment rates and hours have increased
2. Women’s education level has risen faster, with more women than men now completing college
3. Marriage rates have fallen slower – and divorce rates have fallen slower – for those with college degrees, so the married population is increasingly more educated than singles.
The result of all that is more married couples in which wives earn as much or more than their husbands.
The greater earnings of married women, and tendency of higher earners to marry each other, has also increased inequality between married and unmarried people – as we’ve seen before, for example with health insurance. The Pew report calculates income adjusted for household size, and shows that married people are in higher income households now:
One could conclude from this that things have gotten better for the average married man – his household income has gone up more than his individual income. (In fact, the wage premium that married men get has slipped.) That’s where you get this:
Things are sweeter than ever for the recliner kings of America’s four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath castles. Contemporary American husbands are working less, going to school less, living longer and are reaping the benefits of wives who are bringing home the big bucks more than any of their dapper “Mad Men” counterparts of the 1960s.
To keep this transformation in perspective, please note that only 22% of wives earn more than their husbands. A change, but maybe not a sea change? Also don’t forget that the wives who were not “working” were really just not getting paid for their work. I’ve tried to make the case that the movement from unpaid to paid work for women is a job shift – and a crucial one, since it changes the form of the underlying relationships.
It’s not clear how to assess the benefits – or losses – that men derive from all this. That recliner-king image assumes that employed wives still do the unpaid work of the household, but the best predictor of how much housework a woman does may be her own income.
“When you think about it from a guy’s perspective, marriage wasn’t such a great deal,” says Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center. “It raised a household size, but it didn’t bring in a lot more income.”
What about the value of all that work the stay-at-home wife did? Maybe it was more inefficient, but the report also shows with survey data on decision-making, wives get more say-so when they earn more – the price a “recliner king” pays, willingly or not.
