Do people working work in working families?

It’s not that “working families” don’t exist, it’s just the way most people use this term it doesn’t mean anything.

Search Google images for “working families,” and you’ll find images like this:

And that’s pretty much the way the term is used: every family is a working family.

To hear the White House talk, you have to wonder whether there are people who aren’t in families. I’ve complained about this before, Obama’s tendency to say things like, “This reform is good for families; it’s good for businesses; it’s good for the entire economy.” As if “families” covers all people.

Specifically, if you Google search the White House website‘s press office directory, which is where the speeches live, like this, you get 457 results, such as this transcript of remarks by Michelle Obama at a “Corporate Voices for Working Families” event. The equivalent search for “working people” yields a paltry 108 hits (many of them Obama speeches at campaign events, which include false-positives, like him making the ridiculous claim that Americans are the “hardest working people on Earth.”) If you search the entire Googleverse for “working families” you get about 318 million hits, versus just just 7 million for “working people” (less than the 10 million that turns up for “Kardashians,” whatever that means.)

You would never know that 33 million Americans live alone – comprising 27% of all households. And 50 million people, or one out of every 6 people, lives in what the Census Bureau defines as a “non-family household,” or a household in which the householder has no relatives (some of those people may be cohabitors, however). The rise of this phenomenon was ably described by Eric Klinenberg in Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

This is partly a complaint about cheap rhetoric, but it’s also about the assumption that families are primary social units when it comes to things like policy and economics, and about the false universality of “middle class” (which is made up of “working families”) in reference to anyone (in a family with anyone) with a job.

Here’s one visualization, from a Google ngrams search of millions of books. The blue line is use of the phrase “working people” as a fraction of references to “people,” while the red line is use of the phrase “working families” as a fraction of references to “families.” It shows, I think, that “working” is coming to define families, not people.

This isn’t all bad. Families matter, and part of the attention to “working families” (or Families That Work) is driven by important problems of work-family conflict, unequal care work burdens, and so on. But ultimately these are problems because they affect people (some of whom are in families). When we treat families as the primary unit of analysis, we mask the divisions within families – the conflicts of interest and exploitation, the violence and abuse, and the ephemeral nature of many family relationships and commitments – and we contribute to the marginalization of people who aren’t in, or don’t have, families.  And those members of the No Family community need our attention, too.

Not your feminist grandmother’s patriarchy

Originally published at The Atlantic under the title, “America is still a patriarchy.”

Male dominance may be weakening, but it’s not gone.

In this election, women were the majority of voters, and the majority of them voted for Obama. The weaker sex clearly was men, contributing less than half the vote, the majority of whom preferred the loser. This is not new. As with Obama, men and whites also failed to unseat Bill Clinton in his reelection after voting for him the first time.

This story tests my ability to think systematically about power and inequality. How is it possible to understand an unprecedented transformation in women’s relative status while also acknowledging men’s continued dominance? Must we just list data points, always just including an “on the other hand” caveat to our real narrative?

I have been described as part of a “feminist academic establishment” that insists on taking the glass-half-empty view—as someone who likes to engage in “data wars” over the details of gender inequality. But what I actually try to do is keep the change in perspective.

In our academic research on gender inequality, my colleagues and I study variation and change. That means figuring out why women’s employment increased so rapidly, why some labor markets have smaller gender gaps, why some workplaces are less segregated, why couples in some countries share housework more, why women in some ethnic groups have higher employment rates, and so on.

The patterns of variation and change help us understand how gender inequality works. Systemic inequality doesn’t just happen. People (in the aggregate) get up in the morning and do it every day. To understand how it works, we need to see how it varies (for example, some people resist equality and some people dedicate their lives to it). Someone who studies inequality but doesn’t care about change and variation is not a social scientist.

Patriarchy

“It’s easy to find references to patriarchs, patriarchy or patriarchal attitudes in reporting on other countries,” writes Nancy Folbre:

Yet these terms seem largely absent from discussions of current economic and political debates in the United States. Perhaps they are no longer applicable. Or perhaps we mistakenly assume their irrelevance.

In fact—my interpretation of the facts—the United States, like every society in the world, remains a patriarchy: they are ruled by men. That is not just because every country (except Rwanda) has a majority-male national parliament, and it is despite the handful of countries with women heads of state. It is a systemic characteristic that combines dynamics at the level of the family, the economy, the culture and the political arena.

Top political and economic leaders are the low-hanging fruit of patriarchy statistics. But they probably are in the end the most important—the telling pattern is that the higher you look, the maler it gets. If a society really had a stable, female-dominated power structure for an extended period of time even I would eventually question whether it was really still a patriarchy.

In my own area of research things are messier, because families and workplaces differ so much and power is usually jointly held. But I’m confident in describing American families as mostly patriarchal.

Maybe the most basic indicator is the apparently quaint custom of wives assuming their husbands’ names. This hasn’t generated much feminist controversy lately. But to an anthropologist from another planet, this patrilineality would be a major signal that American families are male-dominated.

Among U.S.-born married women, only 6 percent had a surname that differed from their husband’s in 2004 (it was not until the 1970s that married women could even function legally using their “maiden” names). Among the youngest women the rate is higher, so there is a clear pattern of change—but no end to the tradition in sight.

Of course, the proportion of people getting married has fallen, and the number of children born to non-married parents has risen. Single parenthood—and the fact that this usually means single motherhood—reflects both women’s growing independence and the burdens of care that fall on them (another piece of the patriarchal puzzle). This is one of many very important changes. But they don’t add up to a non-patriarchal society.

Differences that matter

The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich—in a 1976 essay she might or might not like to be reminded of—urged feminists to acknowledge distinctions that matter rather than tar everything with the simplistic brush of “patriarchy.” Using China as an example, she wrote:

There is a difference between a society in which sexism is expressed in the form of female infanticide and a society in which sexism takes the form of unequal representation on the Central Committee. And the difference is worth dying for.

China presents an extreme case, with an extremely harsh patriarchy that was fundamentally transformed—into a different sort of patriarchy. By the late 1970s female infanticide (as well asfootbinding) had indeed been all but eradicated, which represented a tremendous improvement for women, saving millions of lives. Since the advent of the one-child policy in the 1980s, however, female infanticide has given way to sex-selective abortion (and female representation on the ruling committees has dropped), representing an important transformation. Calling China a “patriarchy” is true, but by itself doesn’t much help explain the pattern of and prospects for change.

Like Ehrenreich, I think we need to look at the variations to understand the systemic features of our society. Men losing out to women in national elections is an important one. Given the choice between two male-dominated parties with platforms that don’t differ fundamentally on the biggest economic issues despite wide differences in social policy, women voters (along with blacks, Latinos and the poor) bested men and got their way. I wouldn’t minimize that (more than I just did), or ignore the scale and direction of change. The American patriarchy has weakened.

I expect some readers will go right to their favorite statistics or personal experiences in order to challenge my description of our society as patriarchal. In that tit-for-tat, men leading the vast majority of the most powerful institutions, and that American families usually follow the male line, become just another couple of data points. But they shouldn’t be, because some facts are more important than others.

Obama Top Chef Romney Founding Fathers

If you don’t collect data on individual web users, and don’t have a big-data budget, you can still learn a lot about how people voted in this presidential election from some creative probing of the Google Correlate database. The power of the tool is in uploading your own data (such as vote tallies) to see what searches mirror your target pattern.

For example, the map on the left is what I uploaded: the ratio of Obama votes to Romney votes in each state, as of Thursday morning. The map on the right, from Google, is the relative frequency of searches for “top chef.” The two patterns have a correlation of .88 on a scale of 0 to 1.

Maybe it’s a complete coincidence that Michelle Obama appeared on a Top Chef program earlier this year. But out of the 100 Google searches that most closely match that vote pattern, eight are aboutTop Chef. Others on the list include “spliff” (never heard of it), “mos def” and various reggae artists, as well as “itchiness.”

On the other hand, searches for “founding fathers quotes” follow the Romney/Obama ratio just as closely:

Most of the searches on the top-100 Romney-state list (all correlated about the same .84) are about simple, non-obscene pleasures, such as “clean jokes,” “clean funny jokes,” “funny commercials”; and home-schooling materials, like “flag clipart,” “in god we still trust,” and “printable scrapbook.” After the kids are in bed, though, someone is Googling “hot cheerleader,” before quickly toggling back over to “sean hannity” when he hears mom coming up the stairs.

Demography and destiny for voters

Posted on TheAtlantic.com as Why Demographics Can’t Fully Predict How People Vote

Two-thirds of single women voted for Obama, according to the exit polls taken on the day of the election. On the other hand, the majority—53 percent—of married women went for Romney. With marriage on the decline, figured one pundit,

If [Republicans] are unable to attract the support of more unmarried female voters in future elections, they could face years in the political wilderness.

And Fox News reported:

Marital status was a more significant factor than gender this year. Women, a traditional Democratic voting group, backed Obama by 11 points—about the same as by 13 points in 2008. Even so, married women backed Romney by 7 points (an improvement from McCain’s +3 showing). Men backed Romney (52-45 percent), and married men backed him by an even wider margin (60-38 percent).

But these conclusions are overdrawn, because “unmarried women” are a data category more than a lived social group. Most people who aren’t married will get married. And people who are likely not to get married—such as poor people with fewer marriage prospects—tend to have traditional viewsabout marriage anyway. So what distinguishes unmarried women? Birth control is a common explanation. But almost everyone thinks birth control is okay these days, and although single women might be more worried about access, that’s because they’re less likely to have health insurance. In short, even if some women do have a strong identity as members of the single-women category, most unmarried women are just passing through.

What is grouping good for?

From the large sample interviewed by the major media’s exit polling consortium, we can see that simple demography can make some very strong predictions. At the extreme, with just two data points—race and gender—we can guess how a person voted 96 percent of the time, if she’s a black woman.

Source: From exit poll breakdowns based on polling by Edison Research.

But that doesn’t tell us why people voted the way they did. On average, for example, black women also have lower incomes, are younger, and have completed less education than whites—and they have worse healthcare.

Source: National Health Interview Survey.

So did black women vote for Obama because they are proud of him as a black man and identify with his personal experience, or because his policies are more beneficial for them as workers, concerned family members, or medical patients?

And the closer a group gets to the 50/50 middle of the odds breakdown, the harder it is to guess what’s going on from the demographics. When the plane I was on Tuesday night landed, I turned on my iPhone to see who had won Ohio. Waiting for the page to load, I looked around and saw a guy a few rows back, smiling and giving me a thumbs up. He must have noticed I’m a white man, almost two-thirds of whom went for Romney. But did he think I was Jewish, or gay? Maybe it was my rumpled casual-business wear, shaggy hair, and dead-giveaway academic backpack. Or my facial expression.

In real life, even with people we don’t know personally, the cues we get from interactions and behavior explain more than simple demographics, although they all go into the quick mix of judgments we are forced to form on short notice throughout the day. In statistical terms, the basic demographic variables leave a lot of variance unexplained.

These demographic categories are useful for prediction at the group level, as punditry has proved. Show me a room full of randomly-chosen Mormons and I can guess that 78 percent of them voted for Romney. But give me 30 seconds with one of them personally and I might figure out whether she is the one who didn’t.

This paradox is why the “big data” people were so central to the campaigns. If you can get someone to give you a few key bits of information—even just a zip code—and then track them as they wander around the web after leaving your site, your models can be much more powerful than the demographics alone. It’s the equivalent of sizing up someone by their shoes, haircut, and the flight they’re on, rather than just sex and race.

Have Obama haters lost traction?

Maybe it’s because Donald Trump isn’t really a true hero to anti-socialist, anti-Muslim, racist Americans.

For whatever reason, there has been a real slump in the number of people typing “obama gun” (will he take our guns away?), “obama muslim” (the idea used to run at about 20%), “obama socialist” (the republic “hangs in the balance“), and “obama citizen” (thank you, Snopes) into the Google search box since the 2008 election.

Here’s the Google trend (and the search link):

We don’t know how much these fears, versus other concerns, will affect votes against him this year, although there have been some good efforts to track the effects of anti-Black racism on his vote tally.

Naturally, not everyone who Googles these things believes the underlying stories or myths. But it seems likely they either believe them, are considering them, heard someone repeat them, or are arguing with someone who believes them, etc. So I’m guessing – just guessing – that these trends track those beliefs.

But maybe four years of Obama as an actual president has softened up the hard-line hatred in some quarters. What do you think?

Jobs and repeals

Couldn’t resist this:

Sources: Current Employment Statistics (seasonally adjusted); Washington Post 2 Chambers blog.

Note: The blog is nonpartisan.

Health inequality recap

On SCOTUS’s ACA D-Day, here is a quick recap of some health inequality posts.

Percentage of Adults Aged 18-64 Who Did Not Get Needed Prescription Drugs Because of Cost, by Poverty Status: National Health Interview Survey, 1999-2010

From 1,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer over 11 years in Washington, D.C.: The number of days between the discovery of an anomaly and the diagnosis, by race/ethnicity and insurance status.

 

Children with asthma are almost twice as likely as all children to be below the poverty line, and less than half as likely to live at 4-times the poverty line or higher.

 

All groups of countries are showing improvement in maternal mortality rates except the U.S.

The U.S. lags seriously behind almost all European countries on infant mortality (most of which is caused by preterm births, the result of women’s poor health).

Estimated Percentage of Persons Who Delayed Seeking or Did Not Receive Medical Care During the Preceding Year Because of Cost, by Respondent-Assessed Health Status

OK, that’s enough! You can see all the health care related posts here.

Sell that (stale) narrative [off topic]

Tonight in the Washington Post I read, with a sense of relief:

But then I realized I’d been sold this focus story before:

• April 4, 2012: “Mr. Romney looked beyond the Republican primary fight and focused his anger exclusively on Mr. Obama.” –New York Times
• March 31, 2012: “Obama, Romney shift focus to general election” –Washington Post
• Feb. 7, 2012: “Campaigning in Grand Junction, Colo., Romney kept his focus on Obama” –L.A. Times
• January 3, 2012: “[Romney] has stayed focused primarily on Obama and the November general election.” –USA Today
• August 18, 2011: “Romney keeps focus on Obama, not Perry” –International Herald Tribune
• June 14, 2011: “Romney was able to keep his focus on Obama in large part because the others decided not to go after him.” –Washington Post

What women own: U.S. business edition

The other day President Obama celebrated women owning businesses, as well as the problems they face:

More women are also choosing to strike out on their own.  Today, nearly 30 percent of small business owners are women.  Their businesses generate $1.2 trillion last year. But they’re less likely to get the loans that they need to start up, or expand or to hire — which means they often have to depend on credit cards and the mounting debt that comes with them.

Those figures come from data I already was looking at on the question of what women own globally. Most recently, I took a shot at home ownership, with the surprising (to me) finding that women own (or are buying) more homes than men in America. No such luck with business ownership.

Women do own 29% of businesses, as of the Census Bureau’s 2007 Survey of Business Owners. But their share of business receipts — the total size of businesses, as measured by income — is much less: just 4%.

Source: My calculations from the Survey of Business Owners.

The survey defines ownership based on 51% of stock or equity.  So of course there are lots of women with partial ownership of all those other businesses. But the vast majority of businesses in the survey are tiny, with few or no employees. As a measure of wealth, then, owning a business is a bad indicator. Plenty of these people would make more money using their skills working for someone else, if they could (and investing their money in stocks).

Unsurprisingly, there is a distinct pattern of ownership by industry — that is, what the businesses produce. The only industry in which women own a majority of businesses is health care and social assistance, although they are also close in education (think daycare services):

Source: My calculations from the Survey of Business Owners.

Obama went on:

Just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.  Fewer than 20 percent of the seats in Congress are occupied by women.  Is it possible that Congress would get more done if there were more women in Congress?  (Laughter and applause.)  … I think it’s fair to say.  That is almost guaranteed.  (Laughter.)

For some reason this is often a laugh line. As in, “Am I right? Just ask my wife!”

Anyway, I would hate to judge Congressional effectiveness by the quantity of work done, and the evidence that women in Congress do get more done is not clear. But in the world of business our own research (here and here), as well as newer work, does suggest that U.S. women in workplace management positions increase the gender equality around them.

Gingrich’s anti-Semitic code words, too

New Gingrich has used racist code words for a long time, before the current food stamp and no-work-ethic mantras. Now he’s onto something new with a “Saul Alinsky radical” drumbeat. Here he is from last night in South Carolina:

The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky [chants of "USA! USA!"] … We are going to argue American exceptionalism, the American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American federalist papers; the founding fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. He draws his from Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers and people who don’t like the classical America.

Here he is in a December debate on Fox:

Who is Saul Alinsky? And what kind of first name is “Saul,” anyway? Jewish. And who Googles “alinsky”? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that whoever they are, they live in the same states as people who Google “obama citizenship” at a correlation of .73:

Some other searches that have the highest correlation  with “Alinsky” across states (all .68 or better):

• charles krauthammer
• conservative blogs
• drudge
• drudgereport.com
• fairness doctrine
• greta van susteren
• health care bill text
• hr 1388
• mccain for president
• national firearms act
• natural born citizen
• presidential order
• trilateral commission

My guess is that hardly anyone in Gingrich’s intended audience knows who Saul Alinsky is. But I think he’s giving them enough information to know what kind of person he is. In December he put it this way:

…if you look at his background, he’s really a lot more Saul Alinsky and radicalism than he is anything to do with the traditional American models.

FYI, this morning someone removed the description of Alinsky as Jewish from the opening line of his Wikipedia entry, which was added in December.