Glass Ceilings in Statehouses in the Northeast The industrial Northeast enjoys a reputation as a cradle of liberalism, a region that voted overwhelmingly for America’s first black president, started the push on same-sex marriage rights and can reliably be found at the forefront of causes for equality. But there is a notable gap: The Democratic Party has yet to elect a female governor inPennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island or Massachusetts.
Even this year, with women running for governor in three of those states, it is uncertain that any of them will break the pattern. The Democratic Party in each state is rooted in urban machine politics and unions, both of which have been traditionally male dominated. And there have been fewer opportunities in those states for women to acquire executive experience in the state and local offices that are traditional steppingstones to running for governor, or to hold the levers of power in political organizations. (Philadelphia, New York and Boston have never elected female mayors.)
Women have become the crucial element of the Democratic coalition in the era of President Obama, propelling both his victories and those of many others in the party, but there is just one female Democratic governor in America today — Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. It is different in the Senate, where a record 16 Democratic women hold office. The difference, several analysts said, is that senators are seen as advocates working in a collective body, while governors are stand-alone executives — and that voters are simply more comfortable with women in the first category than the second.
But some prominent women concede that a major challenge is one of their own making. “The biggest issue is really getting women to run,” observed former Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, a Democrat, saying some women see high-profile campaigns as “dipping their toes in waters full of piranhas.”
Mothers’ Thankless Work Building an Economy for the Rest of Us While it merely aims to inspire schmaltzy feelings about the sacrifice our mothers make for us, it also highlights the very real, backbreaking, time-consuming work it takes to be a parent.
Moms are doing hard work outside the home, too. A recent report found that if women hadn’t flooded the workforce between the late 1970s and 2000s, economic output would be about 11 percent smaller. While women generally increased their hours during that time, mothers really gave it their all. The typical mom increased the number of hours she worked each year outside of the home by 150 percent between 1979 and 2000, and the share of mothers working full time, year round went from less than 30 percent to 46 percent by 2007. Yet today’s mothers spend more time on childcare than the mothers of 1965.
During that time period from the late 1970s to the 2000s, while women were increasing their work hours, other developed countries were passing family-friendly policies like paid family leave and affordable childcare. The United States, on the other hand, is one of just five countries across the entire globe that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave. The country ranks at number twenty-one among developed countries for the percentage of GDP spent on preschool, and spending on childcare assistance has hit a decade low.
Single Moms’ Job Loss May Have Long Term Impact on Kids Children’s education and long-term mental health often seem to suffer, research shows.
These children are less likely to graduate from high school and college, and more likely to develop depression, according to the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers.
The researchers analyzed 30 years of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in order to compare outcomes among children of single mothers who were laid off before their children were 17 years old, and children whose mothers did not lose their jobs.
The children of mothers who were laid off were 15 percent less likely to finish high school, 24 percent less likely to attend college and 33 percent less likely to graduate from college than children of mothers who kept their jobs, the findings showed.
Also, by the time they reached their late 20s, children of mothers who had been laid off were much more likely to have symptoms of depression, according to the study published in the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology.
The risks of harmful effects were greatest among children who were ages 12 to 17 when their mothers lost their jobs. These children were 40 percent less likely to graduate from high school, 25 percent less likely to attend college and 45 percent less likely to graduate from college than children whose mothers remained employed.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren: I Can’t Get There Tomorrow, But I Can Come on Thursday The reason I’m here today as a United States Senator is because my Aunt Bee rescued me on that Thursday in 1979. I know how lucky I was, because so many working moms don’t have a family member who can rush in and save the day.
In fact, the deck has been stacked against working moms for years. And even though women are the main breadwinners, or joint breadwinners, in two-thirds of the families across the country, it’s only getting worse.
Why many retired women live in poverty Gender inequality doesn’t end at the workplace. For many women, the gender gap haunts them well into their retirement years, when far more women find themselves living in poverty.
In fact, women are almost twice as likely as men to live below the poverty line during retirement, with single and minority women struggling the most (see chart).
On average, women 65 years and older rely on a median income of around $16,000 a year — roughly $11,000 less than men of the same age, according to a Congressional analysis of Census data. And many elderly women rely exclusively on Social Security benefits.
The problem: Women earn — and save — less over their lifetimes than men, leaving them with a smaller nest egg. And because they tend to live longer, that savings has to last longer, too.
On average, women work 12 years less than men do over the course of their careers, according to the AARP Public Policy Institute.
A major reason: Women are more likely to take time off work to raise kids or to care for a sick spouse or aging parents.
The Social Security program was designed to support married couples where one spouse was the breadwinner. Yet today, a growing number of women are getting married later in life, remaining single or have gotten divorced, and many more women are earning their own benefits in the workforce.
As a result, far fewer women receive spousal benefits based on their husband’s work history, according to a Government Accountability Office report. That’s good news for women who have earned a lot over the years, but bad news for women whose lifetime earnings are low.
On average, women still receive Social Security benefits that are thousands of dollars less annually than benefits that men receive, according to the Social Security Administration.
Two potent issues in NY state races This fall, gender could be the determining divide in New York State. Women have become an enduring majority of the New York State electorate. In both 2010 and 2012, exit polls revealed that women cast 53 percent of the statewide vote.
New York’s female majority will be asking where candidates stand on Cuomo’s Women’s Equality Act.
Valerie Jarrett: A 21st Century Workplace for Today’s Working Families Every day in America, there are single moms struggling to take sick children to doctors’ appointments because missing work isn’t an option. Working dads find themselves straining to focus at work, because their employer doesn’t provide paternity leave that would enable them to contribute at home and bond with their new babies. Young women are questioning their ability to thrive in the workplace as they try to balance the needs of their families with their responsibilities at work.
Nearly half of America’s workforce is now comprised of women, and three-fourths of households are headed by a working single parent, or two working parents. Still, our workplaces have yet to catch up by implementing policies which empower women, and provide flexibility for parents.
Female CEOs More Likely to Get Fired A survey confirms that top businesswomen work on the edge of a glass cliff.
Researchers at Strategy&, formerly known as Booz & Company, found that women are forced out of chief executive positions more than a third of the time, while only a quarter of men in similar positions suffer the same fate.
According to the authors of the 2013 Chief Executive Study, women’ higher rate of failure is not because they are placed in more challenging roles or set up to fail. The research looked at CEO turnover over the past decade at the top of the world’s 2,500 largest public companies and found that, while women represent only 3% of new CEOs, they are often forced out of top jobs sooner.
The report finds that men and women are broadly comparable in every area –except one: “Women are more often outsiders,” says co-author Ken Favaro. “So they’re more vulnerable. They don’t know the organisation. They can’t diagnose the problems as quickly and don’t understand the culture or how to get it to work for them – and they aren’t necessarily given more time to deliver.”
Top editor at the New York Times is leaving In a move that stunned the media world, the New York Times announced Wednesday that it was replacing executive editor Jill Abramson with her No. 2 in the newsroom, Dean Baquet. Abramson was the first female executive editor of The New York Times. Baquet is its first African American editor.
Why Jill Abramson Was Fired Ken Auletta, The New Yorker writes: “Abramson discovered that her pay and her
pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs.”
Times Seeks to Reassure Staff After Editor’s Ouster Employees were told that the dismissal of Jill Abramson, the executive editor, was not about sexism or pay disparity.
As Jill Abramson exits the NY Times, a look at how women are faring in newsrooms The departure of Jill Abramson marked an abrupt end to the reign of the first woman to run The New York Times, a role that made her a journalistic pioneer in her own right. Her dismissal comes during the same week as the retirement of Barbara Walters, who broke a glass ceiling at ABC in 1976 by becoming the first woman to sit at a network anchor desk. Both events have prompted a debate about the role of women in American journalism and how much—or how little—has changed over the years.
Our data analysis finds that overall there has been little significant change in the share of women newsroom employees and news managers in recent years. Female journalists are generally paid less than their male counterparts, an issue that may have played a role in Abramson’s exit, according to some media accounts, although the New York Times has denied that.
In the past 15 years, the percentage of women who work in newspaper newsrooms has barely budged. Women made up 36% of all newspaper staff in 2012 (the last year for which data are available), nearly unchanged from 37% in 1998, according to The American Society of News Editors’ annual census. The percentage of women working in local radio news grew from 22% in 2003 to 34% in 2012, according to RTDNA. During this period, however, the percentage of female general managers remained virtually flat, inching up from 13% to 14%. (The percentage of female GM’s peaked at 25% in 2007 and has steadily declined since then.) The number of women working as local radio news directors has also dropped—from 26% in 2003 to 21% in 2012.
Jill Abramson: Why the New York Times ousted its first female top editor Given the power of Abramson’s position and her relatively brief tenure, many observers began to raise the elusive specter of sexism and the so-called “glass cliff” faced by women in high places. During the past 10 years, nearly 4 out of 10 top female executives in the world’s biggest companies have been fired, while only 27 percent of their male counterparts lost their top-level jobs, according to a study of the world’s 2,500 biggest companies by Strategy&, a global consultant.
Noting Sulzberger’s reported issues with Abramson’s leadership style, rather than her accomplishments or decisions, many women have pointed out how difficult it is for women to express the same kind of aggressive – and abrasive – traits as ambitious male leaders.
“I think that people need to remember that women who have made it to the top have gotten there because of certain qualities,” says Lisa Maatz, vice president of government relations at the American Association of University Women in Washington. “They have had to be better, faster, stronger, more brash, more gruff, however you want to say it, in order to get that far.”
“We have a very special name for women like that in our culture,” she continues. “That’s not to say that that’s not a prickly or difficult person to work with, but we certainly don’t seem to have a problem working with men who are like that. It’s women that we penalize when they get into these upper echelon positions.”
Abramson’s firing, too, comes during a time when equal pay for female employees has once again become a national issue. In April, Senate Republicans killed an equal-pay bill in election year maneuverings, and President Obama signed two executive orders last month, one forbidding federal contractors from retaliating against employees who inquire about their pay, and the other requiring federal contractors to give the US Labor Department demographic information about how they pay their employees.
The Times rejected the suggestion that she was underpaid, however. “Jill’s total compensation as executive editor was not less than Bill Keller’s, so that is just incorrect,” said New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy to Politico on Wednesday. “Her pension benefit, like all Times employees, is based on her years of service and compensation. The pension benefit was frozen in 2009.”
Indeed, on Thursday, a number of young female staffers at the Times told Salon how symbolically important Abramson’s success was for their own career prospects, especially since she had been bringing more women into leadership positions at the paper.
“Women in such positions feel pressure about the fact that they are, in some respects, the trial for all women,” says Ms. Maatz at the AAUW. “That if somehow they don’t do well, their company is less likely to promote other women – and of course women leaders care about that.”
Jill Abramson’s Ouster Shows Women We Have to Be Better than Good
The fury of women journalists who identify with Abramson stems from what we know: that excellent performances are not enough. Women must be completely different from the men they replace (or who replace them), apparently – they must adapt to the power they are briefly allowed to hold without transgressing the gender roles they aren’t allowed to escape.
She broke the clubhouse rules. She never became that mythical female boss who is assertive but not aggressive, nurturing but not mothering, not so strong that it bothers the men, but never weak like a woman.
The best way to close the gender pay gap is to make salaries public Regardless of exactly what happened at the New York Times, the uproar is a reminder of the consequences of keeping pay a secret, especially at a high level. More broadly, opaque pay—especially in the executive suite—might also contribute to the gender gap because it allows companies to pay different salaries without having to justify them. Making pay more transparent won’t close the gap on its own, but it puts a burden on companies to at least explain any disparity, and begin to resolve them.
Radical transparency, as practiced by certain startups, isn’t a likely solution at the New York Times. But an executive shouldn’t have to find out about a pay gap from a third party.
Despite the pay gap, women in the US now have as much job security as men American women may still be underpaid, but they now have similar job security to men.
In 1983, just 4.9% of women had more than 20 years of tenure at their job compared to 12.4% of men. But by 2012 these rates converged—10.10% of women and 11.9% of men had been in their jobs for more than 20 years.
Up until the recession, long tenure was becoming less common for men but much more common for women. The rates are now similar across genders. Male tenure may be falling and women’s is increasing, but women will probably not overtake men.
It’s remarkable that the gender wage gap started to narrow staring in the late 1970s. But it’s leveled off and hasn’t gotten much smaller since the mid-1990s. But during the same period, the tenure gap did continue to narrow—it’s only flattened since the recession. We expect seniority to translate into higher pay, but the fact that the tenure gap narrowed while the pay gap hasn’t suggests that it’s still not the case for women.
Clarkson University alumni to participate in salary study Clarkson University alumni will be part of a pilot program launched by PayScale, which specializes in employee compensation data, to help universities gain insight into the work experiences of their graduates.
As part of the project, PayScale will conduct a survey of alumni on behalf of several inaugural customers for its Alumni Analytics program, including Clarkson. Each school will receive a report on the careers of its alumni.
The survey will be sent to more than 188,000 college graduates who hail from the inaugural schools in the pilot project.
The reports will include information on factors such as alumni compensation, job satisfaction and job stress, and will include gender, degree level, major, job title and various other data.
Alumni will receive a free personalized salary report that shows how they are paid competitive to the market. Personally identifiable information will be kept separate from the results shared with the schools. PayScale can provide comparable data for similar schools
Fast-Food Protests Spread Overseas Workers are planning strikes in 150 cities in the United States on Thursday, and they will be backed up by protests in 30 countries. Over the last decade as American labor unions have declined in membership and power, they have increasingly turned to unions in Europe and Asia to help pressure companies overseas to stop battling organizing drives at their United States units. And now the fast-food movement, underwritten by the Service Employees International Union, is embracing a similar strategy as it struggles to gain influence with the fast-food giants.
Walmart and Contractor Settle $21 Million Wage Theft Suit, Days After Obama Praises Penny-Pinching Retailer On Wednesday, workers at three California warehouses used by Wal-Mart agreed to settle a wage theft lawsuit by accepting a $21 million settlement. The workers had sued Wal-Mart and Schneider Logistics, an outside company that owned and ran the warehouses. Schneider will pay the entire settlement. The lawsuit alleged that workers were often paid less than minimum wage, with no required breaks or overtime compensation.
Labs Are Told to Start Including a Neglected Variable: Females From sleeping pills to statins, women have been blindsided by side effects and dosage miscalculations that were not discovered until after the product hit the market.
Now the National Institutes of Health says that this routine gender bias in basic research must end.
Health law gives pregnant women new options The health care law has opened up an unusual opportunity for some mothers-to-be to save on medical bills for childbirth.
Lower-income women who signed up for a private policy in the new insurance exchanges will have access to additional coverage from their state’s Medicaid program if they get pregnant. Some women could save hundreds of dollars on their share of hospital and doctor bills.
Medicaid already pays for nearly half of U.S. births, but this would create a way for the safety-net program to supplement private insurance for many expectant mothers.
The odds you’ll join the ranks of the long-term unemployed Long-term unemployment is a terrifying trap that, even in the best of times, is difficult to escape. And it’s a trap that you can get stuck in for no reason other than bad luck.
Today, there are still almost 3.5 million people who have been out of work for six months or longer and are looking for work.
Long-term unemployment isn’t a story about lazy people choosing to live on the dole instead of getting a job. It’s a story about people who want a job not being able to find one, because there aren’t enough of them—and then falling to the back of the jobs line. That is, it’s a story about macroeconomic bad luck.
Nobody should lose their career because they lost their job at a bad time.
What I Realized When I Finally Decided to Sign Up for Food Stamps When the object of my pity — the poor ‘them’ — suddenly became me.
The people in that waiting room could have been my neighbors or co-workers. They were people I interact with every day. One of them I recognized as an ex-employee of one of my clients who is now out of business. These were not the dregs of society looking for a handout. These were working people, just like me, who just needed some help. This was a shocking reminder of what has become of the middle class.
They say you can’t make good decisions if you’re hungry. While I never got to that, making decisions when you are worried about going hungry is just as bad.