Randy Albelda has an interesting piece over at The Boston Globe questioning if Obama's proposed stimulus package is sexist. Her argument:
Jobs in construction and many of those that come with green investment often pay decent wages with benefits. But they are overwhelmingly held by men. Outside of trickle-around effects, this stimulus package will not create jobs for women in any close proportion to the numbers that will be unemployed....Caring for those who cannot care for themselves, healthcare, and primary education are the very foundation of a civil society. Investing in these outcomes are as vital to our long-term economic health as airports, highways, wind turbines, and energy-retrofitted buildings. On the employment side, women are disproportionately employed in these sectors, so any stimulus package directed toward them would boost the employment prospects of women at all levels of the wage scale.
I see Albelda's point. Historically, the jobs she mentions have been gendered.
But we must not lose sight of the fact that caretaking, teaching, and wellness roles have been traditionally both imposed and embraced by women. Sometimes women have authentically been drawn to these fields; I certainly have female friends who love teaching, social work, and other caretaking professions. But some have been pressured into these professions along with traditional gender roles. When my grandmother was growing up, she could be either a teacher or a nurse. When my mom was growing up, she thought she might be a secretary because she heard if you got your work done really fast, you could read all day. Although young women today rarely have the same kind of social conscription when it comes to their career choices, many are still socialized to believe that a caretaking role in the most virtuous and congruent with their gender.
So, yes Albelda, let's pressure Obama to create lots of jobs in the educational and healthcare fields, but let's ask that his team do it, not because traditionally gendered jobs will continue perpetually to fall into "dude jobs" and "lady jobs," but because caretaking is valued as much as construction. And further, let's continue to support efforts like Men Teach and Non Traditional Employment for Women, that encourage both men and women to break out of traditional gender roles and follow their true calling.
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If we're to have another "New Deal" come about the money should be spent on infrastructure. To me this means education (including educating our populace) and construction of public works.
And frankly if women didn't work any education jobs or any construction jobs or any other sort of field which could be considered an infrastructure type field I would not feel strongly that moneys should be diverted away from long term stability/prosperity building projects just to address that inequity.
Gender division in the workplace is a serious issue, but so is the strong potential for economic collapse. Any portioning out of moneys should disregard gender/ethnic and whatever other kind of politics and focus entirely on how that money will pay off in the long/middle run; because we're not investing money we're spending debt. So there has to be a foremost thought on how each dollar will go toward repaying its self and generating either revenue or lessening national overhead (like dependency on foreign products such as material goods and energy).
I think it's unfair to say that Obama's stimulus package is sexist. It implies that he consciously chose to stimulate "male" industries as opposed to "female" industries. In my opinion it's a coincidence that the "male" industries are the ones that people think need the help in order to help the economy as a whole.
Caretaking and education have always been neglected (and probably will continue to be neglected), even when we weren't in a recession. Although they are vital jobs, our culture places more monetary value on other things. Making more teaching jobs will not help the U.S. economy pick up again, because there is no revenue to be had from public education. The businesses that will help the economy are the ones that can bring money back into the system and create more jobs that will bring MORE money back into the system. The package's flaws says more about our society's values over the last several years than about our government's sexism.
I think it's unfair to say that Obama's stimulus package is sexist. It implies that he consciously chose to stimulate "male" industries as opposed to "female" industries.
Sexism isn't always deliberate. Unconscious sexism is more dangerous than deliberate sexism for precisely the reason that people are unwilling to label it as such. Sexism should not get a pass, ever.
This is a great topic. I'm often irritated at the way people (still!) talk to little girls about what they want to be when they grow up. When my neice was 8 she told her teachers that she wanted to be a doctor or a kindergarten teacher. They raved and raved about how she was going to be a teacher! That pisses me off no end.
I agree that equal attention/funding should be given to both sectors of the economy, but assuming that this is just a "natural" division of labor and that women "freely" choose these lower paid jobs is unacceptable. When I was teaching at the alternative school we got funding for kids to attend the community college classes that weren't full after all the college kids registered. There were always openings in the CNA (Certified Nurse Assistant) courses, and in the Word/Excel and various math courses. The school counselor routinely offered the CNA courses to the girls and the computer skills/math classes to the boys. When I objected to this there was a lot of eye-rolling from the other faculty, but they refused to change this practice until I threatened to report it as a Title IX violation. Unfuckingbelievable!
On the upside, in this state (WY) our awesome governor put an education program in place that trains single moms for jobs in mining, oil and gas, and windmill technician positions, since these are the highest paid blue-collar jobs in this state. This program has been really successful and has made great progress in changing the attitudes of the men who work in the field. I think a lot more women would venture into these fields if they had this kind of support. It also helps if programs like these make it clear to the men who already work in the field that more women will be joining them, and that maintaining a hostile work environment simply isn't acceptable, since that's often one of the reasons why women hesitate to take these jobs.
Let's not forget http://aamn.org/ - the American
Assembly for Men in Nursing in organizations worth supporting.
Hannah, I agree completely. A part of the problem is that no one bothers to parse out the economic value of "caring professions" - in nursing, which constitutes the major portion of every hospital's budget, nursing care is billed with the room charge. This is justified by the fact that nursing care is not what hospitals are paid for; reimbursement is still driven by medical procedures and medical diagnoses, although many studies have shown these are poor indicators of actual cost.
A circular argument is used to rationalize the failure to measure the economic value of caring professions: "They don't pay for it, so we don't measure it, and we don't measure it, so they don't pay for it." Hidden within that justification is the assumption that caring professions are not worth what it would cost to measure their contributions to society.
I thought I'd heard at some point in the campaign that Obama might look into possible expansion of the healthcare industry, if there was money to spare and he ever got around to it.
I disagree with both Courtney and Logrus. Women contribute in a large portion to the economy. Assuming a stimulus package is the correct way to address the current economic problems, it should have provisions for all who contribute to the economy. That means specific attention to white collar, blue collar, and pink collar sectors.
There's already a nursing shortage, while construction workers have been idled since the housing market collapsed. My sister has a $50,000 job right out of nursing school, and my mother is recruiting nurses from all over the world. This is before 1. the baby boomers get really old and 2. Obama tries to expand healthcare access to virtually everyone. Should some consideration go into which industries are really in need of help (since apparently we're not considering health care reform help for medical workers), or do we have to distribute the stimulus money evenly over everyone to make sure it's fair?
I don't think they were trying to claim that women don't contribute to the economy. But it is true that as long as women are pressured/socialized into choosing lower-paid jobs, their contribution to the economy will be lower. That's just an unavoidable fact, but it doesn't reflect on the relative worth of women themselves.
Insulating buildings and installing solar panels are easy to learn and well-paid jobs. I've recently attended a Green Jobs rally and I don't know if this is typical but nearly half the people there were women. I actually got really excited because I realized that a lot of women would benefit from the stimulus package.
A friend of mine who lives in CA has always thought she'd be an artist, teacher or a gardener. Her friend who installs solar hot water heaters for a living told her they could always use help. She realized that she wanted to work for him, but expressed doubts about her ability to learn about circuits. I reminded her that it's not brain surgery and that anyone could learn to install hot water heaters. Now she's considering an apprenticeship to an electrician, a job that would give her independence and a sense of achievement every day. I hope that more women will make that jump and decide to help out where they might not have thought they could before.
Sometimes women have authentically been drawn to these fields; I certainly have female friends who love teaching, social work, and other caretaking professions. But some have been pressured into these professions along with traditional gender roles . . . Although young women today rarely have the same kind of social conscription when it comes to their career choices, many are still socialized to believe that a caretaking role in the most virtuous and congruent with their gender.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. First you say that some women have an authentic desire to work in fields traditionally held by women while other women are pressured, but then you say that some women are still socialized to take jobs traditionally held by women. But even the women you know who love teaching and social work might have been socialized to go into these fields. Loving your job doesn't mean going into that job wasn't influenced by our society.
Anyway, I was under the impression that Obama was planning to expand the green energy industry, education, and healthcare (I'm saying this as if all of these fields are mutually exclusive).
If you're going to look at it as a gender issue, why focus on the receiving side and not on the giving side, which is to say the fact that women would be disproportionately taxed to create these jobs? Or the fact that any government creation of jobs must necessarily be funded at the expense of other workers, which, if the recipients are disproportionately male, means that the harmed industries would be disproportionately female?
"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." We would be better off if we sought to reduce overall government spending instead of jealously fighting over who it should be spent on.
The working the non traditional job sounds great in theory. The reality is more like that shown in the movie "North Country".
I worked as a computer technician in the 1980s and even in the clean job of electronics and computers the sexism was brutal.
Now I work retail and it is kind of a perk of the slave gig to have other female co-workers instead of being the only woman in an all male environment.
The one thing that should be written into the stimulus package is that the office support for these construction jobs as well as the design, engineering and building of green energy technology has to be done in this country and not off-shored.
Factory work is more integrated when it comes to sex than is construction. Build it here.
So why should we settle for that? This kind of shit needs to change. I realize that it's intimidating at times to be the only woman in a context like that - I started out as an engineering major and was often the only female in classes of 250-400 students in my first three years as an undergrad. It was intimidating at times, but I was as good as or better than any of them. But hostile work environments are the kind of thing I was referring to in my earlier comment that must be addressed by both employers and the gov't to bring about change. It's not acceptable to just shrug our shoulders and conclude that it's "just the way it is" and continue with so many women working for lower pay.
Agreed. I hadn't thought that they would create dept to use non-US materials and other resources. That just worried me. I hope that they have the good sense to use as many American workers and products as possible for these projects! If they have to open factories in the US to make something that was previously manufactured in another country, then good.
At least at my work (I work at the USDA) most materials are made in the USA.
It's not a waste if it creates American jobs. Instead of sending money overseas, we would be keeping the money in our country where it can be taxed and spent. Plus, the more manufacturing jobs the better. I don't know about where you live but the only working class jobs around here are low pay, dangerous jobs as a farm hand or low pay service jobs that usually are only part time. There is no job security and little upward mobility. So, while buying goods overseas is cheaper in the short term, it is short-sighted and unwise in the long term. I would at least expect to have the government buy American, especially when the whole point of spending the money in the first place is to CREATE JOBS for Americans.
Every use of money represents a foregone alternative. If the government chooses to buy a more expensive domestic product/service over an imported one, then American taxpayers are worse off because they paid more and got less. The government could have used the difference elsewhere and got a better return, or left it in the hands of the taxpayers to invest. And, the foreign supplier is worse off because they lost business. And the foreign country is worse off. And so on.
There is nothing inherently good about manufacturing jobs. The tertiary sector can be just as profitable, if not more so, and makes up the largest chunk of GDP in developed countries.
I live in Canada, and 76% of our exports are purchased by the United States. So you can imagine how I'm not thrilled by this America-first talk. If it's put into action, it only encourages our own politicians to respond in kind against the USA, and make all of us even worse off.
I would expect government to buy whatever gives them the best value, like any rational actor ought to. On the other hand, if the objective is simply to create jobs, then we should pay people to run on treadmills to generate green energy. Same effect, but much simpler.
As an engineering student I can say that the same goes for BS while you're trying to get educated for these nontraditional fields. Its only my first year in the program and I've had so much WTF thrown in my face this its crazy.
This argument is, sadly, off the mark. The construction and "green" jobs Obama is trying to shore up may be "traditionally gendered," but they also happen to be highly cyclical sectors that are sensitive to economic conditions. The healthcare and education sectors, while certainly undervalued and underpaid, are far more stable vis-a-vis the business cycle (particularly education).
While gender and economic issues are undeniably linked in many ways, we should also know how to intelligently separate the gender issues from the economic ones. I agree that education and healthcare are the backbone of civil society, but that also means these demand different, more comprehensive solutions than a job stimulus package -- which is why fixing education and healthcare are rightly seen as separate issues from the current meltdown.
[If we want to focus on a sector that really does need immediate help and that also disproportionately affects women, it would be the service sector. This IS cyclical and is in serious pain right now.]
The right way to address the undervaluing of certain occupations is to fix the structural issues within those occupations. One example is by encouraging unionization of home health care workers. Another example is what Michelle Rhee is trying to do in the DC school system -- working around the teachers' union to offer six-figure salaries to good teachers. Yet another example is to fix a seriously broken health care system in which the only well-paying jobs for health care workers are in cosmetic surgery.
The bottom line (pun intended) is that a government stimulus package cannot fix gender pay disparities, particularly when the discrimination is happening within the same field. Government can help, but women have to meet it halfway by demanding the pay that their jobs are really worth.
This article is true as far as it goes, but how about working with the idea that women should be getting some of these jobs, and figuring out how to make that happen instead of just assuming that gender roles are natural, and the only way to give women opportunities is to expand teaching and nursing jobs? which is not to say that I disagree that we need substantially more value on both of those jobs, and more people doing it. We do, and I can only hope that it's part of Obama's health care plan. but really. nobody on a feminist site questions the gender essentialism in that piece?
Um, I did. See above.
i was really disappointed when my friends and family badgered me out of trying to find a construction job one summer in college. they were, probably rightly so, afraid for my safety in such an environment, but i just wanted to earn money doing something i loved. while i plan to work toward a sociology profession soon, i LOVE working with my hands and the house repair/building i did on service trips in high school were some of the best times of my life.
i do wish more girls would be encouraged to work towards "guy jobs" AND that more boys would be encouraged in the "girl jobs" direction.
I love working in construction too and used to work on my dad's projects over the summer. I read a survey of female construction workers a couple of years ago, and their rating of their job satisfaction was higher than male construction workers and of female workers in more traditionally female fields. One of the reasons they cited was the creativity involved and the satisfaction of being able to see the results of your work so concretely and (relatively) quickly. I can totally relate to that feeling.
InfamousQBert said: "i do wish more girls would be encouraged to work towards "guy jobs" AND that more boys would be encouraged in the "girl jobs" direction."
Well there is one thing I have to say about one of the great benefits of working with people whose careers violate the stereotypes about proper gendering for the job is that I've met whole lots of my fellow LGBT/T folks doing the same thing.
We've been front runners in breaking down the stereotypes.
I wrote the op-ed and there is only so much you can say in 500 words. I really appreciate reading the thoughtful comments posted here. It is a terrific forum (you wouldn't believe the comments left at the Boston Globe site). A few responses: First, a dollar of economic stimulus (paid for by borrowing) will have as much stimulatory impact -- at least theoretically -- if spend on building a bridge or taking care of a child. One question I tried to raise was that investing in a child or your mother's health may have as much long term value to society as building the bridge. I.e. we need both kinds of investments and as a nation we have underinvested in both.
Second, I would love to see more women in construction and in green jobs. Been there, tried that. There are fewer women in the trades now than in the late 1970s and early 1980s when there was a big push (and state funding) to train women in these jobs. I'm willing to try new things, but I agree strongly with Michelle36, we need to make "bad" jobs into "good" ones and the surest way is through unionization.
Finally, again Michelle36 correctly observes that the sectors I was saying could use some investment as a stimulus package are not as cyclically responsive (although I think recession will prove otherwise) and need investment all the time, not only as a stimulus. She is absolutely correct, but the need for continual investment is probably true of the other sectors. But, I make this argument for 2 important reasons. 1) I don't want to wait to make these investments -- it is too easy to say we need to stimulate the economy now so we have to put the other things off. 2) I want to reduce poverty and providing better education, affordable care (for children, disabled and elders), and assuring health care for all will help improve the lives of many, many low-income women.
First, a dollar of economic stimulus (paid for by borrowing) will have as much stimulatory impact -- at least theoretically -- if spend on building a bridge or taking care of a child.
You should be more explicit with what particular theory you're using when you make such claims. I suspect some flavor of Keynesianism, the same line of theory that got us into this mess in the first place.
I'm willing to try new things, but I agree strongly with Michelle36, we need to make "bad" jobs into "good" ones and the surest way is through unionization.
Nonsense. The only way to raise wages without unemployment is to increase the productivity of labor, which means accumulation of capital and technological improvement. It only appears otherwise because people pay attention to the rise in union-member wages, and ignore the reduced number of workers in that field and the increase costs of production.
Thanks so much for chiming in here GirlEconomist. It's great to have the original author's voice in the mix!
"A few responses: First, a dollar of economic stimulus (paid for by borrowing) will have as much stimulatory impact -- at least theoretically -- if spend on building a bridge or taking care of a child. One question I tried to raise was that investing in a child or your mother's health may have as much long term value to society as building the bridge. I.e. we need both kinds of investments and as a nation we have underinvested in both."
Besides, they're not even mutually exclusive!
For example, remember when that bridge collapsed between Minneapolis and St. Paul? According to http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/news/bridge.collapse/ , 13 people were killed including a mother and her daughter and hundreds more were injured. If more had been invested in I-35W and the bridge collapse had been prevented, it would have also been an investment in the health of these people.
I attended NEW and am now an apprentice electrician at Local 3 in NYC. I have to say that so far, choosing to enter the construction field has been very empowering. I love working with my hands and troubleshooting. Before I was in network engineering, which was male dominated, but not nearly on the same level as the construction industry. NEW gave me the basics that I needed to be ahead of the game. It is a great program & I highly recommend it for anyone in the NYC area thinking about going blue collar.
I think part of the problem with the construction trades is that most women don't think of it as an option even available to them. That and they are conditioned to think that they won't have the physical strength to do the job (false!). What would be great to see from the government is a campaign to help women see a career in construction as a viable option. This campaign could also work towards making the industry more friendly towards women as well (there is hostility within the workers' attitudes and with the lack of support for women-specific issues like pregnancy). If there is to be an explosion of public works in the future, it should also target women workers specifically.