Archive for the 'Working' Category

Work, family, culture, and success: some thoughts on Asian and Latino achievement

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 16, 2008
in Academia, Ethnicity, Pasadena City College and Working
. 10 Comments

In summer school, the gap between what I want to do and what I have time to do yawns particularly wide. I’m lecturing five hours a day four days a week, and that doesn’t count prep time. I’m not complaining, mind, just sayin’ that it makes it hard to get the blogging in that I would like. I’m trying to work up a longer post on feminist Christian sexual ethics, but that’s going to be delayed for a while.

Just a quick link to an interesting Times story this morning: Trying to Bridge the Grade Divide in L.A. Schools. Hector Becerra’s Column One offering explores the wide (and, some say, rapidly widening) success differential between Latino and Asian students in California high schools. Becerra visits Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles, a famous institution with a large percentage of both Asian and Hispanic students, and interviews both teachers and kids about the “achievement gap.” At Lincoln, Asians are 15% of the student body — and 50% of the enrollees in Advanced Placement classes. Virtually all of the students, regardless of race, come from working-class, first-generation immigrant families; socio-economics alone do little to account for the disparity.

Lots of familiar explanations crop up, with differing cultural expectations usually topping the list. Continue reading ‘Work, family, culture, and success: some thoughts on Asian and Latino achievement’

“I’m sorry, Mayor Eastwood isn’t in at the moment”: working night shift at City Hall in 1986

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 5, 2008
in Memories and Working
. 1 Comment

Just because, here’s a memory about working:

I’ve had far fewer jobs than most folks in their early forties. I’ve been teaching here at Pasadena City College since 1993, when I was 26. Before that, most of my paid jobs were in grad school at UCLA: editor, athletic tutor, teaching assistant, researcher. But I did work summer jobs during my undergrad years, and I found myself thinking this morning about what I did for eight weeks twenty-two years ago.

In late May 1986, after my freshman year at Berkeley, I moved back home to Carmel. Jobs in my hometown tend to be centered around the tourist industry, but for any number of reasons, I had a hard time finding a job waiting tables or working in a shop. Responding to an ad in the Monterey Herald, I took a position as a “night janitor” working for the Carmel by-the-Sea public works department.

The hours were very strange: 2:00AM to 10:00AM, Monday through Friday. It’s the only time in my life where I’ve worked such a schedule, and even now, twenty-one years later, I can remember how grueling it was. I was paid $5.25 an hour (well above the then minimum wage of $3.35), and I got to drive the department’s brand new Ford Aerostar around town. My job was to perform janitorial services at the City Hall and the library for the first four hours, and in the second four hours to assist the department’s senior maintenance supervisor with his work around town. Continue reading ‘“I’m sorry, Mayor Eastwood isn’t in at the moment”: working night shift at City Hall in 1986′

Refusing membership in the Boys’ Club: an answer to Derek about what feminist men can do

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 1, 2008
in Favorite Posts 2008, Male feminists, WAM 2008 and Working
. 64 Comments

The first session I went to at the WAM conference on Saturday afternoon was a panel discussion, chaired by the sublime Ann Friedman of Feministing, on women journalists confronting the “old boy’s network.” There weren’t many men in the session, but during the Q&A portion of the workshop, one young man asked an excellent question of the panelists: “What can male feminists do, especially those in the media, to confront the Old Boy’s Network?” It was a variation on the classic question that all well-intentioned men in the feminist movement ought to ask: “What is the most helpful thing I — as a man — can do?” The panelists gave some excellent answers about supporting female colleagues and introducing feminist themes into one’s own writing, but they left out, understandably, what I see as the single most important thing that any feminist man in a male-dominated field can do.

After the session, I went up to the young man and introduced myself. He’s Derek Warwick, an undergraduate women’s studies major from the University of Alberta in Edmonton (where my father taught, many years ago). Derek blogs at DoingFeminism. (I’ve been saying his name in my head, trying not to confuse him with the poet Derek Walcott.) I told Derek how delighted I was he asked the question, and told him that I hoped he would forgive the presumptuousness, but as an older male feminist, I thought there was one thing he really needed to hear in answer to his excellent query.

Male feminists must support women, of course. In the journalism world (which was the arena up for discussion on Saturday), that means standing in solidarity with women colleagues and fighting for the inclusion of feminist perspectives in all aspects of reporting. But I’m convinced that the single most important thing that feminist men can do to dismantle the Old Boys’ Network is both far more simple and far more difficult: refuse to join it.

Particularly for young white men working for older white men, the pressure to join the the Network can be both immense and subtle. All of us, as we age and climb whatever ladder it is we are climbing, look to mentor younger folks. The desire for a protege is a common one, and the classic model in the Network is for an older man to look for a younger version of himself — which in journalism, or academia, or law, may mean a middle or upper-middle class white guy in his twenties. Even those male supervisors who are ideologically sympathetic to feminism may find themselves more likely to support and nurture a young man with whom they feel that emotional affinity, that sense of themselves at a younger age. Resisting the “unearned privilege of the protege” is a very difficult thing to do. Continue reading ‘Refusing membership in the Boys’ Club: an answer to Derek about what feminist men can do’

Sex worker bodies, farm worker bodies: a musing on agriculture, porn, and cheap grace

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 7, 2007
in Class, Food, Money, Porn, Veganism and Working
. 35 Comments

In the midst of the latest round of debates over sex here in the progressive blogosphere, I was struck by BrownFemiPower’s post about the kinds of oppression we sometimes ignore in our eagerness to focus on pornography.

I’m very very *very* tired of how sex work is framed as a labor issue by many anti-pornography activists–they chronically insist that porn is the worst worst worst job ever because it hurts females.

I hear this logic, and all I can think is, “Really?”

I’ve known women who have had to work 12-15 (or more) hours a day in 100+ degree heat with no breaks for water and no place to pee (I was one of those women). I’ve known women who have had to work on their knees the entire 12-15 hour shift (or in a squatting position), with a bag that digs into their backs and can carry 20-25 pounds of vegetables or fruits. I’ve known women who can not kneel at mass because their knees are so shot from the hard labor they’ve done most of their lives. I’ve known women who have worked in the fields since they were five or six. I’ve seen pregnant women, elderly women, young girls, disabled women all forced to walk up to two miles (after 12 or 15 hour days) to get back to their cars so they can go home.

I know women are being exposed to some of the most dangerous chemicals known to mankind. I know young girls are working in fields rather than going to school because their mothers aren’t being paid enough for the job that they do. I know women are being locked up and only allowed to leave the farms for up to two hours a week. I know women are working for wages that have not increased in 27 years. I know women who go to company doctors after exposure to pesticide clouds are being told that they have ‘female problems’ (rather than pesticide poisoning). I know women are giving birth to babies that die because of pesticide exposure. I know women are out digging ditches 20 days after they give birth. I know women are being sexually harassed by field bosses. I know young girls are being sexually harassed by field bosses. I know 90% of the female farmworkers in California say that sexual intimidation and harassment is a major problem at their jobs. I know women refer(ed) to a field in California as the “field of panties” because so many women were raped there. I know women are being threatened with guns by their field bosses.

At BFP’s, these last two paragraphs are filled with links that document what’s going on. Continue reading ‘Sex worker bodies, farm worker bodies: a musing on agriculture, porn, and cheap grace’

The burden of being a change agent caught betwixt and between: a note to “Kendra” about women, the sciences, and grad school

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 16, 2007
in Age, Feminism, Science and Working
. 25 Comments

I got a long email from a woman I’ll call “Kendra”. Here’s some of it:

I’m writing you because I’d like to get your thoughts on a major frustration I’ve had for a while (if you have time or feel so compelled).

I’m a 32 year old graduate student in electrical engineering. I’ll be finishing my masters next spring, and then I know I want to get a PhD…

It really stinks being a woman who is pursuing an advanced degree in engineering (or physics, which was my undergraduate area). It is even worse as you get older. I have two very close friends, both of whom are women. However, I don’t see them often.

Most time is spent around my “peers”, who are often 10 years younger than myself and almost entirely male. Most guys that age seem a bit phobic of girls and women. Age-wise, I am as old or older than most of the junior faculty in the department. However, none of the faculty seem terribly interested in being friendly. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. If I walk into the lunchroom when the faculty are there, they often stop talking as long as I am there. I honestly can’t tell if it’s the fact that I’m “just a student” or if it’s because I’m female, or possibly both. Either way, I wish I could blend into the wall. It’s obvious that they know I’m there, but also as obvious that they have no desire to include me.

I also don’t have a terribly easy time relating to other people outside of school. I hate to say it, but it seems like the stereotype of the engineer without any social skills is true. So much of what I do is wrapped up in my work that I can’t seem to relate to most people effectively. Although I’m a social butterfly by engineering standards (probably too much so since I’m rather talkative once you get me going), but I am often perceived (especially by other women) as “showing off” simply by discussing things that interest me. The feeling I get is that it’s okay for men to be engineers and talk about that “technical stuff”, but not for women.

I really hate being in this position.

No matter which path I follow career-wise, I sense that I’m always going to be caught in this limbo where people don’t fully accept me as a peer because I am different. I’m either older, younger, female, married with kids, a student, (someday) faculty, what have you…and this cuts off a lot of options for friendships. It’s very isolating and makes me wonder what I am paying in order to have the career I’ve been trying to work toward for so long. I would hope that going someplace else may change some of that, but I’m really not sure.

Does this ever change? Once I have my PhD, will faculty magically start treating me like a peer? Or will other students distance themselves even more because I crossed that imaginary line?

I don’t have an easy answer for Kendra. My Ph.D. was in the humanities, and I went through a graduate program that was evenly divided between men and women who were almost all my chronological peers. We were a gossipy, emotionally entangled lot.

I had a good friend a few years ago who was a Caltech graduate student (I can’t remember exactly what she did. It had “materials” in the name). My friend was, like Kendra, in her early thirties and one of the only women in her program. She also felt isolated from both her peers and her professors. Her fellow graduate students either had obvious schoolboy crushes on her, or they ignored her, unsure of what to do with a woman in what they clearly thought of as “male space.” Her male professors tended to treat her with exaggerated formality, always civil and encouraging, but also a bit distant. She noticed that her chief supervisor regularly went out for beers with some of his male graduate students, but never invited her — out of fear, she suspected, that he might misinterpret an invitation as an inappropriate advance. She was never once sexually harassed — but she found the “walking on eggshells” treatment to be almost as frustrating.

We need to acknowledge that graduate school can be a terrifying business. Working on a Ph.D. in any field is frightening; no matter what your topic or your field, there’s always the fear that your research won’t pan out, that you’ll end up in a dead end, or — worst of all — you’ll discover at the last minute that some other grad student at another university just did their doctoral work on exactly the same thing, and finished a month before you did. Add to that the financial strain that graduate education almost invariably imposes, throw in some family responsibilities, and the whole thing can be fairly wretched. I spent years oscillating between intellectual elation and debilitating anxiety, between authentic cameraderie with my fellows and bitter competitiveness. It was a tough time, and I think it is almost certainly worse for women in male-dominated fields.

As for the questions Kendra asks, I can say that in my experience — and, anecdotally, in the experience of most of my fellow graduate students — things do change once you get the Ph.D. I was never especially close to my dissertation supervisor, though we certainly got along quite well. At the moment he signed my completed dissertation, with all my exams and research and writing done, he said to me just one word: “welcome.” Not “congratulations”, or “well done”, but “welcome.” I already had tenure here at Pasadena City College (even though I technically had only an MA), but in his eyes it seemed, getting the Ph.D. was a hurdle I had to get over in order to become his peer. Honestly, “welcome” was the word I most wanted to hear at that moment. It was the recognition not just of a significant accomplishment, but of belonging.

Of course, once you have the Ph.D. you cease to be a student like other students — even if you’re doing a post-doc somewhere rather than actually joining the professoriate. My friends in the sciences who are doing post-doctoral research (but not teaching, and not being paid as full-time academics) often do report feeling a bit “betwixt and between”. On the one hand, they’ve achieved the highest standard the western academy offers, and on the other, they’re not climbing the tenure ladder and they don’t yet have students of their own. Whatever your sex, whatever your age, it can be a rough time.

But in the end, things do get better. And in the sciences, they have started to get dramatically better for women. The percentage of women receiving advanced degrees in the hard sciences, mathematics, and engineering has climbed considerably in recent years. Caltech now is over 40% female, three times what it was just a quarter-century ago. At times, the continued obstacles all around us blind us to the happy reality that we have already come so far. And though women in science and engineering continue to experience the kind of treatment that Kendra writes about, that sense of isolation will decrease as more and more women like her continue to work for the Ph.D. and continue to take post-docs and tenure-track jobs.

I remember very well one thing my old friend from Caltech said to me: “Sometimes, when it gets really bad, I tell myself I’m taking this shit so other women who come after me won’t have to.” It’s hard to be a pioneer, and it’s hard to carry the burden of being a “change agent.” But sticking with it gives others the inspiration to follow in your footsteps. And as more and more women come into the sciences, as math and engineering departments cease to be all-male enclaves, the sense of isolation that “geek women” experience will inevitably diminish. And though that may not be much comfort to Kendra now, in the long run, I hope that it will be.

Final Summer Reprint: Young women’s dreams, choices, Yeats

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 25, 2007
in Feminism, Having children, Relationships and Working
. 31 Comments

I won’t be reprinting any more oldies again this summer, as a regular posting schedule resumes on Monday. Alas, the links in the post below no longer work.

This post originally appeared Friday, March 11, 2005.

Stephanie links to this article in yesterday’s Independent:  Desperate to be housewives: young women yearn for 1950s role as stay-at-home mums.   An excerpt:

Research into the attitudes of 1,500 women with an average age of 29
found that 61 per cent believe "domestic goddess" role models who
juggle top jobs with motherhood and jet-set social lives are
"unhelpful" and "irritating". More than two-thirds agree that the man
should be the main provider in a family, while 70 per cent do not want
to work as hard as their mother’s generation. On average, the women
questioned want to "settle down" with their partner by 30 and have
their first child a year later.

Vicki Shotbolt, deputy chief executive of the National Family and
Parenting Institute, said: "This is the generation of young women who
have seen the ‘have it all’ ethos up close and personal, and they have
realised that it doesn’t work.

"Their own mothers may have tried to juggle motherhood and careers,
and it may have been the children who feel they lost out … I think
women really are coming of age now, and are accepting that it is
virtually impossible to have it all."

Stephanie writes in response:

I would have to agree, it’s very hard to try and have it all. In some
ways, I think I may have given up on the dream myself. That is a
problem. But I think the either/or solution we’ve resigned ourselves to
seems more likely to breed resentment than anything else. I don’t see
much point in agreeing that the best way to organize society is for men
to be the breadwinners and women the childrearers. That just
potentially limits everyone to a lifetime of unfulfillment. I know from
experience that unhappy parents make lousy parents so I’d argue that
doesn’t do the kids much good either.

I’m always encouraged when folks start questioning false dichotomies, as Stephanie does here.  One important role feminists play in society is that of dreaming out loud; it’s vital that we have change agents questioning whether the given paradigm ought to be accepted as is.  And in terms of social policy, it’s clear that much can be done to make it possible for both men and women to better balance family and work obligations.

That said, the title of the article bugged me.  Obviously, it’s a riff on the TV show "Desperate Housewives."   But I see nothing in the article that says that these young women actually want to return to the "1950s." (For what it’s worth, I’m tired of both sides in the culture war dragging in the 1950s.  Conservatives need to stop idealizing it; progressives need to stop demonizing it.  It was one decade, folks, and a complex and interesting one at that.)  More to the point, why is it that we assume that the yearning for marriage and motherhood is somehow defective?   

Feminists are often tarred as "anti-family", a charge that is, in general absurd.  Most feminists desperately want to strengthen families by giving parents more time, more choices, more state and social support.  But it’s true that among at least some in the women’s movement (and their male allies), there remains an ugly, patronizing, dismissiveness towards young women who genuinely aspire to marriage and motherhood.   Mark, who commented at Stephanie’s place, wrote:

A disturbingly high number of women in college (at least in SE Ohio/N
Kentucky), do not want to work after graduating…

(Bold emphasis is mine.)  This raises the question, is college really only about preparing people for the work force?  (I sure hope not, because I have no idea how next week’s lecture on the Peloponnesian War is going to help anyone.)  What about college as an opportunity to engage new ideas, a place to be challenged, and a time to discover what one really wants?  And what about the possibility that some rational, intelligent, interesting and creative young women might conclude "Hey, the more I think about it, the more I realize that nothing is likely to be more fulfilling to me than raising a family."  Why must we assume that she is a victim of low expectations?  Is it not possible that such women have weighed their options, considered their choices, and made a heartfelt decision?  As feminists and pro-feminists, should we not be interested in empowering young women to live out their hopes and dreams?

More specifically, are we so sure that if high-quality, subsidized day-care was widely available, every woman who wishes to stay home would suddenly change her mind?  Mind you, I’m a big believer in high-quality, low-cost day care!  But I’ve known enough women who could afford the best day-care, and chose to stay home anyway, to know that not all mothers approach the issue in precisely the same manner. 

I’ve written a few times that I want to raise up young feminists and pro-feminists.  I want my female students to be aware of the tremendous, varied possibilities for their lives that may not have existed for their mothers and fore-mothers.  I want them to challenge themselves and take risks.  But I don’t presume to tell them that a high-paying career in the workforce is superior to building a loving home and raising children.  My goal is not to empower them to live out an ideological agenda; my goal is to empower them to lead lives that will be both personally fulfilling and socially beneficial.  I don’t know what each one of them will find fulfilling, but I am damn sure that different choices will please different people in different ways.  And to those young women who want to prioritize children over career and marriage over management, I say "Good on you."  It’s the same exact thing I’ve said to young women who pledge never to marry, and devote their lives to public service.  But when it comes to the future dreams of my students, I will not create a hierarchy of wants, in which certain desires are validated and others are shamed.  To do so would go against everything I have been taught that real feminism is.

And you know, when it comes to time and children and life itself, we really can’t have it all our way all the time.  I know it’s Friday, but the best lines on this subject come from the great W.B. Yeats:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

It’s clear where Yeats’ sympathies lie.  And mine.

 

Wages, the masculine malaise, and “waiting to be struck by certainty”: some thoughts on the new urban income report

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 6, 2007
in Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Money, Working and Youth
. 53 Comments

I promised last Friday I’d post this week about young professional women’s income outpacing men’s. The original New York Times article is here.

It’s worth noting that this phenomenon is a narrow one: overall, men still out-earn women across the country.

…women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages, and even more in Dallas, 120 percent. Nationwide, that group of women made much less: 89 percent of the average full-time pay for men.

Because this trend is confined to a couple of large metropoleis, it’s difficult for anyone to draw sweeping conclusions that apply uniformly across the nation. No major shift in national social policy is called for based upon the narrow experiences of young women in Manhattan and the Metroplex. Still, the numbers themselves are striking, even if they do only apply to a select few regions. And I’m particularly struck by this excerpt from the Times piece, touching on a possible “why” for this shift:

Melissa J. Manfro, a 24-year-old lawyer who was raised in upstate New York, offered her own theory on why younger female lawyers are outearning their male peers: a desire to begin their careers earlier to prepare for starting families.

“It seems that women tend to take less time off between college and law school, and therefore become more senior, and, hence, make more money, at a younger age,” she said. “I would, of course, like to think that means that women know what they want sooner than men. But it probably has more to do with the unfortunate fact that women need to keep in mind biological time constraints and feel a great deal of pressure to build an entire career before refocusing on marriage and children.”

Of course, a great many young women lawyers in New York City are not worrying about biological clocks. Many may not expect to marry or have children at all. But I do think we’ve done a fairly good job in recent decades of raising middle-class young women to be self-reliant, stressing that if at all possible, they should not “have to rely on a man” for support. This doesn’t mean that most successful young women are motivated by a lack of male reliability! It does mean that we’ve managed to impress upon young women something we haven’t managed to impress upon their brothers: that success is usually the result of a good education and a lot of hard work, and the sooner both are embarked on, the better.

The tenured American professoriate is still largely male. Law schools still have more male faculty than female. It’s difficult to find verifiable evidence of blatant discrimination against men in the American academy. (Though it has been widely reported that many colleges now have easier admission standards for boys than girls.) The problem is not that boys can’t do the work, or are being discouraged from doing the work; rather, it’s a kind of “masculine malaise” that seems to have infected a great many potentially successful young men.

To quote my father (and the title of a book proposal I’ve put out), too many young men are “waiting to be struck by certainty.” Too many young men figure that getting a graduate degree, making a decent living, and building a stable and successful life can “happen later” after they’ve “grown up.” (And anecdotally, the number of men in their mid-to-late 20s using the phrase “when I grow up” is nothing short of alarming.) We have a generation of young men who seem to lack the urgency and the ambition of their sisters. They haven’t been shamed out of it, they haven’t been actively discouraged — but they haven’t been sufficiently encouraged, either. They are waiting, waiting, waiting; waiting perhaps for a sudden beam of inspiration from above that will tell them exactly what they are to do with their lives. Until then, they’ll do a little of this and a little of that, they’ll hook up here and move in there, and they’ll put off pursuing a goal until they figure out what the heck it is that they want to do. And as many of the sisters, mothers, and girlfriends of these lads know, some men can put off that “growing up” until they are well into middle age.

Just as this study on wages among urban twenty-somethings doesn’t apply universally, this theory of “masculine malaise” isn’t going to fit every young man my readers know. And let me be very clear that this malaise is not the fault of feminism. Success is not a zero-sum game. Blaming women for male failures is a bit like the trustees of Ivy League colleges in the 1920s blaming a small number of Jewish students for being “too ambitious”. (In more recent years, we’ve directed that antipathy towards Asian-Americans.) As the story goes, in the 1920s, a lot of WASPs who expected to slide through Harvard with the “gentleman’s C” were nonplussed by the willingness of Jewish classmates to work hard. Something had to give — and what gave, thank goodness, was the “gentleman’s C.” Today, a lot of young men don’t seem to be as willing to work hard in school as their female classmates. Just as WASP privilege alone ceased to be a guarantor of success; perhaps now, at least for a few, we are seeing that maleness alone is no longer a similar guarantor.

Our culture is too easy on our young men, frankly. Anxious parents worry about boys’ poor attention spans, and complain that classes today are too detailed-oriented. That ought to send any historian of education into gales of laughter; look at the the young rabbinical students — all boys — who memorize the entire Torah by sixteen; look at the the demanding curricula (Greek, Latin, etcetera) of many nineteenth-century American universities. All male student bodies proved perfectly capable of feats of concentration and hard work, and they didn’t need huge doses of Ritalin to do it. I have no desire to return to the limited and extremely demanding educational philosophy of an earlier generation, but it seems absurd to suggest that “boys can’t concentrate as well as girls.” (Plenty of boys prove to be positive miracles of concentration when playing video games!)

There is a time and place for dreams. But the American middle class allows too many of their sons to dream to distraction. For fear of alienating them, for fear of repressing what we insist on believing is their innate masculine wildness, we allow them to “explore” and “wander” for a very, very long (much too long) time. We all know a lot of handsome, dreamy-eyed slacker boys, a year or two out of college, drifting through their twenties on drugs and theories, waiting, waiting, waiting, to be struck by certainty. And it is these boys — for boys they still are — who are one big whopping reason why, in our urban centers, incomes for young men have fallen so badly in comparison to their sisters.

What I don’t have time to blog about now…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 3, 2007
in Men and Masculinity, Money and Working
. 18 Comments

is this fascinating New York Times article: For Young Earners in Big City, a Gap in Women’s Favor. Some excerpts:

Young women in New York and several of the nation’s other largest cities who work full time have forged ahead of men in wages, according to an analysis of recent census data.

The analysis…. shows that women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages, and even more in Dallas, 120 percent. Nationwide, that group of women made much less: 89 percent of the average full-time pay for men.

Just why young women at all educational levels in New York and other big cities have fared better than their peers elsewhere is a matter of some debate. But a major reason, experts say, is that women have been graduating from college in larger numbers than men, and that many of those women seem to be gravitating toward major urban areas.

Melissa J. Manfro, a 24-year-old lawyer who was raised in upstate New York, offered her own theory on why younger female lawyers are outearning their male peers: a desire to begin their careers earlier to prepare for starting families.

“It seems that women tend to take less time off between college and law school, and therefore become more senior, and, hence, make more money, at a younger age,” she said. “I would, of course, like to think that means that women know what they want sooner than men. But it probably has more to do with the unfortunate fact that women need to keep in mind biological time constraints and feel a great deal of pressure to build an entire career before refocusing on marriage and children.”

Though the analysis showed women making strides, it also showed that men were in some ways moving backward. Among all men — including those with college degrees — real wages, adjusted for inflation, have declined since 1970. And among full-time workers with advanced degrees, wages for men increased only marginally even as they soared for women. Nationally, men’s wages in general declined while women’s remained the same.

I’ll post on this next week.

Outsourcing justice

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 10, 2007
in Feminism, Food, Having children, Veganism and Working
. 22 Comments

I can usually count on my blog-crush, Chris Clarke, to get me thinkin.’ And he does that today with a great post up at Pandagon: Quality of whose life, again? Citing naturist, philosopher, novelist and poet Wendell Berry’s fondness for having all of his work typed by his wife, Chris points out that too frequently, the burden of living “slow”, of living “off the grid”, of living a life of “environmental purity” often places a disproportionate burden on to women:

What decisions are environmentalist citizens asked to make? Choosing the green laundry detergent and toilet paper and buying organic groceries. Carrying cloth bags to the supermarket. Using non-toxic cleansers. Adding corporate citizenship to one’s list of brand loyalty factors and schlepping the Seafood Buying Guide around. Sorting trash into the proper containers for recyclables, compost, and landfilling.

Of course, we men carry all those containers to the curb, which perfectly balances the division of labor. But then you add Environmentalism 2.0 to the mix, and you have the Slow Food (read: hours spent in the kitchen) and Local Food (read: hours spent shopping) movements, and with that kind of scheduling pressure a woman likely wouldn’t even have enough time left in the day to type up her husband’s poetry.

Yikes.

Since my wife joined me in strict veganism (and she jumped in “cold tofu”, skipping from eating red meat one week to full-on vegan the next without any of the traditional stages in between) we eat out a lot less. The number of restaurants to which we can go has been cut, even in greater Los Angeles, by 90%. With one or two exceptions, the local fast food options are all off the table now. We spend much more money at the supermarket than we used to; we are using the pots and pans more; we are eating out less. All of this is great for the health of the household. But it does do exactly what Chris worries it will — put extra pressure on both my wife and me to avoid falling into traditional gender roles.

The nice thing about eating out all the time was that, well, my wife and I contributed exactly the same amount of labor to the process. Pulling out the Amex and signing the bill is not a labor-intensive activity. The people who made our food and cleaned up our dishes were invariably invisible to us, and we assuaged any small sense of guilt about being waited on by giving good tips. But we eat out less these days, and that means more work for both of us.

My wife made a wonderful stew on Tuesday night, loaded with sauerkraut and potatoes (among other goodies). I packed it into tupperware after we had eaten, and I had one portion for lunch yesterday, another today, and another tomorrow. Yes, I washed dishes and packed leftovers away. But my wife still ended up doing a bit more work than I did that particular evening.

I know well enough that “real feminism begins at home”. If my commitment to egalitarianism isn’t matched in what I do around the house, then all of my public pronouncements are built on a foundation of fraud and hypocrisy. And as Chris cheekily points out, men who think they’re “doing their share” by dealing only with the outside things (like washing the car, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash) often have no sense of just how much less time these traditionally male activities require than the “inside” chores (cooking, cleaning, laundry) that we think of as largely female.

I’m going through a particularly ascetic period these days. I’m drinking a lot of vegan shakes (which come prepacked), I’m eating a lot of raw spinach, lots of trail mix, lots of soy yogurt (with some nice live cultures), lots of vegan organic food bars. Only once in a while am I eating anything that takes much time to prepare. This limited diet has the benefit of being quick and easy, but I’m aware that it’s hardly to everyone’s taste. More importantly, as my wife and I consider having children, we have no intention of raising our kids on little baggies of almonds, pumpkin seeds, and spinach leaves. At some point, our environmentalist and animal-rights commitments will demand that we take even more time than many other parents do to meet our children’s needs for variety and pleasure as well as ethical nutrition. And I’m going to have to work doubly hard not to fall prey to the Wendell Berry phenomenon, where my commitment to the most humane lifestyle possible ends up creating much more work for other people!

So this summer, it’s vegan cooking classes for me. Maybe with my wife, maybe not. But I’ll be danged if I’m going to outsource my justice.

Cesar Chavez

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 29, 2005
in Christianity, Class, Faith, People and Working
. 1 Comment

The college will be closed this Thursday for Cesar Chavez day.  It’s the only paid California state holiday that isn’t also a federal holiday.  (It’s also a holiday in Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah.  Perhaps folks in those states can tell me if their colleges and schools close?)

A brief biography is here.

I was thrilled when, a few years ago, the California state legislature chose to make Chavez’s birthday a paid, mandatory holiday.  It’s not that I just wanted another day off, though like many who have lived abroad, I think Americans take entirely too few holidays.  It’s that Chavez is such a remarkable figure on so many levels.  Growing up on the Monterey Peninsula, not far from the Salinas Valley growing region, I grew up with lots of Chavez and United Farm Workers lore.  I went to school with the children of wealthy growers, many of whom said the most appalling things about Chavez and those on whose behalf he worked tirelessly throughout his life.  (Trust me, in Monterey County, there are plenty of affluent folks in agri-business who still loathe Chavez and the UFW. For them, the paid holiday is "political correctness run amok.")

But Chavez is personally important to me.   In 1987, he was one of the reasons I became a Catholic.  (He wasn’t the only reason: a great undergraduate seminar on patristic theology, where I read Augustine and Origen and Chrysostom, had an influence as well.)  But I wanted a church where social justice concerns mixed with a deep faith, and that was what I found at the Newman Center in Berkeley.  I was living in a co-op, and most of my friends were left-wing Latino Catholics (one of whom was regularly interning with the marvelous folks at California Rural Legal Assistance.)  Before I’d even heard of the Mennonites, and before I became an Episcopalian, I became enchanted with this blend of radical activism and Catholic piety.  My friends talked worshipfully of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta (whom I went to see speak on a couple of occasions.)   I haven’t read much about Chavez’s faith, but here’s a link to an article on the subject.  It jives with what my friends told me.

In 1988, Chavez went on a 36-day fast (at age 61) to protest unjust conditions in the table grape industry.  He made an explicit connection between the religious and social dimensions of fasting:

It is a fast for the purification of my own body, mind, and soul. The fast is also a heartfelt prayer for purification and strengthening for all those who work beside me in the farmworker movement. The fast is also an act of penance for those in positions of moral authority and for all men and women activists who know what is right and just, who know that they could and should do more. The fast is finally a declaration of non­cooperation with supermarkets who promote and sell and profit from California table grapes.

I fasted in solidarity with him.  For one day.  I knew I "could and should do more", and what I did at that time (I was at the height of my Catholicity) was pray the rosary for Chavez every day.  Even though I haven’t prayed the rosary in many years, whenever I think about it, I think about doing it for Cesar Chavez and for his cause.

And when I talk to folks about Cesar Chavez, I always emphasize his faith.  It’s a huge mistake to see him outside of the context of his passionate devotion to Christ and His church, just as it is a mistake to see Dr. King outside of the context of his commitment to Jesus.   And I’m hoping that my students reflect on why it is that they don’t have class on Thursday.

Teens and justice; the minimum wage

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 27, 2004
in Class, Clothing and Fashion, Feminism, Politics, Race, Working and Youth
. 3 Comments

Thanks to Dry Bones Dance, I went to this article in yesterday’s LA Times; it tells the inspiring story of the teenage daughters of immigrant garment workers in Oakland, and the revolution in ergonomics that they brought about.

For nearly a decade, Kwei Fong Lin tolerated numbness in her forearms. Like a great many Chinese immigrants who work in this city’s cramped and poorly equipped garment factories, her neck and back ached from long days spent hunched over a sewing machine while perched on rickety folding chairs, stools or even crates.

“We just took the pain as it came,” the 52-year-old Hong Kong native said in Cantonese. But an unlikely revolution has taken root here. Today, dozens of women work in relative comfort while seated on customized ergonomic chairs. Most surprising in an industry synonymous with powerless and mistreated workers: The women made it happen. They did it with the help of a group of teenage girls tired of seeing their seamstress mothers suffer…

Christy put it well:

You know, if they’d put stories like this in Seventeen, young women in this country might discover that they have more to contribute to the world than their fashion statement. It’s amazing how fighting for justice makes the size of your hips or your breasts seem a little less important.

In somewhat related news, the California Assembly passed a bill yesterday to increase the minimum wage to $7.75 an hour. It will surely pass the senate; Governor Schwarzenegger’s position is unknown. What I do know is that so many of my tired and stressed community college students work for that minimum wage in restaurants and retail businesses. I know how carefully they count their pennies (three of my best students are sharing one textbook to save money). And I know what a difference an extra dollar an hour could make in their lives.

More Immigration

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 13, 2004
in Money, Politics and Working
. 1 Comment

One of the better conservative Christian magazines is World, edited by the formidable Marvin Olasky. Here’s a post from the magazine’s blog on undocumented aliens, and it seems to indicate that at least some Christian conservatives are open to a moderate stance on immigration:

Readers in Des Moines may not be faced with illegal immigrants every day, but the fact is, no matter where you live, your life is somehow improved by the 7 to 10 million foreigners working here illegally: Your strawberries were picked by Mexicans, your Starbucks was built by Nicaraguans, your shirt was starched by Chinese. Those are jobs Americans, by and large, don’t want because they’re too menial or low-paying. Unemployment benefits and welfare programs afford us the luxury of being picky (some would say lazy). So, when President Bush proposes to grant three-year temporary work visas to illegal immigrants already in this country, isn’t he merely recognizing an economic reality that many would rather ignore? No, we don’t want to encourage more illegal immigration, but we can’t realistically expect to deport millions of illegals already here, already contributing to our quality of life.
It seems to me the right response would be to apply Jesus’s words to the woman taken in adultery: “Go, and sin no more.” Bush’s immigration plan would say to illegal aliens, “Go on with the jobs you’re doing. But register with us instead of trying to hide. Pay your taxes instead of working for cash. Get your license instead of driving illegally.”

There’s an interesting debate going on below the post as well.