Equality in the Workplace

I stumbled across an article in the Star Tribune today that summarized some of the census results having to do with me and women's equality in the workplace. According to the article, nearly as many women have advanced degrees as men, there are more women in the work force as men, and yet women are making 80.2% of what men earn. The piece highlights working mothers, by pointing out the increased needs for child-care and fixing the pay disparities.

But this is the part that makes me tilt my head in curiousity: acknowledging that women make up the majority of the work force the article still goes on to say that "as more women enter the workplace, I think they will realize the unfairness of the situation.. and demand change." Wait a minute, didn't we already establish that more women already are in the work force? How many women need to join the work force before the realization of inequality becomes a driving need for change? Apparently more than the millions who make up greater than 50% of the current work force.

I also have to wonder if the article is implying that it's women themselves who are entirely responsible for realizing and fixing the pay disparities in the work place. Not to mention the other acts of discrimination that women face because of their roles and women and mothers in our society. This makes me think of something we discussed in class today... the idea of whether change comes through changes in our roles or through the larger symbols presented in our society. This question completely applies in this case, where we see the roles have changed to the point where women are acquiring higher education and participating in the work force, yet the symbols and titles attributed to them have changed less than we could expect.

We also talked in class the other day about how women my age can make changes in working situations for women by challenging some of the standards that apply to working mothers, even though they don't apply to us - not yet. I know that I haven't spent the last three years working my butt off just as hard as my male peers to work in a situation where they will be paid that extra 20%.

Still a lot of change to be made, but in the big picture, yay for those women who are making their lives with work and family succeed. We just need to make sure the support is there to help the trend continue.

Who's going to care for the children?

Childcare inevitably plays a huge role in women's decisions about working after they have children. How could it not? You have a baby and when you go back to work you want to make sure that child is being taken care of as well as it would if you were at home. But has our society placed too high of a standard on women's responsibility of taking are of children? Joan Williams in her book Unbending Gender talks about commodification anxiety as a guilt women feel about women leaving their children in a childcare center as it is viewed in a economical market perspective. People don't want to feel like they are paying someone to take care of their child in the same way they would pay for any other consumer item, which makes mothers in particular feel guilty about leaving their children in daycare while they're at work.

How much does this anxiety really exist? Although childcare necessarily remains an important aspect of the work/stay-at-home decision, are women actually keeping themselves out of the workforce in response to this dilemma? If so, is it the childcare system we need to reform or the way we view our standards of maternal caregiving? I think it's a little bit of both, but am not sure how mothers view the matter.

Does Maternal Employment Effect Cognitive Development?

During the 1950s and 60s, when the number of women joining the workforce began to rise, there were claims by psychoanalyst, writers, and doctors that claimed these women were negatively effecting their child's development. Even as late as 2004 Suzanne Venker published a book illustrating the 7 reasons why having children and actively pursuing your career just don't mix. As I began to think about this assumption, I started to wonder what merit it actually held. Is there any negative effect to working while trying to raise a child? I did some research through academic resources and this is what I found...

A lot of the studies I looked at data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) which gathered information from children born in 1986 and their mothers. While some studies examined the data for a specific time period, others chose to follow a specific group of children throughout their developing years, sometimes up to adolescence and college years. Each study also varied in the factors they took into consideration, such as maternal income, child care options, the amount of quality parental time spent with the child, and education levels of both parents. They used these standards to test the PPVT (Peabody Picture and Vocabulary Test, a standard developmental testing system) of children whose mothers worked.

And now the results. Nearly all of the studies I read found a notable negative cognitive development during the first year of life for those children whose mothers worked. However, if the mother continued to work through the subsequent years of the child's life, the negative effects are offset by positive development through years 2-4. In the end, these children have no net effect on their cognitive ability merely because their mothers were working as they aged. Besides this neutral long-term effect on cognitive development, many studies cited positive social outcomes for children whose mothers worked during their childhood (I'll discuss some of these things in a later post).

Having shared the information that I've learned, I'm curious to know how these claims of negative effects on children remain a fear of working women today. Have these things crossed your mind when deciding whether to continue work after childbirth? I am just really interested in knowing to what extent any of these ideas remain today, and if so how mothers react to them.

If anyone has comments I'd love to hear them! That's all I've got for today but I'll write again tomorrow about some more things on my mind...

Why I'm Here

First of all, I'd like to say that the whole blogging world is completely new to me, so this will be an experience in itself! I'm writing for my Women's Studies semester-long project, but also as a way to bridge the gap between the things I'm learning about in class and what's actually going on in the lives of women. As a student at St. Olaf College, I've spent a lot of time learning very useful information, but how does that apply to real people?

Since the class has revolved around the topic of women and work, I decided to focus my research on maternal employment and cognitive development of children. So after all of the academic research I've done, I want to know what women are really feeling when it comes to leaving their children in daycare to pursue their careers. I'm planning on keeping this blog for a month to send out the information I've learned in class and hopefully get comments and opinions of women in particular, but really anyone who can relate to the subject.

What are some of the issues that moms are facing with regards to work and childcare? How does this align with the research I've done? How can academic research be useful for moms? These are all questions that I'm hoping to answer in the process of my month-long blog. I hope that this project can serve to quench my curiousity and provide a source of information and debate for all of you!