Session Issues – Concurrent Session on Workplace Inequality
Joan Chalmers Williams, American University Washington College of Law

I. Introduction

A. Within the U.S., the feminization of poverty discussion has tended to focus on the disproportionate share of women among the poor

B. This is an important topic but a limited one, in a society with a 13% poverty rate.

C. The discussion on the feminization of poverty in the U.S. needs to learn from international studies, which focuses not only on the disproportionate rate of women among the poor, but more broadly on the relationship of women and wealth. Thus, U.N figures show that not only are women

59% of those in extreme poverty, and
70% of those in poverty, but also that

Women own less than 1/10 of the world's income, and

Less than 1% of the world's wealth

D. What better place to start than with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women And Economics — classic treatment of the topic, published in 1898. E. Gilman set the frame within which we consider women and economics even today

Her focus is on women's "dependence." The solution: allow women to work along side of men by professionalizing domestic tasks along the industrial model; houses without kitchens; child care. I have called the Gilman tradition the full commodification model. It is the classic approach to deconstructing domesticity — the breadwinner/housewife model invented in the 19th century

F. Betty Friedan adopted this model in The Feminine Mystique, and it has survived to this day as the mainstream of American feminism.

G. I have argued that this model is flawed because it accepts too readily three basic elements of domesticity.

1. First, it accepts the ideal of a worker who starts to work in early adulthood, and works for 40 years straight, taking no time off for child bearing or child rearing

2. Second, it accepts the dichotomy between home and work, and that notion that family and household work is not "work." Reva Siegel has documented that the economic value of women's household work, which was openly acknowledged before the 19th century, was subsequently erased in law and social practice. Hence the housewife says, "I don't work"; and the value of a wife's services was recognized before the 19th century in ways it became impossible to recover for them after domesticity became established

3. Third, the full commodification model does not contest to privatized frame proposed by domesticity: accepts too readily the notion that reproductive work is a private responsibility, not a public necessity. But this is one of the elements of domesticity that needs to be changed: raising the next generation of citizens is not a private frolic of one's own.

G. This paper will explore a new theoretical framework for analysis of women and economics. I will first sketch this framework; will I then describe each element in a bit more detail; finally, I will propose an analytic for thinking about interventions designed to equalize women's access to wealth.

H. First, the basic sketch. In the U.S., the feminization of poverty discussion has tended to focus on the social safety net. This is an important, on-going discussion: though it needs to be changed in one way. Gender affects children and women in the same way

But note that it affects only women's relationship to a small fraction of our economy. Welfare programs constitute a tiny fraction of the federal budget; much more important are "entitlement" programs such as social security. It makes no sense to focus our attention only on a small fraction of government budgets; we need to bring the analysis of other government programs (now considered topics only of interest to specialists) into the mainstream of gender research. Thus far, the only government program other than welfare that has received extensive gender analysis is tax; critical tax theory can provide many of the tools we need for analysis of the public sector. But most wealth in the U.S. is private, not public. Our analyses of the private sector tends to focus on employment. Yet this focus itself is gendered: the economic status of many women depends not, or not solely, on their employment status. This is because, as I will document below, American women still do 70 - 80% of the child care, and that family work often affects their paid work. Thus to analyze women's relationship to private wealth, we need to examine not only their workforce position but also who owns what within the family.

I. To summarize, we need to widen out our analysis of women and wealth, to include not only

The social safety net and the disproportionate percentage of women among the poor; we also need to analyze

How other government wealth-distribution programs, from social "entitlements" to the tax system, systematically favor men over women; and

To analyze as well women's relationship to private as well as public wealth, through a consideration both of women's relationship to paid work, and their entitlements based on family relationships.

Two statistics frame the way we look at women's relationship to paid work:

1. Women's workforce participation — designed to document the demise of the breadwinner/housewife model as women enter the workforce

2. Wage gap — measures the gap between the wages of men who work FT against women who work FT

These statistics tend to lend support for the feasibility of the full-commodification model, the problem lies in what they miss.

If look at mothers during the key years of career advancement (aged 25 - 44), two out of three do not perform as ideal workers even in the minimal sense of working 40 hours/week all year.

And — even more dramatic — 92% of this group of mothers works less than 50 hours/week. In an age of high-overtime, this cuts mothers out of the labor pool for many of the best jobs society has to offer, blue- as well as white-collar.

This is the economy of mothers and others, which emerges clearly once we stop denying it. Women without children earn 90% the wages of men, but mothers earn only 60% of the wages of fathers. The "family gap" between the wages of mothers and other adults rose during the 1980s, and is still rising among many income groups.

Thus if we look not at women's workforce participation but at whether they perform as ideal workers, starting to work in early adulthood and taking no time off for child bearing or child rearing, one thing that emerges sharply is the fragile hold of many mothers on market work, in a society where 90% of women become mothers during their working lives.

III. Women's Relationship to Family Wealth

One out of four mothers is still a housewife, and two out of three do not perform as ideal workers even in the minimal sense of working full time, during the key years of child development. This means that economic security for many women depends on entitlements gained within the family.

The only existing conversation for challenging received notions of who owns what within the family is the "new theory of alimony" debate.

But what's at stake requires not a narrow focus on alimony, which has traditionally been based on need rather than ownership, and never been awarded to more than a small fraction of women. Instead, we need a more sweeping consideration of economic entitlements gained through family relationships.

A. To begin we need to return to the basics of domesticity

1. Domesticity defines the paid work of the IW as "real work"; equally important care work is defined as "not working"

2. I like to quote one mother:
"I get so sick of people asking me, 'Do you work?' Of course I work! I've got five children under ten -- I work 24 hours/day! But of course they mean, 'Do you work for pay, outside your home?' Sometimes I hear myself say, 'No, I don't work,' and I think, 'That's a complete lie!'"

3. It is a complete lie -- one with important social implications

4. A key tenet of domesticity is that women at home are "supported" by a man who "works." In fact, the only reason a father can perform as an ideal worker is that he is supported by a flow of child care and other family work from his wife. (You will note here how I have deconstructed domesticity by flipping Gilman's analysis of who is dependent on whom.)

5. By focusing on the husband's dependence on that flow of family work from the wife, we can see that the chief family asset in most households -- the IW wage -- embeds not only the husband's paid work but also the wife's family work

6. You would think that an asset that reflects the work of two family members would be jointly owned, but that is not what we do

7. In divorce courts, in the economy of gratitude in intact marriages, and in many government and private benefits programs the husband typically is treated as the sole owner of the IW wage. And then there is a little bit of redistribution through family law, but not much:

alimony is rate, most families have little savings to fuel property distribution, and one recent estimate is that fathers pay only 6% of their income in child support.

In a society where the typical father earns 70% of the family income, it should not surprise us that 40% of divorced women end up in poverty

When we take a step back, we can see that what we have -- and what we are exporting through globalization -- is a system in which men specialize in paid work, which is defined as work and linked with ownership while women specialize in family work, which is defined as leisure and is linked with economic vulnerability

G. The logic is clear

when you define the IW as someone without responsibility for children, you set up a system of providing for children's care by pushing their primary caregivers to the margins of economic life

1. In a few European countries, the government steps in to redistribute wealth to women and children

2. But in most other regions, this system leads predictably to high levels of maternal and child poverty in the U.S., for ex., 80% of those in poverty are women and children

3. Few governments in developed countries have the political will to save women and children from the gendered logic of the private economy, and few countries in the developing world have the resources to do so.

4. Unless we want globalization to export our economy of mothers and others, we need not only government action.

6. Worldwide, we need to redefine women's relationship to private wealth.

III. Government Wealth

A. To complete our analysis of women and economics requires an analysis of women's relationship to public as well as private wealth

B. Scholars of the social safety net have led the way:

C. It is important to view welfare "reform" through the lens of domesticity: it is a particularly pernicious example of how women's family work is erased and treated as leisure; and is not tied to social entitlements

Domesticity also highlights the way our economic system links the fate of women and children

A system that it provides for children's care by economically marginalizing their caregivers is one that systematically impoverishes children along with women, though a similar gender dynamic

D. But, as mentioned above, we need to examine government wealth other than the wealth that is part of the social safety net. In my analysis here I rely on an insightful and important article by Mary O'Connell.

E. O'Connell points out that, in the U.S., we have in effect a three-tiered system of economic security.

"The greatest security belongs to those whose attachment to paid work is lengthy, uninterrupted, and highly remunerative. . . . A second mode of access allows some persons to claim economic security derivatively — that is, through the labor force participation of another individual. . . .[T]his mode of access produced a hodgepodge of entitlements, fraught with gaps, that frequently fails to provide needed protection to the recipient. Finally, those who do not engage in paid work, and who lack access based on a derivative basis, must look to statutes providing means-tested benefits for their economic security. These benefits are chronically underfunded and their receipt is often stigmatized."

F. Of course, this three-tier system is gendered, with the upper-tiered inhabited predominantly by men, and the two lower tiers staffed almost exclusively by women

G. So a final element of an analysis of women and economics needs to build on critical tax theory, but to go much further. For the distribution of government benefits plays at least as great, and probably a greater role in defining women's relationship to wealth than does tax policy.

As O'Connell points out, government benefits include not only the obvious candidates like Social Security, unemployment insurance, and worker's compensation; they also include the tax subsidies given to private health care and pension plans.

All these benefits today reflect the model of an ideal worker who begin full-time work in early adulthood and work uninterrupted until retirement. This means they are designed around men's bodies and life patterns, and discriminate against women. Even by 2030, according to estimates by the Older Women's League, a majority of women will not work in the patterns required in order to receive Social Security.

H. Obviously, the solutions are complex, but here's 2 basic principles:

First, social entitlements should be based both of two important kinds of work most adults do, not only one of them. Social security and other benefits should be earned not only through paid work, but also through the family work traditionally done by women.

Second, benefits linked to paid work should not be limited to ideal workers as traditionally defined. Health insurance policy waiting periods, ERISA vesting rules, Social Security recency requirements and the thirty-five-year work-life rule should all be abolished or redesigned so that they do not have a disparate impact on women.

A much larger component of government redistribution than the social safety net are entitlements that are "earned." How are they earned? All these are linked only with paid work, and treat family work as leisure that does not give rise to entitlements related to work. In addition, they typically are awarded to IW, as opposed to the part-time or other "casual" work that mothers often adopt in order to accommodate care-taking responsibilities. As a result of these two patterns, it is disproportionately men who earn social entitlements such as Social Security, UI, pensions, etc.

IV. Conclusion: How to Change Women's Relationship to Economic Security

To analyze women's relationship to economic security, need to examine three things:

• How a society's work system fits with its traditions of nurturance — this is what I have done for the U.S. via the IW analysis of market work

• How it defines who owns what within the family

• How a society allocates government wealth — not only the social safety net, but also provision of "earned" social entitlements related to paid and/or family work

To change the relationship of gender and economic security, we can change one of three basic relationships:

1) We can change the relationship of employer and employee, to require workplaces to take account of the important family work responsibilities of their employees.

need to go far beyond "family friendly" policies to rethink how we define the ideal worker baseline: proportional pay, benefits, and advancement for PT work particularly important in mandatory OT economies need to rethink the ways we define an ambitious, committed, valuable worker should be able to accomplish a lot through voluntary programs -- esp. in an age of high employment (U.S. rate now 4%). Yet we also should not lose sight of the fact that employers who designed their workplaces around men's bodies and traditional life patterns are discriminating against women

2) We can change relationships within the family

we can change the allocation of household work between men and women — but this has proven very difficult — We need to be a lot more thoughtful about why this strategy has had such limited success. Helpful to turn to growing literature on construction of masculinity. Men feel their masculinity is on the line. Also need to turn to literature on class, and to re-theorize the relationship of class and gender: gender performances help create class status; the available cultural idioms for performances of class are very gendered.

we can change our notions of who owns what within the family -- in the U.S., the key is in divorce law (for after marriage) and popular discourse (for who owns what during marriage). joint property proposal, to end unexamined notions inherited from coverture in other countries, some provide for even fewer entitlements for women upon divorce It's very important in countries that up until very recently have had virtually no divorce, not to replicate the situation in the U.S., where rising divorce rates have led to increased impoverishment of women and children (40% of divorce U.S. mothers are in poverty) because of unexamined assumptions about who owns what within the family

in other countries, it's also necessary to change inheritance laws.

3) Finally, we can change the configuration of the public and private spheres

two different approaches here
one has been discussed: government-ordered mandates on employers to provide leaves and alternative schedules for people with family work responsibilities

the other is to adopt a strategy of providing an entitlement to those involved in care work Here is the important work of Martha Fineman should be noted, as should the striking differences in childhood poverty rates in the U.S. and other civilized countries (or, should I say, in countries that are truly civilized when it comes to accepting the responsibility to provide children a true chance in life).