Shoulder Pads Q & A with Bryce Covert

I saw Bryce Covert speak in March at the Women, Action and Media conference in New York City, when she spoke about being a financial reporter, something I may now be on my way to becoming. She was cheerful, articulate, thoughtful and encouraging. Since then, I've followed her excellent work on women in the economy in the Nation, GOOD, Alternet and other magazines and websites. Covert, 27, is now editor of the Roosevelt Institute's New Deal 2.0 blog, and has come out with some extremely keen analysis lately of how the economic crisis has affected American women. I spoke to her about her career, financial reporting, covering women's issues, and the end of secretaries. How did you wind up as a financial reporter? 

When I graduated, I went into teaching for two years.  I had this brilliant scheme to teach and write fiction at the same time, but it turns out that teachers don’t have free time, so the scheme didn’t play out so well.  After that I wanted to do something where I was writing every day, because if you want to write, you have to build it into your every day life.  I applied to a lot of entry-level jobs, in a whole host of areas.  A lot of the paying journalism jobs are in financial reporting, because there’s demand for insider knowledge.  I got a job at mergermarket – a completely entry-level job where half of it was data entry. But they promoted people very much based on merit, with little regard for age or seniority, so I moved up really quickly. I started in what must have been early 2008, so it was really interesting.  I came in just before Lehman Brothers, just before everything hit the fan.  Everything changed, so I thought, “I know as much as anyone.”

How did you satiate, shall we say, your feminism in that role? 

That was a struggle I had for a while. In the beginning there was such a steep learning curve that financial reporting was my whole life: I learned the skills of making sources, trading info, breaking news and things like that, that I hadn’t picked up anywhere else.  But when the learning curve leveled off, I needed to tend to the rest of myself. I volunteered with the Obama campaign because I’ve always been really interested in politics. At some point I started a blog.  I was full of ideas, but I didn’t have the bandwith to pitch everything every time, so it was a great place to put everything down.  I got on Twitter, and started connecting to people that way.  That helped a lot.  I ended up leaving mergermarket and getting a job at the Roosevelt Institute, where of all that political, feminist stuff is tended to in a very substantial way.

Although a number of think tanks are doing great work on these issues, I don’t see a lot of reporting that looks carefully, deeply and thoughtfully at the numbers about women and the economy. Am I looking in the wrong places?  Whose work do you follow?  

There’s Nancy Folbre, who blogs at The New York Times, and some people at Alternet, like Lauren Kelley.  I do think that it’s something of a bare space, and I think that comes from the separation that a lot of people have in their brains between economic and social issues, and between economics and feminism.  There’s this thought that economics is about these formulas, supply and demand, input and output, numbers, policies, and that those things are very separate from social issues, which are touchy-feely, emotional things, or activism.

I don’t think that line can really be drawn, because economics have social impacts and social issues have extremely important economic aspects. So that’s where I’ve decided to plant myself. There’s also a gender split – the field of economics tends to be very white, and very male, whereas writing about feminist issues is pretty much the purview of women.

From your work and the work some great policy think tanks, women – particularly in the U.S. – have it very, very bad, particularly at the lower ends of the economic spectrum.  At the same time, we’re hearing a lot about ‘investing in women.’  At a policy level, where do these facts and these rhetoric meet, and what do you think about this shift in rhetorical strategy?

The rhetoric is a good sign, because it’s better to have people talking about it than not.  In Obama’s jobs package, there’s a lot of recognition of jobs typically held by women, like teaching.  And they put out a fact sheet about how his policies affect owmen, which is awesome. That said, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

But the “Girl Effect” phenomenon, this idea that if you invest in women, you’ll save the world, is troubling.  Now it’s on women in the developing world to invest in their communities and save them, and that seems a little bit fraught.  Now we’re supposed to invest in them because it’s “smart economics,” and it does seem to pay off economically, and it does seem to convince people.

Here’s the problem, though: even if it weren’t economical to invest in women, we should still be doing it.  Even if it’s not going to bring developing countries into the global economy, we should still do it.

Tell me about your current research at the Roosevelt Institute.

First we were examining the public sector data where a lot of jobs traditionally held by women were eliminated, and the numbers there made sense.  But when we looked at the private sector numbers by occupation, we found that a lot of administrative assistants have been laid off.  The recession has been an excuse to fire them and tell other people to do their work.  My boyfriend has the new iPhone 4S, which has Siri.  She -- or rather, the machine – will make calls for you, schedule things for you.  It’s the latest and most tangible iteration of how secretaries have been replaced by technology.

But when I spoke to someone at an association of administrative professionals, she noted that the women who do administrative assistant work are capable of a lot of functions that can’t be mechanized, like working with Excel or doing Powerpoint, which are still needed.  But they’re not being invested in, and that’s the real problem.  Theoretically some day this economy will turn around and companies will not have invested in your most important resource: their employees.

This woman deserves a job.

One of our earlier writing assignments in the course was to report on a specific group of people and how they are being affected by the recession.  The plight of female public sector employees was brought to my attention by the great work of Bryce Covert, with whom I will be doing an interview soon.  Through Working America, I was put in touch with Shonda Sneed, who was laid off two years ago and is still looking for full-time work while she looks after her dementia-afflicted mother.  She could have had a job as an engineer rebuilding Ohio's infrastructure.  But something went wrong. By Anna Louie Sussman

September 26, 2011, NEW YORK CITY -- One day in December of 2009, Shonda Sneed was laid off from her job as a computer-aided design operator after ten years with her company, unceremoniously escorted out of the building that same afternoon.

Sneed, 46, had worked as an engineer at various private firms in Ohio for over twenty years, and was making around $35,000. But she knew that another job would be hard to come by just a few months into the recovery, which officially began in June 2009.  Luckily, she thought, hope was just around the corner.  Ohio was slated to receive $400 million in federal stimulus money for a high-speed rail project linking Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus, and she had seen at least a hundred related engineering jobs advertised on Monster.com.

“I thought, woo-hoo, I am going back to work!” she said.

But something happened on November 19^th: Republican former Congressman John Kasich won Ohio’s gubernatorial race, and immediately announced his opposition to a high-speed rail line.  On December 9^th, 2010, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that the federal government would be revoking the $400 million grant, sending that money instead to states such as California and Florida, which had gotten behind the rail project.  Sneed was shocked.

Since the recession began in 2007, state budgets have faced the largest budget shortfalls in history, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February of 2009, made $274 billion in federal contracts, grants and loans available to states and municipalities.  One of its chief stated aims was upgrading the country’s infrastructure, and Sneed was keen to do her part.  But when Kasich turned his nose up at $400 million in federal money, her job prospects dried up almost overnight.

Sneed had spent months staying up late and waking up early to get first dibs on newly posted jobs.  Overall, she estimated, she had applied to 75 of them.  They were slated to pay well, she recalls: around $20 to $25 an hour, plus benefits and the possibility to work over the long term, since the construction of any infrastructure she helped design could require her consultation going forward.  Several of the firms, impressed by her diverse engineering experience – she has worked as a civil, mechanical, electrical, and architectural engineer, and is highly proficient in the three-dimensional imaging software AutoCAD – told her that as soon as their contracts were secured, they would give her a call.

“When he turned it down,” she said, “the jobs went away, the hope went away.”

As the ARRA funding dries up, states and municipalities can expect further public sector layoffs.  To date, these public sector job losses have disproportionately hit women, who made up 57.2% of the public sector workforce at the end of the recession, but who have lost 72.3% of public sector jobs - 430,000 of them - since the recovery began in June 2009, according to data from the National Women’s Law Center.  Women are overrepresented in education and health care, two areas hit hard by cost-cutting measures.

“The loss of women’s jobs is very much related to cutbacks in government spending,” said Joan Entmacher, Vice President and Director of Family Economic Security at the National Women’s Law Center. “The states are cutting back as ARRA investments expire.  They have budget crises and aren’t getting help.”

Sneed, who was born in Dayton and lives in the suburb of Yellow Springs, had never worked in the public sector before.  But after a year of un- and under-employment, she felt it was her last hope.  While the private sector added 1.23 million jobs during the recovery, only 85,000 of them - one in 15 - went to a woman, according to the NCLW.

In the past, Sneed, said, she had never gone more than a month without a job.  She’d look for two or three weeks, and by the third week, “you’d have three or four” offers. But this prolonged under-employment has robbed her, a single woman who cares for her elderly dementia-ridden mother, of the few so-called “luxuries” she once enjoyed.  She no longer goes to McDonald’s every now and then.  She skips $300 shots she used to get for her asthma.   And when her car broke down last winter, she walked everywhere. Once a month, someone drove her outside of town do her grocery shopping.”

“You’re at the mercy of other people,” she said, her voice choking up.  “I swallowed my pride, because it’s not for me.  It’s for my mom.”

Thanks to lobbying efforts by the NCLW and a coalition of other women’s groups, the jobs bill that President Obama announced earlier this month does include some spending that will serve to protect women’s jobs, such as $30 billion to keep teachers on the payrolls, and targeted funding to train and provide jobs for women in construction and infrastructure.  But it’s unclear what chance the bill has of passing.  Republicans have already spoken out against its proposal to increase taxes on wealthier Americans.

Sneed has found temporary work organizing on behalf of S.B. 5, the Ohio Senate Bill protecting the right of collective bargaining, but it will end in November.  After that, she’ll pick up the job search again.

“I won’t give up,” she said. “I have to work.”

As someone who has until recently been working since she graduated high school, she deeply resents the notion that she and other jobless people are laying back, living off the dole.

“I’m not asking for a handout,” she said.  “All I’m asking for is the right to work in a safe place.  I can do the rest myself.”

Why takeout is a feminist issue

First of all, I apologize for the headline. The internet has a few rules one has to play by in order to get people to click, one of which is naming an article or a blog post "Why [this thing] is [actually something else that's counterintuitive]."  The other one, you may have noticed, is to title your story "[So and so's] [something] problem."  The former convention is not nearly as trendy or irritating to me as the latter. Moving on to why takeout is, in my experience, quite the gendered issue, I'll begin with a few data points, and follow up with how my own experience illustrates as much.

• Women, on average, still earn less than men.  How much less?  Around 23% less, unless you're a black woman, in which case you earn 38% less than the average white male, or a Hispanic woman, in which case you are taking home 54 cents for every dollar your white male colleague earns for doing substantially the same work, according to data from the Census Bureau and compiled by the National Women's Law Center.
• Men, on average, work longer hours than women.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier this year that among full-time workers, men worked a longer day than women: 8.2 hours versus 7.8 hours.
• The same BLS report noted  that "on an average day, 20% of men did housework- such as cleaning or doing laundry - compared with 49% of women. Forty-one percent of men did food preparation or cleanup, compared with 68% of women.

Here's the pattern I'm picking up: men work more, make more money, cook less.  Women work less, make less, cook more.  The more valuable someone's time is, the bigger an opportunity cost it is for that person to spend it on non-revenue generating activities.  In other words, why cook when you make more than enough to pay someone to do it for you?   Getting takeout (or ordering delivery) is not the same as going to a restaurant, which is generally an event to be savored, an investment of time and resources in a meal with someone of some professional or personal significance.  No, takeout is what you get when you need to eat but you don't have time to cook.

It was only recently that I started regularly ordering takeout.  Until a few months ago, I was a full-time freelance writer, a precarious, anxiety-inducing financial situation if there ever was one.  (I should add that I also tutored students in writing to make the financial situation slightly less precarious.] I had very little free time on my hands, but I had even less disposable income.  So I cooked most of my own food.  I don't have a dishwasher, so I washed a lot of dishes.  And pots.  And pans.  In the end, I ate well (for which I owe a big shout out to my mom, a New York Times food writer and cookbook author and above all spectacular single mom, for teaching me how to cook and eat well).  But I also spent a lot of time in the kitchen -- time I was not spending taking my career further along.

I've spoken to an older family friend about this, and she believes strongly that women and men should be obliged to take home economics courses.  More women, she thinks, should know basic finance and accounting principles, and men should know how to cook.  My closest male friend can barely brew himself a cup of tea -- but he can make a fair amount of money (first as a day trader, and now working for an alternative energy company), call a deli, and have a cup of tea delivered to him.  It might cost $4 instead of 14 cents, but he gets his tea.  Spending $3.86 on someone else's labor was worth it to him.

I wonder if these messages start early: boys, be sure and make lots 'o' money so you can always outsource the drudgery to someone else.  Women, make sure you know how to cook since you'll always be paid 23% less than men.  That food - its growing, its preparation, and its consumption - is gendered is not a new insight; Harvard had a fantastic conference on the topic in 2007 that you can watch here. But I wonder how these ideas and expectations have changed and are changing.

My high school history teacher once told me that the tradition of Chinese takeout (and Chinese laundromats) took off during the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s, when a lot of men converged in California and needed someone - in this case, immigrants - to make them food and wash their clothes.  I don't know how true this is, but it's not far from the modern-day tradition of the wealthy paying others to do jobs they just don't feel like doing: cleaning the house, walking the dog, keeping track of appointments. Parents outsource childrearing, in varying degrees, to baby nurses, nannies and tutors.

Now that my income is a little bit more steady, and I don't always feel like I'm living on the precipice, getting takeout once a week - say, before or after a class that runs from 6 to 9 pm - is a relief, a welcome change from the obligation of cooking for myself, but most of all a privilege.  With the poverty rate among American women at a 17-year-high of 14.5%, finally having enough money to tip the scale in the direction of takeout is a luxury I don't take lightly.

Why MBA courses are a feminist journalist's best friend

It's week four of an MBA course entitled "Global Economy," our midterm exam will be upon us in approximately 100 hours, and anxiety has tied my back and neck muscles into knots.  And I'm thrilled about it. The course, taught by Professor Michael Waugh, has enlightened me on so many levels.  Learning how to calculate GDP, manipulate formulas in Excel, and analyze factors contributing to productivity is not only illuminating, but empowering.  All of a sudden, I feel like I understand business news when I read it -- really understand it.  Not just the words, but the thinking (the math, even) behind it.  For someone who comes from a humanities background (and compounded it by going to Brown), this new knowledge is exhilarating.

Why does this relate to feminism?  Several reasons:

• Being "numerate" - a word I confess I hadn't heard until Reuters data journalist and all-around great guy Reginald Chua guest-taught a class and dropped that one on my head - is just as important as being literate; it's a way of understanding the world that can provide a lot of clarity, or, as Professor Waugh put it when referring to a growth formula, "it's a way to discipline our thinking."
• Clarity and disciplined thinking are often scarce in discussions about gender, sexuality, reproductive health and related issues.  Why?  Because these are deeply personal, emotional issues with very small slivers of black and white, and a tremendous amount of grey.   There are statistics and metrics on a lot of these issues -- on abortion rates state-by-state, for example, or hate crimes against LGBTQ people, or the incidence of domestic violence -- but for many people, there's something callous about evaluating an issue like abortion on the basis of a data set.  Is a fetus a life?  Is a woman's life more valuable than that of an unborn fetus?  I'd hazard that most people feel more comfortable turning to beliefs, not numbers, for answers.
• This is not to say that numbers provide answers to these questions.  But data is critical to forming policies, and to soundly critiquing them.  I learned this when I researched an article on the death penalty, which is currently losing favor in a lot of states on economic grounds: prosecuting death penalty cases through repeated appeals processes costs states a crap-ton of money that could be spent on other parts of the criminal justice system, like the police force.
• Thinking more mathematically and learning about how labor, capital and productivity interact are forcing me to challenge and refine my own long-held notions about feminism, and to think more creatively and rationally about how and why issues like education, work, reproductive choice, sexuality, and health fit together within a larger economic framework.

Of course, given how fundamental constructs of gender are to larger social structures like the family, or marriage or - perhaps especially - commerce, the challenge with which I am struggling right now is how to evaluate these statistics, numbers, economic indicators in light of or with respect to structural critiques of patriarchy or heternormativity.  Data is disaggregated by gender or sex -- where does that leave trans people?  The Census Bureau defines a "family" as "a group of two people or more (one of whom is the householder) related by birth, marriage, or adoption and residing together" -- but who are they to define a family?  And where did that definition come from?

Forthcoming blog posts will explore more of these issues in depth.  Thanks for reading and stay tuned.  --ALS

Money or morals? Analyzing the AKP's assault on legal sex work in Turkey.

For recent story I did for the New York Times magazine, You Are Here -- Dimming the Red Lights in Turkey, I reported from just outside one of Istanbul's last remaining red light districts on the effect of the Islamist AKP government's campaign to slowly but surely rid the country of its long tradition of legal sex work.

The AKP government has presided over phenomenal economic growth in Turkey.  Earlier this year, while the rest of the world economy was spinning down the toilet, Turkey's GDP grew 11% in the first quarter.  Unfortunately, this economic growth has yet to empower women in a meaningful way.  Employment among women stands at 24 to 26%, depending on who you ask, but either way, it's the lowest among OECD countries.  Unlike in other developing countries, where women have flocked to work in factories and other low-wage employment, strong -- I mean, really strong -- patriarchal social norms discourage the hiring of women.  Unsurprisingly, women may find it easier enter other informal sectors such as sex work, which have a low barrier to entry and offer the chance of earning more than the minimum wage (currently approximately 630 TL after taxes, or around $350 per month).  However, they do so under extremely precarious conditions: they are vulnerable to violence, harassment, fines and extortion.

It's in this context that I will further explore what is motivating the AKP to clamp down on sex work, for a forthcoming story that will go into these issues in more depth.  Do they know that women find it extremely difficult to find work in the formal sector?   Do they care?  Do they disapprove of sex work, or are they merely angling to close down the brothels so they can gentrify those prime, centrally located patches of real estate?

These are some of the questions I hope to begin to answer in the upcoming story.  As with politics anywhere, it's very difficult to locate truth, or even truthiness (hat tip Stephen Colbert.)  But the reporting process was fascinating, and I was lucky to work with two of the most wonderful translators/reporting partners I can possibly imagine.  Looking forward to sharing the story with you in the near future.

The Laughing Monster

Despite the fact that I have a blog, and broadcast my thoughts to the internet every now and then, I’m actually a pretty private person.  My first instinct wouldn’t be to blow someone up or shout her or him out for doing something lame, if said person was a private citizen (public figures, by contrast, are fair game).  But on Sunday night I encountered one of the biggest assclowns I’ve ever met.  He is so assclown-y, in fact, that I would like the whole world to know. I was enjoying a convivial farewell dinner in London with a group of five vivacious, accomplished women writers and journalists at St. John’s Bread and Wine.  The entire night was wonderful, and I laughed the whole time.  At one point, talk turned to pregnancy, and the two pregnant women in the group had one of the more honest and hilarious conversations I’ve ever heard, prompting more uproarious laughter from my end.  Around twenty minutes later, a business card slid near my elbow.  I looked up to see the messenger, a tall man in his 50s sporting a bushy take on the Hitler ‘stache.

He neither winked, smiled, nor licked his lips like LL Cool J, so it didn’t feel much like a come on (note to men: slipping women your cards generally fails, anyway).   In fact, he rather glared at me.  I turned over the card to find this charming, charming message:

Note: this reads "Madame, You are a MONSTER, a laughing monster, very primitive!  I fear my ears are destroyed. W. W."

Now, here is a lesson for anyone who thinks they can silence a laughing woman such as myself with a hyperbolic 18^th-century putdown scribbled on a card: YOU MUST BE STUPID.  THIS IS ONLY GOING TO MAKE ME LAUGH HARDER.  ONLY NOW AT YOU.  So, laugh we did, and all six of us were laughing directly at him.

Happy ending: I ignored his glares till he left the restaurant, and the waiter, who was horrified at his behavior, gave me a compensation bag filled with baked goods.

Suggested pro-loud-woman activism:  Tweet a link or a joke of something funny today (and every day – why not?), with the hashtag #laughingmonster.  Make yourself laugh, make your friends laugh, make me laugh.  Or, send this guy an mp3 or .wav file of your laugh!  Remind him that women are not just to be seen, but heard, too.

Tampons and vaginas - American and Rwandan women face taboos

A story from a couple of weeks ago in the NYT noted that tampon manufacturers have shied away from using the word "vagina" in their advertising, and even the innocuous (and juvenile?)-sounding "down there" was apparently too insiduous for TV stations.

Merrie Harris, global business director at JWT, said that after being informed that it could not use the word vagina in advertising by three broadcast networks, it shot the ad cited above with the actress instead saying “down there,” which was rejected by two of the three networks. (Both Ms. Harris and representatives from the brand declined to specify the networks.)

“It’s very funny because the whole spot is about censorship,” Ms. Harris said. “The whole category has been very euphemistic, or paternalistic even, and we’re saying, enough with the euphemisms, and get over it. Tampon is not a dirty word, and neither is vagina.”

The Times' story seems to address a topic the Onion addressed over a year ago, in a story entitled "Renowned Hoo-Ha Doctor Wins Nobel Prize for Medical Advancements Down There."

Meanwhile, in Rwanda, a similar taboo has prevented a discussion from even taking place around the lack of tampons and pads that women need so they can, you know, function and do things like get to school.  The story, printed last week in the New Times, a Rwandan paper, notes that 18% of women surveyed in 2007 missed school or work due to not having sufficient pads or tampons during their menstrual cycle.

These articles make me strangely nostalgic for a Theater Arts class I took when I was at Brown where several of my classmates wanted our presentation, which was intended to be about Yoruba rituals, to involve our all-female group to burst out of a paper vagina and throw tampons at the rest of our classmates.  At the time I was fiercely against this proposal, but in retrospect, maybe what seemed like a self-indulgent stunt was actually a prescient, much-needed cry against this societal taboo?