Long Live the Lady-Centered Blogosphere; Please Fund the Lady-Centered Blogosphere

In the same week that New York magazine's cover story celebrated "the lady-centered blogosphere," the Nation ran a story about the realities of maintaining the lady-centered blogosphere. Here are excerpts from the two articles, one written largely to describe and celebrate, and one written mostly to explain and gripe. One sounds like ad copy for a new kitchen appliance. The other sounds like the trouble-shooting section in the instruction manual. From the New York magazine article by New York editor-at-large Emily Nussbaum:

Like feminism itself, it would be a mistake to peg the lady-centered blogosphere as just one thing (“lady” being the term of choice for many online writers, an ironized alternative to the earnest “woman” or problematic “girl”). Some posters consider themselves primarily activists, some journalists, some artists. Many sites operate less as magazines and more as collectives, in which like-minded thinkers burn out or are snatched up to high-profile gigs. Among ambitious writers, this game of musical chairs goes on each day: When I meet with Jezebel blogger Irin Carmon, she describes her decision to take a job at Salon, replacing Rebecca Traister, who is now writing for the Times—which means Carmon’s job will be taken by “MorningGloria,” a Jezebel commenter who left her finance job to take the gig and who now writes under her full name, Erin Gloria Ryan.

Sounds awesome, right? A young-girls-club where everyone shares broader goals of social justice and refers each other for great jobs, but there's plenty of room for feisty debate on intersectionality, what Kim Kardashain's divorce means for women, or whether "SlutWalk" protests are inherently exclusive to women of color.

From the Nation piece by Courtney Martin, an editor emeritus of Feministing:

Blogs like Feministing, of which I am an editor emeritus, have operated without any formal structure for years. Third-party advertising networks, like Google Adwords, provide the majority of our revenue, but most often there is no money left over—after tech and hosting fees—to pay any of our eleven bloggers. We’ve been caught in a seven-year chicken-or-egg-cycle; at annual retreats, we discuss next steps for formalizing our structure and focusing on becoming financially sustainable, and then our full-time jobs (largely as communications consultants at feminist nonprofits and freelance journalists) crowd out any time to follow up. We’re too busy trying to make ends meet to figure out how to make ends meet.

Nussbaum's story ends with a list of lady blogs to check out, which includes many of the dead-broke blogs whose participants are also in Martin's piece, more of which I excerpt below (it's really worth reading the whole thing, though - please go on ahead).

This leads us to the biggest misperception of all—this one even held by many bloggers and online organizers themselves: that online feminism is free. It’s not. Many feminists innovated remarkably early on in the Internet’s existence, founding blogs and online communities, but we’ve largely stalled in progress over the last few years because we are under-resourced and overwhelmed. Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the executive editor of Feministing.com, explains, “Blogging has become the third shift. You do your activist work, then you have a job to make money and then you blog on top of that. It’s completely unsupported.”

....

Online organizing has infused new energy—not to mention drawn thousands of newly minted feminists—into the feminist movement, and yet the movement’s financial backers haven’t caught up to the new reality. Despite the high-profile rise of women’s-focused philanthropy in the past few years, including initiatives like Women Moving Millions, only a few foundations or individual donors publicly purport to be focused on supporting online movement building. The Media Consortium’s Jo Ellen Kaiser acknowledges that “a handful of foundations and donors--especially the smaller foundations--that may previously have given mainly to advocacy movements, are beginning to understand that they need to give to media as well in order to support online movement building.”

As someone who has been doing my best to write about women's issues and keep a roof over my head all at the same time, the Nation story struck me as the more important of the two. Yes, New York, online feminist activism is an important cultural phenomenon to document. But the Nation story asks, how can we sustain it? Why are major philanthropists, eager to "empower women," ignoring it?

That the more wild, lefty, disruptive shades of the lady-blogosphere are underfunded (which, long-term, can come to mean "silenced") I guess should come at no surprise. But meanwhile, over in the mainstream media, women's issues are all the rage. I wrote a blog post for the Financial Times' Women at the Top blog that should appear in the next few days, in which I describe the explosion of women-focused coverage at places ranging from Bloomberg News to the International Herald Tribune to the Huffington Post to Forbes magazine.

It remains to be seen how this demand in the mainstream media for lady-focused content will interact with the voices, talents and financial troubles of the lady-focused blogosphere.  Their respective needs and goals are not exactly aligned, but I'm optimistic that there's room for productive overlap.

This one's for you, Hitch.

Katha Pollitt is so damn funny. Here is her latest column in the Nation. It is funny. Subtly funny, intelligently funny, straight-up funny. In it, God drunk dials her and tries to get her to run for POTUS. Hilarity ensues. In my heart and on my blog, I dedicate this column to Christopher Hitchens. When I was Katha Pollitt's intern at The Nation in the fall of 2005, one of my assignments was to photocopy all of her columns from the previous five years so that the hard copies could be messengered over to her publisher for what was later to become the book "Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time," a best-of collection of her biweekly columns (Hitchens' own collection of columns, Arguably, came out recently).

Her columns were right across the page from those of Christopher Hitchens, who later left the magazine over his stance on the Iraq war (he was pro, entire rest of the office down to the plants and the carpeting was anti). Standing there by the copy machine, I absorbed a lot of vintage Hitch. He's absolutely brilliant, one of the funniest writers I've ever read, especially when he decides to be mean. But a few years ago he lost me with an incoherent Vanity Fair essay on why women aren't funny:

"Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon," said the report's author, Dr. Allan Reiss. "So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it." The report also found that "women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny."

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?

This claptrap leads to outcomes like SXSW's 29 men:1 woman comedy lineup this past March (and reinforces outdated, unhelpful gender roles). But a study out a few weeks ago put this nonsense to bed, as the consistently and highly funny Amanda Marcotte noted in Slate:

It's worth noting that this study didn't get as much coverage as other, less scientfically sound evolutionary-psychology ramblings that actually promote sexist stereotypes. Which is a shame, because this study neatly debunks the unevidenced claims of evolutionary psychology that there's a "sense of humor" gene on the Y chromosome that's there—why else?—so men can get women to sleep with them. What the researchers actually found was that the slight edge given to men in humor rankings was because men find men funnier than women find men. So much for that "will get you laid" theory.

When my late father, Gerald Sussman, worked as a humor writer at The National Lampoon in the late 1970s, the staff was all male. But that was then. This is now.

Updated Monday 8:15 am I forgot to add a list of a few other people to read if you love the funny. Send me your favorites and I'll post them too! Please you enjoy:

• Chloe Angyal, blogger at Feministing and author of this big bag of funny, a send-up of rom-coms
• Katie Halper, satirist and stand-up comedian
• Jill Filipovic and friends over at Feministe, with a couple recent favorites here and here
• Jena Axelrod, JenaNotJameson

Virginia Rometty has a wife.

It's impossible to read Friday's New York Times story about Mark Rometty, husband of newly-designated I.B.M. CEO Virginia (Ginni) Rometty, and not think of the classic feminist Judy Brady essay "I Want a Wife," in which she details precisely why she wants a wife, and what that wife would be good for:

I want a wife who will take care of my physical needs. I want a wife 
who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after my children, 
a wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes 
clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that 
my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what 
I need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals, a wife 
who is a good cook.  I want a wife who will plan the menus, do the 
necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and 
then do the cleaning up while I do my studying.

From the NYT story:

Acquaintances say the intensely private Mr. Rometty deserves tremendous credit for pursuing a career that gave him the time and flexibility to support his wife’s ascension to the pinnacle of global business — as, for that matter, do the vast majority of C.E.O. spouses of both genders. Still, the C.E.O. husband remains a rarity in American business.

.....

The Romettys aren’t the only couple reluctant to discuss the husband’s role in his wife’s success. There’s still a social stigma for the stay-at-home or less successful husband that women don’t face. And management experts say that that has to change if women are going to be represented in the top jobs at a level commensurate with their numbers and talent.

Asked at a Barnard College conference what men could do to help advance women’s leadership, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the landmark “Men and Women of the Corporation,” answered, “The laundry.”

My guess is that neither Mrs. nor Mr. Rometty are doing much laundry with their own bare hands. But his pursuit of "a career that gave him the time and flexibility to support his wife’s ascension to the pinnacle of global business" is still something notably rare at the top echelons of CEO-land. Sounds like he's been a terrific wife.

"Women are less ambitious now." Or something.

Yes, I bit the link-bait. "Survey: More professional women choosing time over money." It was a USA Today story reporting on a national survey conducted by More magazine. Here's the write-up from More's website:

Since the 1970s, women have poured into the American workplace—and now we’re at a crossroads. Stymied in our efforts to advance, confused about how to manage both a full personal life and a promising career, women are asking two questions: “Is it possible?” and “Is it worth it?” Their answers will surprise you.

For More’s third annual workplace report, we partnered with the PollingCompany/WomanTrend to survey women about their attitudes toward their jobs. Their responses make clear that in the search for balance, women are sacrificing ambition. When asked point-blank, 43 percent of women described themselves as less ambitious now than they were 10 years ago; only 15 percent reported feeling more ambitious.

Women are finished living to work; now we want to work to live. For more surprising results from our survey and for the top ten flexible jobs for professional women, pick up the November issue of More, on newsstands now.

I guess I could go pick up the November issue of More, on newsstands now, but I'm put off by the fact that they're not only hiding the results behind a paywall of sorts (the newsstand), but there's not even a hint of discussion one about the methodology. When the results are this discouraging and this provocative, throw the internet/blogosphere a bone, will ya? There's something innately irritating about saying "We did our third annual gigantic supermega poll, and the results will BLOW YOUR MIND. Please go pick up a paper copy so the results may not be easily discussed or linked to online." How did they phrase the questions? Who were they surveying? How many people? Only More readers? By phone? Online?

Isn't it ironic that a magazine called "More" would give you so little?

The economist and blogger Echidne (subject of a forthcoming Shoulder Pads interview) wrote up the USA Today story on her blog, reaching many of the same conclusions I did.

Then have a look at the way the results are reported. For instance, the quote above on wanting the boss's job states that "Almost 2 of 5 — 38% — report they don't want to put up with the stress, office politics and responsibility that often go hand in hand with such positions."

Does that means that more than three out of five ARE prepared to put up with those negative side-effects? I couldn't get hold of the study to check and it's always possible that some respondents said they don't know or didn't answer the question.

Now this would be a fun assignment. Pick the data above and write a post about how many women really are very ambitious at work! One in four of all women are hovering around, ready to grab the job of their bosses! One in four are avidly working towards their next promotion! And so on.

Most men are not working towards their next promotion. I'm willing to bet on that. But because we didn't study that at all, everything about the interpretations is pure speculation.

Even more disturbing was the MSNBC coverage of the poll, which, at two and a half minutes long, also fails to report on the methodology and recites the same depressing, headline-making statistics and includes gems like these, regarding the reasons women said they were less ambitious.

"The pressure, the responsibility. Most just wanted to have 'a life.'"

The implication, of course, is that men can handle the pressure, the responsibility, and don't want to have a life, because they'd rather be successful. And that's how we wind up with a Fortune 500 list that's 96 percent male. I am all for work-life balance, but propagating the idea that women are averse to pressure and responsibility and would rather faff around having "a life" (which, of course, presumes another earner in the household, supporting that "life") is dangerous and irresponsible. And, given that women now hold the majority of managerial positions, it's also kinda not true. From Hanna Rosin's "The End of Men."

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast.

The MSNBC piece ends with this doozy, which more or less declares "The End of Women."

"A message from the generation that broke through the glass ceiling to their daughters: Maybe having it all isn't all it's cracked up to be."

Uh, sure, right, maybe. It's entirely possible that the survey results truly did include that message. But without any details - who they polled, their ages, how many of them there were, etc. - are we really supposed to accept, at face value, that "women are less ambitious now than they were ten years ago"?

It sucks to be a lady in France, and other findings from the WEF Global Gender Gap report

Until recently, I thought French women had it good. They'd invented a magic diet whereby cheese makes them skinnier, and they get all the free maternity care a woman could want. Then the DSK scandal broke this year, unleashing some ugly truths about chauvinism in France. It was perhaps in that "aha!" spirit that a fair amount of the press coverage of the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap 2011 report, which was released today, honed in gleefully on the fact that France is #48 out 135, four places behind Kyrgyzstan where, if I have my misogynistic traditional customs GPS tuned right, bride kidnapping is still kind of a big thing. (Although some might argue that repeated alleged sexual assault charges share some similarities with the taking of a bride by force.) From the NYT/IHT piece:

France poses even more questions. Although it is at the top in education and health, it ranks only middling on women’s economic and political influence. Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum, a co-author of the report, explained in an interview that France scored 3.48 on a scale of 1 to 7 in the ability of Frenchwomen to rise to positions of enterprise leadership.

That, she said, suggested that France had a “corporate culture that does not encourage the rise of women” and was an indicator that helping women to move up the ladder “is not a major part of corporate policies.”

Then there are the Scandinavian frontrunners. These results surprise me like a pre-revolutionary Egyptian election result: "Iceland claimed the No. 1 position for the third year in a row, followed by Norway, Finland and Sweden." (Bloomberg)

Then, sadly, there's the MENA region, clinging stubbornly to its collectively lousy rankings while the world's other regions sail by:

In the Arab world, the gender gap is so wide that the United Arab Emirates enjoys the best record with a lowly rank of 103, while Saudi Arabia and Yemen hug the bottom rungs. (NYT)

Regrettably, I missed this morning's press briefing in New York, but here's a roundup of today's coverage of the 375-page report, written by Professor Ricardo Hausmann, Director, Center for International Development at Harvard, Professor Laura D. Tyson S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management at Stanford, and Saadia Zahidi, Senior Director Women Leaders and Gender Parity program at the WEF. Hats off to all of them for this gigantic annual undertaking.

It's interesting that almost all of the headlines focus on the negative.

• The IHT: Progress for Women, but a Long Way to Go
• Reuters: Women still lag economics, politics: report
• Bloomberg Businessweek: Fewer Nations Made Progress to Close Gender Gap, Study Says
• And lastly Forbes coming in with the tired-ass headline: The Best and Worst Countries for Women

What the report (and many other similar lists) cannot, by its nature, account for is the deep inequality of experience and opportunity between women in a given country. Jesse Ellison at Newsweek/The Daily Beast put this well in an article about their own rankings:

Declaring that one country is better than another in the way that it treats more than half its citizens means relying on broad strokes and generalities. (The experience of a domestic servant can hardly be compared with that of an executive with an M.B.A., even if their citizenship is the same.)

Particularly in the developing world, inequality between women and the consciousness level and commitment by those with resources and influence are CRITICAL factors in how the struggle for gender equality evolves, since inequality is often even more acute. I've lived in a few countries in the developing world, and noticed that, for all sorts of obvious reasons, it is often the most privileged women who have the greatest opportunities to work on behalf of women's rights.

As a junior studying abroad in Morocco, my mind was blown by the editor of the fashion magazine Femmes du Maroc, who devoted a substantial portion of her pages to things like legal issues, political protests against the discriminatory family law, etc. She also ran a literacy program for the young rural women who come to Morocco's cities and become domestic workers. I tried to imagine her American counterpart, Anna Wintour, doing anything of the sort. This woman was hands-on. Contrast this to Lebanon, where a lot of the wealthier women kinda have no idea that there are poor women. (There are other reasons why the Lebanese feminist movement is hamstrung, more on those later when I can find a great essay on it by I think Jean Said Makdisi.)

The other interesting thing to do, which I will undertake after I've survived a midterm on Thursday, would be to compare this ranking with the Reuters Trust rankings that came out earlier this year and which took a lot of heat for being based on perceptions of people surveyed, rather than statistics and a clean, verifiable methodology. I mean, in the end, would I rather be a woman in France (#48), or in Lesotho (#9)?  Come on, now. Pass the cheese.

By the way, here's what I did this morning while I wasn't at the press briefing: I ran around Bobst Library doing a scavenger hunt and coming down with a severe case of Library Syndrome, in which I daydream intensely of retiring at 30 and spending the rest of my days checking out books and reading them in bed. There's an amazing cookbook section that begs for a daylong visit on a snowy day over winter break.

Is the gender pay gap sort of like a unicorn?

I ask because my macroeconomics professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU, Michael Waugh, doesn't seem to think it exists. Maybe he's kidding, or maybe he's pretending he doesn't believe me so I can work harder to prove my ideas (I'm hoping this is the case), or maybe he's in deep denial, because our class discussions and after-class discussions go something like this:

Him: I don't believe the government should mandate equal pay for men and women.

Me: But women earn an average of 23% less for performing the same work as men.

Him: How do you know it's the same work?

Me: [Sputter in disbelief]

Him: Can you prove it? If women were really so much more productive, firms would hire them away from the companies that are underpaying them. The market would solve it.

I'm going to go ahead and take the not-very-radical step of asserting that the gender pay gap does, in fact, exist, and that its root cause is discrimination, and not that women are, across the board, 23% less productive and efficient than their male co-workers.

The longtime feminist economist blogger Echidne (with whom I hope to do a Shoulder Pads interview in the near future) has meticulously documented and explained not only its existence, but the myths surrounding it, here. She neatly does away with the rudimentary objections voiced by my professor, which Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber called "Stone Age labor economics," or rather, "Stone Age labour economics," because he's British.

I asked some finance people, wonks and feminists about this, and drew really excellent responses.  Since they said it way better than I could, I quote/excerpt them here [all emphases mine]:

From public policy whiz Kathleen Geier:

Even if there is no discrimination against young women, the fact that there still is a substantial pay gap among older workers, and that so few women make it to the top ranks of corporate America, politics, etc., is compelling prima facie evidence that a lot of discrimination is still going on.

The best studies on the gender gap in pay have all shown that such a gap definitely exists, *even when* you control for every observable factor like education, experience, hours worked, type of work, etc. Now, there are two ways you can explain that. One is simply that there is some discrimination going on. The other is that there is some difference in unobservable characteristics between men and women -- e.g., that men are harder working, or more motivated, or more intelligent or more able in ways that are not outwardly observable but which quickly reveal themselves on the job.

Which scenario seems more plausible to you? Many free market economist types have a bias toward believing that markets function efficiently almost all the time, so they're not going to think that discrimination is happening and that any group is getting paid less, or more, than it is worth. So they're going to go with the "unobservable skill differential" story. But "unobservable skill differential" is basically a polite way of saying, straight up, that women are innately inferior to men. That's basically what Larry Summers implied in his notorious remarks, when he mentioned biological differences as a possible explanation for women's underrepresentation in the hard sciences.

Biological differences, or "unobservable skill differential," or what have you, basically amounts to saying that women are biologically inferior. Aside from the fact that that's a profoundly ugly aspersion to be casting, there's not very much empirical evidence for it. Whereas there is literally mountains of evidence that women have been discriminated against -- tons of excellent, scientifically rigorous studies have shown this.

We know very well what equal work is, in a legal sense. (Oh yeah, the law!  That old thing! - ALS)

From Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber:

For some purposes (including, probably some macroeconomics) it makes sense to think of the labour market as a continuous spot auction in this way but a labour market like that has never really existed (the docks in Liverpool at the start of the 19th century probably closest). Economists really often need to take a step back and say "if I was a business, how would I actually do that?"  In any deep and realistic model of the labour market, search costs and recruitment costs would eat you alive if you tried to arbitrage away the gender pay gap.  In general, people in economics departments are much too quick to help themselves to arguments which assume that various versions of the law of one price will hold - I was inoculated against this at an early age when I sat next to a guy who spent all day trying to arb Royal Dutch against Shell.

From Katha Pollitt, feminist writer and thinker par excellence:

Anyone who's ever had a job knows the best person doesn't always get hired or promoted. I'm sure your prof can think of examples in his own department!   There's collegiality, nepotism, old boy networks, sexism and racism. People don't always like working with people who are 'different.'  Just ask a black guy. There are also huge assumptions about who is good at what, who the customers want to see, who suppliers can deal with easily --assumptions that usually favor white men. For example, if socializing with customers and clients includes visits to strip clubs and other male playgrounds, then being a man becomes an unacknowledged job qualification.

Katha also added this very important point:

etc! 

Thank you, everyone, for your contributions and readers -- please, please weigh in with thoughts and resources on this one.

Money, food and sex: not the winningest of combinations

In "Predictably Irrational," behavioral economist Dan Ariely writes about the two separate worlds we inhabit, "one where social norms prevail, and the other where market norms make the rules." He describes a [purely hypothetical, I'm sure] guy who takes a girl out for dinner several times, and eventually mentions how much all these dates are costing him. She's offended he expects sex in return for spending money.  Ariely writes, "He should have known that one can't mix social and market norms - especially in this case - without implying that the lady is a tramp." I'm going to have to go ahead and agree with that. I was recently asked out by someone who mentioned "free coffee" in the subject line of the email. Free coffee? Oh go on, spoil me. We eventually wound up having dinner, after which he suggested convening again. When I told him my schedule did not permit, he wrote back suggesting a number of different meal options (breakfast, lunch, dinner and brunch), insisting that surely I must have to eat at some point. Well yes, of course I need to eat, but I do not need to eat in his company, nor at his expense.

In fact, even without his assistance, I have been managing to eat (and procure my own coffee).  Three, four, five, heck, six times a day if I'm up late and need a midnight snack. Sometimes I cook for myself, sometimes I eat with a friend or my mom, and sometimes I get takeout. Lately, due to my school and work schedule, I've been relying heavily on takeout. But buddy, I've been eating all my life. That's how I got to be 29 years old and still alive.

The implication was that somehow, until he came along with his credit card and Zagat's 2011 edition in hand, I was dumpster diving and/or surviving off cat food and/or whoring myself out for coffee. The other, more insidious implication was that he is only good as a meal ticket, which is not only a misread of what I am after, but entirely unfair to himself. He's a wildly smart, very interesting person who is selling himself short, in much the same way that women who trade in on their "erotic capital" (more on that load of horses**t later), instead of their intellectual or other forms of capital, are also ignoring what I would argue are more fundamental and authentic parts of themselves.

The gender pay gap still exists. Men still earn more than women, and sure, maybe some women like to go out with men who make more money than they do. Lots of people  - male and female - enjoy being treated to a meal by a friend or a partner, and lots of people enjoy treating others. But when courting, remember, you yourself are supposed to be the main event. Meals are supposed to facilitate the process of getting to know one another; they are not in themselves sufficient to sustain a relationship.

In other words, I'm not going to date a meal, so please don't make that the best thing you have to offer. It's not. You're better than that.

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.