family

On Lying About How Much You Work

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909 - Idiocy

The Harvard Business Review has an article that is at once shocking and utterly obvious. The premise of the article is that in a lot of demanding (and also very lucrative) professional service careers there is a culture that demands ridiculous hours as a signal that an employee is fully committed to the team. “We often think of problems with these expectations as women’s problems,” says Erin Reid, “But men too may struggle with them.”

Reid found that there were a couple of important differences, however. The biggest is that men have two choices when they refuse to sell their souls to the job: they can either publicly ask for more accommodation or they can “pass” which is to say: lie about how much they work. If they take the path of formally asking for less-demanding positions (e.g. asking for a domestic rather than an international assignment, asking for time off after a child is born), then they face the same stiff penalties as women who ask for official accommodation: lost promotions and marginalization. But if they can successfully hide their true hours and get away with working less than people assume they do, then they can simultaneously work fewer hours and preserve their sterling reputations.

I haven’t ever worked in a management consulting firm or similar high-pressure environment. My corporate experience has been like a watered-down version of these trends, but it’s the same basic concept.[ref]My current position is with a small company, so it’s very different than corporate culture of any kind.[/ref]Conspicuous overwork is like conspicuous consumption: a way to signal that you’re part of the in-group. I’ve always been disgusted by the dishonesty that goes along with it, however. No one ever (in my experience) lied outright about their hours, but based on observations and conversations I’m sure that a lot of white-collar professionals vastly overstate their hours to their bosses and often to themselves. Not when they actually have to record their hours, but when they are paid salary and the hours are implied.

Another thing to note: the bias was specifically anti-family.

Intriguingly, the pushback men received for asking for time away from work seemed limited to time for family: one man who had since left the firm told me that, when his daughter was born he had been harassed for taking two weeks of paternity leave, despite spending some of that leave working. But when, later that year, he and his family took a three-week vacation to an exotic locale, the vacation was permitted, and his team encouraged him to “unplug” and take a real vacation. This disparity in treatment seems, at one level, ridiculous, but at another level, entirely consistent with the firm’s expectation that men be ideal workers: taking on mundane responsibilities in one’s family life can threaten one’s devotion to work, while affording an expensive vacation may be instead contingent upon devotion to and success at work.

 

I believe the problem starts with outmoded vestiges of Industrial Revolution assumptions. During that time–when professional work in large corporations first became widespread–a lot of the work was mechanized. In that scenario your productivity as a worker is basically equivalent to the time you spend pulling the lever (or whatever it is you’re supposed to do.) Partially this outdated assumption is sticking with us based on sheer inertia, but I think the bigger explanation has to do with the big differences between client-facing roles and knowledge roles. There are lots of coders, data analysts, and other knowledge workers who would get much more done with 12 hours of hard work per week (and some overhead for meetings and maintenance) than 50 hours spent primarily browsing Facebook and pretending to work. But if you give them genuine freedom to work as effectively as possible, you will likely enrage the client reps who really do need to be at their desk (or otherwise available) throughout the entire work day no matter what.

It gets trickier when you consider that the knowledge workers are generally highly-skilled and probably better paid, while client-facing folks (like call center employees, to use an extreme example) are much closer to entry level. I’m not sure that I want a super-efficient system if it means creating such a major divide between self-directed knowledge workers with tremendous freedom and lower-level employees who are locked in to 9-5 drudgery.

In the long run, you hope that all the boring jobs eventually get taken over by computers and we all become highly-skilled, self-directed workers, but transitioning to that point without great injustice (not to mention civil unrest) is a tricky, tricky problem. In the meantime, however, it would great for companies to drop the unrealistic expectations of hyper-schedules and realize that, in the long run, fathers and mothers are both better workers when are treated more like humans and less like resources. The potential to have more fairness for male and female workers and a  healthier society in general (as family takes greater priority) is a win-win.

1.5 Million Missing Black Men

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A recent piece from The New York Times describes what can only be called a staggering, haunting, and horrific picture:

In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life. In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South — from North Charleston, S.C., through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and up into Ferguson, Mo. — hundreds of thousands more are missing.

They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million, according to an Upshot analysis. For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity.

African-American men have long been more likely to be locked up and more likely to die young, but the scale of the combined toll is nonetheless jarring. It is a measure of the deep disparities that continue to afflict black men — disparities being debated after a recent spate of killings by the police — and the gender gap is itself a further cause of social ills, leaving many communities without enough men to be fathers and husbands.

Perhaps the starkest description of the situation is this: More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life.

…The disappearance of these men has far-reaching implications. Their absence disrupts family formation, leading both to lower marriage rates and higher rates of childbirth outside marriage, as research by Kerwin Charles, an economist at the University of Chicago, with Ming-Ching Luoh, has shown.

The black women left behind find that potential partners of the same race are scarce, while men, who face an abundant supply of potential mates, don’t need to compete as hard to find one. As a result, Mr. Charles said, “men seem less likely to commit to romantic relationships, or to work hard to maintain them.”

Arguments over racial disparities are sensitive and more often than not heated (just take a quick look at your Facebook feed regarding Baltimore). Blame is placed in various places, from systemic and institutional racism to individual choice and accountability. I have my own opinions (largely a mixture of the two), but that isn’t what I’m interested in with this post. Put aside the finger-pointing, the outrage, and the judgment for a moment. Just look at those numbers and think of the human faces behind them. And then weep.

T&S Post: Privilege and the Family

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932 - Dom Viol Chart

I wrote a post for Times and Seasons today: Privilege and the Family. The post borrows heavily from work that Walker Wright has done right here at Difficult Run collecting research and data (like the chart above) on the impact of marriage and family for children’s outcomes, and also seeks to answer a couple of questions raised at By Common Consent recently: Who has two thumbs and doesn’t give a crap about the Family? The questions are:

  1. Why should we care about the family?
  2. What does it mean to stand up for the family?

If that sounds like an interesting post to you, then you should check it out.

 

Marriage: Safe Haven in Unsafe Neighborhoods

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Research has found that children in two-parent families are less likely to be victims of a crime compared to those in single parent households, but it has been ambiguous as to whether this is due to marriage or the neighborhoods in which married families choose to live. A recent analysis on the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children’s Health, however, “shows that even when their families live in unsafe neighborhoods, children in married two-parent families are less likely to be exposed to violent crime than children of never-married and divorced parents.” Family scholar Nicholas Zill explains,

When I looked at combinations of neighborhood safety and family type in which children lived, those living with never-married mothers in unsafe or unsupportive neighborhoods unsurprisingly had the highest rate of encountering neighborhood violence: 165 children per 1,000. This was five times the rate of violence exposure for children living with both married parents in safe and supportive neighborhoods: 32 children per 1,000. Children living with separated or divorced mothers in unsafe neighborhoods were not far behind their peers with never-married mothers: 153 children per 1,000. While children in intact families who resided in unsafe neighborhoods had a higher risk of encountering violence than similar children in safe neighborhoods, their rate of exposure was lower than that of children of never-married or divorced mothers who lived in safe and supportive neighborhoods.[ref]Of course, “these comparisons are adjusted for differences across family types in the average age, sex, and race/ethnicity of the child; family income and poverty status; and the parent’s education level.”[/ref]

Zill offers three possible explanations for his findings:

First is the stress of conflict between parents and the strain of raising children as a lone parent in reduced financial circumstances. These can lead to a lack of vigilance and the overlooking of simple precautions, such as making sure that doors and windows are locked in houses and vehicles. Second, if they have broken up with their child’s other parent, a single parent will usually begin dating and trying to find a new partner. This process often involves being out of the house at night, sometimes leaving children with no or inadequate supervision. Third, as children become adolescents, the peers they become involved with in their less-than-ideal neighborhoods and schools are often troubled ones, who can lead them into hazardous situations and activities.

For me, this is just more evidence as to why those who are concerned about social justice should be the biggest advocates of marriage.

Healthy Marriages: Protecting Women and Children From Domestic Violence

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W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia has a recent article exploring the connection between family structure and domestic violence. Drawing on new evidence, he writes,

Using data from the 2011-12 National Survey of Children’s Health, which surveyed more than 90,000 parents of children aged 17 and under, Zill reports that domestic violence is much lower in families headed by intact, married parents. The figure below shows differences, by family structure, in the odds that parents reported that their child had ever seen or heard “any parents, guardians, or any other adults in the home slap, hit, kick, punch, or beat each other up,” after adjusting for differences in the sex, age, and race or ethnicity of the child, as well as family income, poverty status, and parent education. So, even after controlling for…pet variables—“education, income and race”—Zill finds that homes headed by never-married, separated, or divorced mothers are about five times more likely to expose children to domestic violence, compared to homes headed by married, biological parents.

Wilcox also notes that marriage may actually be a causal factor in this stabilizing, low-conflict environment. Linking to numerous sources, Wilcox finds that “men tend to settle down after they marry, to be more attentive to the expectations of friends and kin, to be more faithful, and to be more committed to their partners—factors that minimize the risk of violence.”

He concludes that this is yet “more evidence that violence against women (not to mention their intimates and children) is markedly rarer in families headed by married parents regardless of how well-off or well- educated mom is…[W]hat should be clear to analysts willing to follow the data wherever it leads is this: a healthy marriage seems to matter more than money when it comes to minimizing the scourge of domestic violence in American families.”

Marriage and Children Outcomes

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The above graph comes from yet another post at the Brookings Institution, which finds that marriage leads to better outcomes for children. However, this study breaks it down into two main reasons:

  • More money: the income effect

  • More engaged parenting: the parenting effect

However, the authors come to an interesting conclusion:

If the benefits of marriage for children can be explained by other observable characteristics of the family, and especially money or parenting behavior, then policy may be more successful if focused on those pathways. It would be convenient to find the magic bullet – the one family input that really matters – but of course the truth is messier. Children’s life chances will be influenced by a complicated, shifting mesh of family characteristics (and many other factors outside the family).

Marriage is a powerful means by which incomes can be raised and parenting can be improved. But marriage itself seems immune to the ministrations of policymakers. In which case, policies to increase the incomes of unmarried parents, especially single parents, and to help parents to improve their parenting skills, should be where policy energy is now expended.

Yet, W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project points out that

marriage itself fosters higher income and better parenting among today’s parents. For instance, men who get and stay married work longer hours and make more money than their unmarried peers. And fathers and mothers who are in an intact marriage tend to engage in more involved, affectionate, and consistent parenting than their peers in single- or step-families.

The bigger point is this: you cannot easily strip marriage of its constituent parts, such as more money and a supportive parenting environment, give those parts to parents apart from marriage, and expect that children will do as well, apart from marriage.

Family Instability and Wages

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Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz has an interesting piece in The New York Times on rising family instability. Commenting on male and female wages, she states,

Today, job prospects for young men are far less favorable. Real wages for men under age 35 have fallen almost continuously since the late 1970s, and those with only a high school diploma have experienced the sharpest losses. Between 1979 and 2007, young male high school graduates saw a 29 percent decline in real annual earnings — an even steeper decline than the 18 percent drop for men with no high school diploma…Women’s wages, by contrast, have risen significantly since the 1970s, except for those on the very bottom…Meanwhile, women’s expectation of fairness and reciprocity in marriage has been rising even as men’s ability to compensate for deficits in their behavior by being “good providers” has been falling. Low-income women consistently tell researchers that the main reason they hesitate to marry — even if they are in love, even if they have moved in with a man to share expenses, and even if they have a child — is that they see a bad marriage or divorce as a greater threat to their well-being than being single.

She concludes,

If women lowered their expectations to match men’s lower economic prospects, perhaps marriage would be more common in low-income communities. But it would most likely be even less stable, and certainly less fair. Turning back the inequality revolution may be difficult. But that would certainly help more families — at almost all income levels — than turning back the gender revolution.

This piece goes nicely with a recent review in The Wall Street Journal by sociologist and National Marriage Project director W. Bradford Wilcox, in which he points out,

Although the authors put too much stress on economic explanations-their approach cannot explain, for instance, why the economic dislocation of the Depression did not result in high levels of family breakdown in the 1930s-the story told by “Marriage Markets” is worth heeding, whatever one’s political affiliations. Conservatives need to take note of the growing family divide in part because fragile families require more public aid, from Medicaid to food stamps: As marriage goes, so goes the tradition of limited government. Progressives, for their part, might well worry that the family divide begets not only economic disparity but also gender inequality. After all, communities where fathers are largely absent from their children’s day-to-day lives do not come close to approximating the egalitarian ideal championed by today’s left-of-center thinkers and activists.

…What, then, is to be done? Ms. Carbone and Ms. Cahn offer a number of good suggestions, such as job-relocation grants for laid-off workers (to help them move away from high-unemployment regions to those with jobs) and portable health plans that allow workers to seek out the best job opportunities instead of clinging to bad, low-paying jobs for the sake of their benefits.

But the authors also think that the way forward requires strategies designed to “enhanc[e] women’s power”-such as “improved access to contraception.” …Perhaps. But a stronger case could be made that the bigger challenge facing working-class and poor families is not a lack of female empowerment but rather that contemporary masculinity has been decoupled from work, fatherhood and marriage-and for reasons that are not entirely economic.

Good stuff. Check them out.

 

Marriage, Parenthood, and Public Policy

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Ron Haskins of the Brooking Institution has an excellent piece in the Spring 2014 issue of National Affairs. He begins by reviewing the current state of marriage and the rising rate of single parenthood in the United States. Furthermore, he looks at the impact single parenthood has on children, including the increased risk of poverty.

He then looks at the four major policies used to combat this social problem:

  • Reducing non-marital births
  • Boosting marriage
  • Helping young men become more marriageable
  • Helping single mothers improve their and their children’s lives

Haskins provides a balanced overview of the empirical outcomes of these policies, both successes and failures. He concludes,

If we want to address the challenges of income inequality and immobility, we must address one of their main causes — non-marital births and single parenting. Maybe stable, married-couple families will never again be the dominant norm, but if so the children who are raised by such traditional families will continue to have yet another advantage over their peers who have minimal contact with their fathers, live in chaotic households, and are exposed to instability at home as their mothers change partners.

Our society and culture will no doubt continue to change, but our children will continue to pay the price for adult decisions about family composition. Public policies cannot ultimately solve this problem, but those that prove themselves capable of ameliorating some of the damage are surely worth pursuing.

Worth the read.

(Neo) Traditional Marriage

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Over at The Atlantic, Brooking’s Richard Reeves argues that “the most affluent and educated Americans…are creating a new model for marriage—one that is liberal about adult roles, conservative about raising children.” Reeves calls these “high-investment parenting” marriages or HIP. “The central rationale for these marriages,” explains Reeves, “is to raise children together, in a settled, nurturing environment.” These couples “take their time to select a partner; and then, once the marriage is at least a couple of years old, take the final step and become parents. Money, marriage, maternity: in that order.” According to Reeves, this represents a new child-centric, gender-equal model of marriage.

However, a couple recent articles demonstrate that this isn’t exactly new. Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute points out that far from being a product of the Industrial Revolution, “the nuclear family—a mother, father and child(ren) in a “simple house,” as Laslett put it—was the dominant arrangement in England stretching back to the thirteenth century.” In northwestern Europe “men and women married later than in other parts of the world, only after they had saved enough money to set up an independent home. By the time they were ready to tie the knot, their own parents were often deceased, making multi-generational households a relative rarity. In fact, the family arrangement so common to England helps explain why it and other nations of northwest Europe were the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the launching ground for modern affluence. The young nuclear family had to be flexible and mobile as it searched for opportunity and property.” This led to expanding roles between genders.[ref]As historian Mary Hartman explains, “Within households, men came to depend less on their own male blood relatives and more on their wives for livelihood and support, whereas outside households they came increasingly to rely on unrelated men rather than on kin networks. Women, for their part, emerged as more active if not equal partners with their husbands in decisionmaking within households and also within their local communities . . . Husbands requiring responsible partners were obliged, however reluctantly, to abandon the image of the irrational and unruly female, and to refashion women’s image more closely to their own. . . . [t]he whole society was becoming less, not more, patriarchal, starting at the basic level of the household . . . the unity of kin and property that for thousands of years had been the central focus of most men’s worlds began to dissolve” (Quoted in V.H. Cassler, “‘Some Things That Should Not Have Been Forgotten Were Lost’: The Pro-Feminist, Pro-Democracy, Pro-Peace Case for State Privileging of Companionate Heterosexual Monogamous Marriage,” SquareTwo 2:1, Spring 2009).[/ref] Furthermore, this arrangement was “uniquely child-centered… The older brides of northwest Europe…had fewer fertile years ahead of them and smaller families, which enabled them to provide more focused attention on each child.” This means that “the children of married couples are internalizing their parents’ bourgeois aspirations and child-centeredness, both of which lie deep in the bones of the institution they have chosen to enter.”

Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox notes that “family life is organized along neo-traditional lines, and has been since the 1990s, when the gender revolution stalled out in married families. It’s new in the sense that today’s married dads do a lot more child care and housework than dads of the 1950s, and that most married moms are working in the paid labor force. But it’s “traditional” in the sense that most husbands take the lead when it comes to breadwinning, and most wives take the lead when it comes to childrearing.” Married mothers still handle close to 70% of the child care and housework, while married fathers work 65% of their households’ hours in paid labor force and earn nearly 70% of their families’ income. This fits their preferences: “53 percent [of married mothers] prefer part-time work and 23 percent prefer to be stay-at-home mothers. (This stands in marked contrast to married fathers: 75 percent of them think working full-time is ideal and an additional 13 percent prefer part-time work, according to Pew data.)”

 

This is why “public policies and cultural norms related to work and family should be geared toward maximizing flexibility, rather than locking in approaches geared to serving full-time, dual-income families, and toward renewing the employment opportunities of poor and working-class men who have become less “marriageable” in recent years.”

Apparently, child-centeredness and adaptation of gender roles to economic circumstances and preferences aren’t all that new. We should remember that before skewering “traditional” marriage.

Child Support

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This post is reprinted with permission from Secular Pro-Life:

 

When arguing about abortion, I’ve seen a lot of people claim “sex isn’t a contract.” Other variations of this idea include: 

  • Consent to A doesn’t mean consent to B (that is, consent to sex doesn’t mean consent to reproduction).
  • You clearly don’t consent to reproduce if you use birth control.
  • Sex is not a crime and shouldn’t be punished / Rights cannot be restricted unless there is a crime.

The problem is, when it comes to reproduction, these arguments only apply to women. 

If a man gets a woman pregnant–be it his wife, girlfriend, affair, or one night stand–he is legally bound to provide support for that child. In other words, because the man participated in the child’s conception (because the man had sex), his rights are altered. It doesn’t matter if the man was only consenting to sex, and not to reproduction. It doesn’t matter if he used birth control. It doesn’t matter that sex isn’t a crime. He fathered the kid, so the law considers him responsible for the kid.

And the law takes a pretty hard line on the subject. Courts can require a father to pay child support based not just on what he earns, but on what courts believe he has the ability to earn. Child support obligations remain even if a father goes to prison, or declares bankruptcy. Even if he wants to terminate his parental rights (and therefore his parental responsibilities), the courts usually won’t allow it unless there is another adult prepared to adopt the child and take over that responsibility. And there are many methods for enforcing child support. A man’s tax refunds can be intercepted, his property seized, business or occupational license suspended, and in some states his driver’s license can be revoked. If he still fails to make payment, he can be held in contempt and given jail time.

In short, if a man has sex he runs the risk of being (rather tightly) legally bound to any new life he creates. In the essay “Abortion and Fathers’ Rights“, author Stephen D. Hales summarizes the situation:

…the father, having participated in conception, cannot escape the future duties he will have toward the child. The father can decide that he cannot afford another child, that he is not psychologically prepared to be a parent, that a child would hinder the lifestyle he wishes to pursue, and so on, to no avail.

Sound sad? If a man is forced to pay child support, that could mean serious emotional, psychological, financial, and social repercussions for him. So why do we have child support laws? Is it because we hate sex, and want to punish people for having sex?

No, of course not. And interestingly, you rarely see anyone even suggest as much. No, it’s clear to most people that we have child support laws in order to, you know, support children. Child support laws aren’t enforced to punish men for having sex—they’re enforced because it’s best for the child. In the same way, abortion shouldn’t be outlawed to punish women for having sex—it should be outlawed to protect fetal life. In both cases, it’s not about punishment, it’s about protection.

And that’s as it should be.

I’d love to live in a world in which there are no unplanned pregnancies and no unintentional parents. I think people should have control over whether they become parents, in the sense that people should have control over whether they get pregnant or get someone pregnant. That’s why I support comprehensive sex education: I want people to understand their own fertility and, if they do choose to have sex, I want them to understand how they can best prevent pregnancy while being sexually active.

However, once pregnancy has happened, once there’s already a new human organism in the picture, it changes everything. I think the people whose actions created that new life should be responsible for its protection. 

Of course, many people disagree. Abortion rights advocates place reproductive freedom over protecting the lives we create, at least when it comes to women and pregnancy. How would this mentality look if they also applied it to men and child support? Hales has an idea:

A man has the moral right to decide not to become a father (in the social, nonbiological sense) during the time that the woman he has impregnated may permissibly abort. He can make a unilateral decision whether to refuse fatherhood, and is not morally obliged to consult with the mother or any other person before reaching a decision. Moreover, neither the mother nor any other person can veto or override a man’s decision about becoming a father. He has first and last say about what he does with his life in this regard.

(And if we’re being really consistent, he doesn’t have to inform the woman he impregnated, or anyone else, about his decision to refuse fatherhood.)

It seems to me that consistency requires abortion rights advocates to argue for the man’s right to choose as well as the woman’s: the pro-choice mentality means that, as women can “walk away” from their pregnancies, men should be able to walk away from the women they have impregnated. 

Not very uplifting, is it?

Or we could strive for a different kind of consistency–the kind that holds both men and women to a higher standard. This is why I’m for child support laws, and this is why I’m against abortion.