Bryce Covert

Editor

 

 

bcovert@rooseveltinstitute.org

Recent Posts by Bryce Covert

  • Reducing Abortions: It's the Economy, Stupid

    Feb 23, 2012Bryce Covert

    If we put women back to work, lifted them out of poverty, and funded social services they rely on, fewer women would turn to abortion.

    If we put women back to work, lifted them out of poverty, and funded social services they rely on, fewer women would turn to abortion.

    It seems the cat's finally out of the bag these days: conservatives aren't just concerned with saving the babies from abortions when it comes to reproductive rights. They are now outspoken about being against access to contraception -- and some of them have even come out against non-procreative sex. Women's rights activists have long warned that they were coming for our birth control; now it's hard to deny they were right all along.

    One big clue this whole time has been a simple fact: if conservatives are so hell-bent on preventing abortions, one of the best things they can do is support family planning services and access to contraception. Yet the last time we saw an openly pro-family planning Republican was the '80s, when George H.W. Bush was in office. Meanwhile, all Republican 2012 candidates have signed personhood pledges that endanger many forms of contraception, Santorum himself has said birth control is bad, and I've lost track of how many times Republicans have tried to defund Planned Parenthood, which supplies contraception to low-income women. But as Irin Carmon laid out, the connection between increasing access to contraception and lowering abortion rates is very clear.

    There's another clue that this isn't about saving the babies. It's the blind eye conservatives have turned to the economic factors that are leading more women to turn to abortion. A new report, "Abortionomics: When Choice is a Necessity," shows that "lower incomes and rising unemployment are affecting Americans' choices about pregnancies," and in the recession abortion rates, particularly among poor women, are on the rise. Stephanie Poggi of the National Network of Abortion Funds says, "A lot of women are... telling us, 'I've already put off paying my rent, my electric bill; I'm cutting back on my food.' They've run through all the options." In lean times, a child can seem like an overwhelming expense.

    It's not terribly shocking that when incomes are strapped, millions are out of a job, and many are falling into poverty, women are thinking twice about having a child. Raising a kid in this country is not a cheap undertaking. For a two-parent couple making under $57,600, the USDA estimates the costs of raising a young child to be $10,950 a year. The total cost of taking care of that child until he or she turns 18 averaged $226,920 in 2010, up nearly 40 percent over the last decade. As one woman in the report puts it, "I totally cannot afford another child. I knew immediately [upon learning about her pregnancy] what I had to do."

    Those without a job don't have the income to cover these kinds of expenses. Over 12 million people are unemployed right now; almost 6 million of those are women. One unemployed woman in the report who chose abortion says, "At this time I am not working and neither is my partner... We are unable to support a child under our present circumstances." If Republicans are concerned about reversing the rise in abortion rates, they need to focus on putting people back to work making decent pay. Putting women to work in large part means spending money at the state level to keep them on public payrolls.

    Check out “The 99 Percent Plan,” a new Roosevelt Institute/Salon essay series on the progressive vision for the economy.

    But even after women are back at work, we still have to wrestle with a big factor: the high number of women living in poverty who seek abortions. One study found that 69 percent of women having abortions in 2008 made incomes lower than 200 percent of the poverty line, while women in that income category make up only 35 percent of the overall population. In fact, the report says, "while abortion rates generally have declined over the last 20 years...rates have increased among low-income women." And a lot of women have been falling into that category lately. Recent Census numbers show that women's poverty rate rose to 14.5 percent in 2010, the highest since 1993. Their "extreme poverty rate" -- those whose income is less than half of the federal poverty line -- is at 6.3 percent, the highest on record.

    The link between addressing poverty and lowering the abortion rate may be uncomfortable for conservatives like Mitt "I don't care about the very poor" Romney, but it's one of the most important factors. As the report notes, "low income women often have difficulty affording preventive contraception and sometimes address this problem by reducing frequency or dosage use, thereby increasing the risk of unintended pregnancy in the group most likely to decide they are unable to afford to support an additional dependent."

    And lastly, the point conservatives may enjoy the least: we need to increase spending on social services. As the report puts it, "As funding for social services declines, more women may be expected to determine that economic constraints make abortion the only viable option." The report is mostly talking about services that provide access to contraception. But there are other services that we're cutting back on that will impact the decision to have a child. For example, 37 states pulled back on child care support in 2010 due to tight budgets. Yet the average cost of full-time care ranges from $3,600 to $18,200 annually. That's a huge part of the cost of raising a child, but we're giving parents less support to pay for it.

    Women choose to terminate pregnancies for all sorts of reasons and should be able to access abortion care when they do. Tight budgets aren't the only reason to choose not to have a child. But economic factors that prevent families from having children should be high on conservatives' list. If we ease those families' financial situations, they may not have to turn to terminating a pregnancy. But instead conservatives are fighting access to contraceptives, cutting off funding for services that would make life easier for women living in poverty, and blocking job creation policies.

    Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

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  • The Census Perpetuates Leave It to Beaver Gender Roles

    Feb 16, 2012Bryce Covert

    By assuming women are default child caretakers, the Census devalues care work, puts pressure on women, and ignores fathers completely.

    By assuming women are default child caretakers, the Census devalues care work, puts pressure on women, and ignores fathers completely.

    Anyone who knows me will be shocked to hear that I may agree with Rick Santorum on something. But while he was in the midst of ranting against radical feminists back in 2005, Santorum said this: "We need to value mothers and fathers spending time with their children much more than we do in America." He even makes a point of saying this "goes for men and women." In my twisted reading of what he was actually trying to say, Santorum may be more progressive on this point than our own government. Because when it comes to the Census Bureau's data collection efforts on child care, its definitions are based on long-held, yet unhelpful, ideas of who does the care work at home. (Hint: it doesn't go for men and women.)

    The Census regularly reports who cares for children when parents work in its report "Who's Minding the Kids?" A trove of data on child care arrangements in the U.S., given the lack of support for families with working parents and the dearth of affordable options, is exciting. But it goes about classifying things all wrong. On page one of the most recent report, it lays out some basic terms. And, I quote, "In households where both parents are present, the mother is the designated parent." What is couched in the dressing of scientific term is really a judgment: that women are the default caretakers. Minding Johnny and Susie is only dad's concern if mom's not around. Otherwise it's something that she just does. But then it does away with even this term to say, "In this report, unless otherwise noted, the term parent is used to refer to the designated parent." Dad gets booted from even counting as a parent, not just the designated one. So what is dad then? Just some guy who lives in the same house who sometimes stands in as a child care arrangement.

    But it gets worse. If mom's not around to talk to the Census, dad isn't even empowered to know anything about how his kids are cared for. "If the mother is not available for an interview, the father of the child can give proxy responses for her." But he will never be a real source of information on child care duties. Because he's rarely ever going to be doing it: "The survey only asked about child care provided by the father for the time the designated parent was working." What dad would deign to care for his kids if mom's around to do it for him?

    The Census claims it is simply trying to collect data based on "gender norms," as Lynda Laughlin of the Fertility and Family Statistics Branch told the New York Times' KJ Dell'Antonia. "Regardless of how much families have changed over the last 50 years women are still primarily responsible for work in the home," she points out. A mother is "not only caring for the child only while Dad works. She's probably caring for the child 24 hours and so Dad is able to go to work regardless."

    Laughlin is probably correct in her estimation of the gender norms women face. But why replicate these pernicious ideas? This misconception that women are default caretakers reverberates throughout the entire workforce.

    Check out “The 99 Percent Plan,” a new Roosevelt Institute/Salon essay series on the progressive vision for the economy.

    In a controversial article riffing off the "opt-out revolution" trend of a few years ago, Linda Hirshman talks about the fact that many college-educated women who hold jobs choose to stay home -- sometimes even before kids arrive on the scene. Whether you may quibble with her data-mining methods, she makes a vital point as to why this might happen: women are still responsible for child care and homemaking, a fact that hasn't really changed even as women have flooded the workforce. The fact that women are thought of as default caretakers -- by their husbands, their workplaces, their society, and even themselves -- plays out in very specific ways. Hirshman writes:

    The economic temptation is to assign the cost of child care to the woman's income. If a woman making $50,000 per year whose husband makes $100,000 decides to have a baby, and the cost of a full-time nanny is $30,000, the couple reason that, after paying 40 percent in taxes, she makes $30,000, just enough to pay the nanny. So she might as well stay home. This totally ignores that both adults are in the enterprise together and the demonstrable future loss of income, power, and security for the woman who quits.

    Hirsman postulates that this is due to a lack of transformation in the home. But it's also a lack of transformation at work. If by and large women are still being paid less than men for the same work, then it will be easier to think of her lower salary as the most expendable. And her family wouldn't be faced with such stark economic choices if we supported parents who work. There's no such thing as guaranteed maternal leave -- the Census itself recently found that half of mothers don't get any leave at all. We have some family leave policies in place but many workers fall through the cracks. And not to mention that there are few quality, affordable, and accessible child care options for parents who don't rely on family members. We're still making it difficult to be a working parent, let alone a working mother.

    The fallout from assuming that one gender just naturally "does" care work goes beyond the family. It devalues care work itself. This is a large part of why domestic workers are still fighting to be protected by national labor laws after having been excluded on the grounds that what they do is "babysitting" or offering "companionship." Because of these exclusions, our 1.7 million home care workers have been excluded from minimum wage and overtime protections. That means employers aren't required to pay them for all of their work hours, reimburse them for costs incurred as part of work, or pay them time-and-a-half for working over 40 hours a week. All of this adds up to pathetic pay: in 2009 the median wage of $9.34 an hour added up to just $20,283 a year. President Obama just nixed this exclusion for home health aides, but child care workers are still working outside labor laws.

    It also impacts working women by assuming that they will interrupt or leave their careers to care for children without asking whether men should share that burden. A UC Berkeley study on California's child care system puts it this way: "Workers' careers are disrupted because of child care failure -- care that is unreliable, unaffordable, or just unavailable -- and these workers are usually women." This leads to lower pay and benefits, getting us back into the Catch-22 of the gender wage gap.

    The opt-out trend wouldn't be that bad, however, if it weren't weighted to one gender. If a parent wants to stay home with the children, fine by me. But it shouldn't be assumed that women will be the ones to do it. We should see just as many stay-at-home dads as moms. The stereotypes that the Census relied on, however, simply add weight to the pressure on women to be the ones to leave their careers. And this obviously harms fathers as well. Why disqualify the care work they do while mom is at home? Why can't we assume that they would want to stay home?

    Parroting outdated notions of the workforce, women's roles, and care work makes these problems worse. All it would take is to change a few words and ask slightly different questions for the Census to stop being part of the problem. Shouldn't be so much to ask given what's at stake.

    Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

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  • R.I.P. Mancession

    Feb 9, 2012Bryce Covert

    Now that the gender gap in unemployment has disappeared and male-heavy industries are seeing signs of life, we can finally put the buzzword to rest.

    If you were one of the unfortunate few who watched ABC's failed wannabe-Tootsie comedy Work It, you wouldn't have known that the mancession has actually ended. But in fact last Friday's jobs report marked the end of the trend (and hopefully the persistent portmanteau).

    Now that the gender gap in unemployment has disappeared and male-heavy industries are seeing signs of life, we can finally put the buzzword to rest.

    If you were one of the unfortunate few who watched ABC's failed wannabe-Tootsie comedy Work It, you wouldn't have known that the mancession has actually ended. But in fact last Friday's jobs report marked the end of the trend (and hopefully the persistent portmanteau).

    Before we can declare it over, let's review what it actually was. The term itself was coined by AEI scholar Mark Perry. He was the first to give a name to a striking phenomenon during the recession (officially from 2007-2009): not only did employment tank in male-heavy industries, and not only did they therefore have elevated unemployment rates, but the gap between their unemployment rate and women's was the largest in post-War record-keeping. This was particularly striking because before the recession -- in the months from 2004 to 2007 -- unemployment rates were about equal for the two sexes, and women's even rose higher than men's for some months. This gap between the two rates hit a peak in August of 2009 at 2.7 percent -- men at that point had an 11 percent jobless rate, and women had 8.3. (The gap started closing after that point even as male unemployment rose -- women just started catching up with them in the unemployment department.) To sum up, as Perry puts it, "the impact of job losses was considerably greater for men, since almost 6 million men lost their jobs, compared to only 2.64 million job losses for women. More than two out of every three jobs lost in 2008 and 2009 were held by men (68.5%), or alternatively it was also the case that 217 men lost their jobs for every 100 women who became unemployed in 2008 and 2009."

    He points out that much of this was related to the industries most affected by the recession. Construction and manufacturing went into freefall. He calculates that the largest job losses during the recession were in manufacturing -- down by 14 percent -- and construction -- down by 20.2 percent. Men make up 71.2 and 87.5 percent of those industries, respectively. On the other hand, some industries where women dominate were doing well. Education and health services was up 4 percent, 74 percent female, and government jobs were up 2.25 percent, 57 percent female.

    Click here to buy Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch’s new book on the epic health care reform battle, Fighting for Our Health.

    So that's what Work It was trying to channel: this notion that the economy had so changed that the only job prospects are in female-dominated industries. Where are we now? It turns out the recovery period, officially from 2009 until now (even if it hasn't really felt like one), has created a very different world. While recovery should mean a good bump in jobs for men if they lost so many in the recession, women have surprisingly lost ground. Their unemployment rate has been rising as men's has been falling, in many ways because government jobs are now the ones to suffer overwhelmingly.

    But there was still a gender gap in unemployment -- that is, until Friday. Analysis by the National Women's Law Center shows that men and women are now on par for unemployment rates, both standing at 7.7 percent. Mark it: the gender gap that had Perry, the media, and manhood so worried has completely evaporated.

    On top of that, the supposedly recession proof, female-dominated industries are not faring as well. And the male dominated ones are starting to show signs of life. Construction is up 2.1 percent; manufacturing is up 2. Yet government jobs are down 1.2 percent, and that's across the board -- 1.5 percent at the federal level, 1.4 at state level, and 1.1 at the local level. Those government job losses are driving our current womancession. Job losses, which skewed male, have now turned into skewed job gains. Men had lost 6 million jobs to women's 2.64 million during the recession, but now women have gained just eight percent of the 1.9 million jobs added in the recovery.

    This painful economic period, even if it's showing signs of improvement, is likely far from over. Men and women are both still hurting in huge numbers. But at least one thing has changed: we can stop calling this a mancession.

    Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

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  • Michelle Obama Embodies the Reasons Women Don't Run for Office

    Feb 8, 2012Bryce Covert

    They don't feel confident. No one tells them to run. Sexism plagues female candidates. Michelle Obama faced all of these problems and decided to stay out.

    They don't feel confident. No one tells them to run. Sexism plagues female candidates. Michelle Obama faced all of these problems and decided to stay out.

    Get ready for yet another "Year of the Woman." It seems that every election cycle since 1992 has been thus dubbed, no matter the fluctuating results of actually getting more women into office. In fact the last "Year of the Woman" -- 2010 -- actually represented the first dip in the percentage of women in Congress since 1978. There are some promising signs for this year: 10 female candidates from both parties are running for the Senate this year. Half of the Democrats' 76 House races will run female candidates.

    Yet as a study on why so few women are in politics, "Men Rule: The Continued Under-Representation of Women in U.S. Politics," points out, "women, assuming they win their primaries, will still compete in fewer than one-third of all races." So even in the best-case scenario women's political representation only stands to rise about one or two percentage points. That's because our progress has recently stalled in getting more women into office. Eighty-four percent of congressional members are men; three-quarters of officials and legislators at the state and local level are men; women hold only 12 percent of governorships and 8 percent of mayoralties.

    Why this persistent gap in representation? The authors of "Men Rule" found that it all gets back to women lacking the desire to run. Despite the fact that women are just as successful as men when they do, and despite high profile women like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton getting into the mix, women don't run. "There is a substantial gender gap in political ambition; men tend to have it, and women don't," they write. They found seven key factors that lead women to be wary:

    1. Women are substantially more likely than men to perceive the electoral environment as highly competitive and biased against female candidates.

    2. Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin's candidacies aggravated women's perceptions of gender bias in the electoral arena.

    3. Women are much less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office.

    4. Female potential candidates are less competitive, less confident, and more risk averse than their male counterparts.

    5. Women react more negatively than men to many aspects of modern campaigns.

    6. Women are less likely than men to receive the suggestion to run for office -- from anyone.

    7. Women are still responsible for the majority of childcare and household tasks.

    These factors have led to a "persistent and unchanging" gap in appetite for running: men are 16 percentage points more likely than women to have considered it.

    But can we find a living, breathing incarnation of this research? If women are shying away from office, can we ever know who they are? Turns out we can. After reading Jodi Kantor's new book on the first couple, The Obamas, it's clear that Michelle stayed away from running for office herself for most of the reasons listed above.

    Click here to buy Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch’s new book on the epic health care reform battle, Fighting for Our Health.

    An ongoing theme throughout Kantor's book is the differing views of politics between Michelle and Barack. Barack thinks he should join the system in order to change it; Michelle thinks you have to work outside the system for real change. That plays right into the problem of women reacting negatively to modern campaigns -- and by definition, modern politics. The system doesn't seem like it's going to work for them. As Kantor writes, "Barack saw the same problems with politics as Michelle did. But for him, those weren't reasons to stay out; they were reasons to get in. He believed in his own talent and singularity; he felt sure that the usual rules would not apply." Michelle remains suspicious of DC and all it represents.

    That quote also illuminates a difference between their self-confidence: another theme in the book is Barack's -- and Michelle's -- belief that he is a historical, transformative figure. But Michelle doesn't seem to have the same idea about herself. This is just like the women who don't think they're qualified enough to run, compared to most men who just plunge in, thinking they're perfectly qualified. Michelle is keenly aware of and concerned about the problems facing this country, yet Kantor writes, "She viewed the events of the presidency more as an outsider, her aides said... But Michelle Obama knew and cared a great deal about what was going on in the United States."

    One reason women may feel less self-confident is they don't have people around them boosting their egos. As the study reports, women are less likely to have people tell them they should run. And no one seems to have told Michelle. Ann Marie Lipinski, former editor of the Chicago Tribune, remembers, "Over the years, many Chicagoans thought Michelle showed just as much promise as her husband did; maybe more. 'If someone said to me, one of them is going to grow up to be president, I may have bet on her.'" Yet there's no mention of people urging her to run.

    And Michelle doesn't seem to have much appetite for jumping into the fray anyway -- she's seen what happened to those who came before her. The study found women have picked up on the cloud of gender bias hanging over Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, and the treatment of Clinton did not get past Michelle. "The first lady told an aide that she did not want to get drawn into the policy details [of the administration]," Kantor writes. "'I don't want to be Hillary Clinton, I can't be that person,' she said, referring to the criticism her predecessor had earned for taking charge of her husband's failed reform efforts."

    On top of all of this, even if some women did have the appetite to run they'd have a hard time balancing it with childcare and household chores. And, sadly, that is still overwhelmingly a woman's province. Michelle is no exception, even if she has a law degree from Harvard. During her husband's early campaigns, "She worried that her husband was not home enough, that campaign staff weren't... helping her get to a campaign event and then home again to feed her kids." The kids and the house were her concern. She herself has noticed this difference. "What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first. And for women, me is fourth, and that's not healthy," Kantor quotes her. Yet it's still pretty inescapable.

    So what are the answers? How do we reach the Michelle Obamas and convince them to run? Because that will be the only real way to make substantial progress on the gender gap in political representation. The study ends with some suggestions for how to overcome this dilemma. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that we have to recruit women -- early and often -- to foster their ambition. If women are told to run, and told that they'll be successful at it, from early on it will help boost that desire and confidence. We can also spread the word that women succeed when they run just as much as men do, and we can work with them to help with the personal trade-offs that come with campaigning. And of course, as is the case with many issues facing women, helping them deal with work-family balance comes back to implementing work-family policies.

    We have to figure it out. We've been left behind by 90 other nations in the percentage of women in our national legislature. It doesn't serve the women or men who live in this country to be represented by only one half of our population.

    Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

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  • What $100 Million Could Do for Out of Work, Underpaid Teachers

    Feb 7, 2012Bryce Covert

    Instead of spending the money to train new teachers, we could focus on putting laid off teachers back to work and keeping them there by paying them better.

    Instead of spending the money to train new teachers, we could focus on putting laid off teachers back to work and keeping them there by paying them better.

    News came out today that President Obama is announcing a new plan to spend $100 million on training 100,000 new teachers over the next decade. Responding to a call from American businesses to provide more high-skilled workers, Obama's plan will focus on training more STEM teachers -- aka those teaching science, technology, engineering, and math.

    Spending more money on education is a healthy priority, but is this the right tactic? The plan seems to presuppose that there is a dearth of teachers right now. Yet the opposite is true -- we've been laying them off in droves in response to tight state and local budgets. So there is a whole pool of people that we could put back to work doing what they already want to do. The number of jobs in "local government education" -- in other words, elementary school teachers -- has been falling steadily since February 2008, according to the BLS. We've lost 217,900 of those jobs since then, and things aren't getting much better, even with seemingly good signs in the latest jobs report. Those education jobs were down 9.6 percent since December.

    So rather than enticing and training a new army of teachers, perhaps we could start by putting the ones we've already got back to work. It would likely be a lighter lift to retrain them. And it would help ease the ongoing womancession.

    Click here to buy Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch’s new book on the epic health care reform battle, Fighting for Our Health.

    But this plan also misses a larger problem: that we lose teaching talent because we don't value the profession enough. If you're educated in STEM, which some report pays 87 percent higher than the average private sector job, why would you go into teaching, an under-paid and under-appreciated field?

    This is a serious problem for our education system. A report from McGraw-Hill lays out some recommendations on how the U.S. can take on the fact that its butt is being kicked on global test scores. The numbers are pretty embarrassing: on average, American students came in 15th in reading, 19th in science, and 27th in math. So what was the report's number one recommendation for changing those figures? Raise the status of the teaching profession. The report notes that the countries with the top scores are also those that typically pay teachers better. In fact, our high school teachers work longer than other countries, yet we spend less on teacher salaries than the average OECD country. This is a big reason that nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years, according to a 2005 NEA report. Their reasons for leaving were poor pay and poor working conditions.

    I applaud the idea of spending $100 million on education, particularly in a "recovery" period still taking a heavy toll on those working in that sector. But there may be much better uses for the money, and in all reality we need a much larger sum to make real change in our education system. We do need to recruit more people to the teaching profession. If we help people stay in those jobs by firstly employing them and then paying them what they deserve, we may take care of the problem.

    Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

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