Just ask anyone and they'll tell you: Raising kids is really important. One of the most important jobs in the world, if not THE most important.
Just don't ask your boss to act on that priority. It's well known that women's careers and lifetime earnings suffer because of time they take off when they have kids. So do men's, it turns out. It's just less visible because so many fewer men take more than a few days off:
One of the studies was by Mr. Coltrane of the University of Oregon. It used data from 6,403 men in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and was the first major longitudinal study — tracking the same group of people over time — to show that taking time off for family reasons reduced men’s earnings, just as it reduced women’s earnings. When men reduced their hours for family reasons, they lost 15.5 percent in earnings over the course of their careers, on average, compared with a drop of 9.8 percent for women and 11.2 percent for men who reduced their hours for other reasons. [...]
Another study found that men who used flexible work arrangements, whether taking temporary family leave or working from home or part time, received worse job evaluations and lower hourly raises. The third found that men who requested family leave were at greater risk of being demoted or laid off because they were perceived to have negative traits that are used to stigmatize women, like weakness and uncertainty, not masculine ones like competitiveness and ambition.
We're not talking about taking off five years to raise kids until they're old enough for kindergarten. We're talking about men not being able to take six weeks to care for a tiny little baby without being penalized at work. Men taking family leave to care for a baby translates into them being more involved parents after they go back to work. And, of course, women having actual partners in caring for children makes it more possible for women to go back to work.
The United States continues to be terrible at family leave, and men face significant pressure not to take parental leave even when their employers offer it. If this doesn't change, women will continue to shoulder far more than their share and too many men will continue to be absent fathers, even in cases where they live in the same house with their children.
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's labor and education news, with election aftermath.
Election aftermath
- Tuesday's elections put the brakes on that pernicious anti-union law being passed in Kentucky. Republicans campaigned on the promise that if they took the state House they would pass that Law. They didn't take the state House.
- Some under the radar good election news, again on a ballot measure, of course. Voters rejected an attempt to turn Phoenix's pension system into a 401(k)-style retirement plan.
- And more good election news you probably haven't heard unless it's local to you. Jersey City, New Jersey, resoundingly elected school board candidates backed by the teachers union. Bayonne, New Jersey, is switching to an elected school board. In Wake County, North Carolina, the site of major recent battles over school segregation, Democrats took all the open seats on the county commission, promising more spending on education and public transit.
- Andrew Cuomo is just the worst.
- Speaking of Cuomo, endorsing him sure went well for the Working Families Party.
A fair day's wage
Education
- Charter schools: Why poverty measures matter.
- More charter school corruption:
The Jacobin probe into Gulen-affiliated operators in Texas, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California found that roughly $4 million in E-Rate contract disbursements and $1.7 million in Department of Education Race to the Top grantee awards were given to what appear to be “related parties.” Awarding contracts to firms headed by related parties would seem to violate the FCC’s requirement that the school’s bidding process be “competitive” as well as “open and fair.”
It's not that all charters are corrupt, it's that the lack of oversight allows them to be if they want.
- Speaking of charters, it turns out that charter expansion can hurt a city's credit rating.