This is a series of ongoing women’s consciousness raising sessions.This is how it works:
We are inviting women from diverse cultures, races, sexual orientation, and all who self-identify as women, regardless of birth gender, to share their personal stories about their encounters with sexism, racism, classism or similar forms of discrimination as they relate to the larger issues of women's oppression.
Traditionally the women’s movement has called these moments “clicks” --when it clicks in our mind that we are being oppressed in our day to day lives. If through dialogue, we find ways to work together to move the lives of women forward, great. If not, we can at least listen to each other and become more sensitive to each others' goals.
These diaries are intended to be dialogues among women from their own perspectives. We ask men readers to respect this. Deliberate use of divisive racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic or classist remarks will receive one warning before the might of the daily kos moderation system is brought to bear! Please don't "feed the troll" by responding to them to avoid disruption of the discussion.
We hope to have a rotating diary writer and chair each week. If you would like to write a diary and moderate the weekly discussion (or have a problem posting or commenting) please contact us Dailykos at Unaspenser, Geminijen or NY Brit Expat.
I. Are We Living on the Same Planet?
About a month ago, I got an email from Sens. Barbara Boxer, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar asking me to endorse “Paycheck Fairness Act” to fight for legislation on equal pay for equal work for men and women (http://www.barbaraboxer.com/...). My first thought was are you kidding me, there still is not legislation ensuring this, are we still fighting for this most basic of bourgeois democratic reforms? I snorted and said “of course, we are.” So I signed the petition (which I would also encourage you to do as well if you have not done so, just hit the link above), but all the while I kept thinking that while this was necessary, it was by no means sufficient and that once again, we were ignoring the basic problems that were ensuring inequality between men and women in the workplace.
“Equal pay for equal work” implies that men and women actually have access to the same jobs and that women are simply being paid less than men. This may be the case with some jobs especially on the upper and lower ends; but in reality, both women and people of colour do not even have access to the same jobs as white men. It is equal access to jobs, not just equal pay, that is the fundamental problem for women and people of colour in the jobs market. The question is one of “equal pay for comparable work”. If we cannot get into better paying jobs due to colour and gender barriers, then, at least, until these barriers are removed (and it is not in the interests of those that rule to remove them), give us equal pay for work that is at least comparable in terms of requirements for employment, skills and knowledge utilised. Moreover, the notion of equal pay for comparable work (or worth) attempts to compensate for previous social discrimination against women ((http://www.jofreeman.com/..., http://www.scu.edu/...; perhaps the most depressing thing is that I haven't seen many links on comparable work or worth written after the 1980s).
In other words, instead of worrying about getting up the ladder and smashing into the glass ceiling, we are honestly more worried about getting a foot on the ladder. The glass ceiling is a problem for women with large amounts of education and skills whom cannot get beyond a certain level in the jobs market; for the vast majority of women (of all colours), the problem is getting a foot on the same job ladder as white men (for an excellent discussion on race, class and gender income and wealth inequality, see Seeta08’s diary (http://www.dailykos.com/...).
Moreover, while it is obvious that we demand to have the same pay for the same job
(honestly, it doesn’t seem to be too much to ask for, does it?), in the 21st century women’s salaries for the same jobs receive $0.77 on the dollar as compared to men’s wages in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/...), while there is wide variation in the EU:
Eurostat found a persisting gender pay gap of 17.5 % on average in the 27 EU Member States in 2008. There were considerable differences between the Member States, with the pay gap ranging from less than 10% in Italy, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Belgium to more than 20% in Slovakia, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Germany, United Kingdom and Greece and more than 25% in Estonia and Austria (http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/gender-pay-gap/situation-europe/index_en.htm; http://upload.wikimedia.org/.... Perhaps one of the loveliest things I read was that the UK Home Secretary, Teresa May, seems to think that the gender pay gap among full-time workers is only 10% (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/14/gender-pay-gap-promotion-rates-may?INTCMP=SRCH).
There are many more problems that affect women’s equal participation in the work place. Moreover, the far more general problem is the attempt of legitimisation of under-employment (aka, part-time work) in the employment statistics by governments to demonstrate the “success” of economic policy.
Irrespective of the reality that our employment is not for “pin-money,” to this day, women are treated as though our employment is secondary for our lives rather than an essential component of family income to ensure that we have a roof over our heads, food in our family’s bellies and clothes on their backs (as well as health care, a ‘benefit’ to which Part-Time workers in the US rarely have access). Given the long-term attack on wages in the advanced capitalist world (beginning with attacks on unionised jobs, wage freezes in the public sector, stagnation in wages, and now absolute and relative wage cutbacks in both money {take-home pay} and real wages{what our wages buy; w/p}), our jobs are essential in ensuring that basic needs for ourselves and families are covered.
Given the roles of women as carers both of children and of our extended families, further problems are access to cheap, affordable and reliable child-care (independent of exploiting our parents and other family members if we are lucky enough to have them) and also flexible working hours that can be scheduled around time needed to fulfil our carer responsibilities. This child-care needs to be covered independently of employers’ responsibility as that would be a further excuse for the non-employment of women. Due to the need to cover this role as carers, women are invariably concentrated in part-time, poorly paid retail work with limited or no benefits. It is essential that the issues of flexible working hours and access to free or cheap child care be examined seriously. For single mothers, this is a poverty trap; there is no way that we can abandon our role as carers and we need the income to merely survive.
Full-time employment (if it could be found) would mean that even with higher wages, higher amounts would needed to be paid to cover full-time child-care (I will not even address the obvious point that our schools have taken on the role of child-care for our children as an essential service provision; this was quite evident during the one-day strike in June where the Tory government was babbling constantly about the hardship placed on parents when teachers had the nerve to strike to protect their pensions. Happily, this didn’t resonate with the parents who for the most part supported the striking teachers; in fact, it was rather humorous watching the BBC having to shift locations to Tory strongholds to find support for that piece of propaganda).
The question of child-care coverage also links to an additional issue that is constantly being raised both by the right and liberals that concerns getting single mothers off of the dole (welfare). Somehow it has never occurred to them that, given low wages and carer costs, an obvious incentive would be to offer free child care and guarantee wages that will cover housing, food, and necessities that women can get while on the dole. In fact, it was only France that came up with this solution; blame-the-victim ideology is far easier than to come up with coherent solutions to the poverty trap in which many women find themselves (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...).
II. “Maternal Guilt” or the Last Refuge of White Wealthy Men
While waiting for my friend to do a quick look-through of second-hand charity shops in South Wales last Thursday, I went to the local shop to pick up some ciggies and a newspaper. The Guardian was reporting that while prior to the election 45% of women viewed David Cameron sympathetically his current support among women has declined to 35% (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...). Moreover, the coalition as a whole is suffering from a severe gender gap in terms of its support.
Women's votes are increasingly seen as crucial for the next election. Polling by Ipsos Mori, commissioned and published by the Resolution Foundation, concludes that support for the coalition among female voters in the C2 socioeconomic group (mostly low-skilled workers) has fallen away. Over the course of this year, the Tory rating with C2 women is down by seven points, and the Lib Dems are down 14 points.
The polling also shows that the proportion of women aged 18-24 who support the Tories has declined from 30% at the general election to just 18% in 2011, and support for the Lib Dems among the same group has fallen from 34% to just 8%. Overall levels of approval for the coalition have fallen to 25% among women, 8% lower than for men. Just 13% of women feel the Tory party is the party closest to women; only 7% believe the Lib Dems are (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...).
A leaked document by the Tory party examining this problem (good luck getting elected when only a little more than a third of half the electorate loathes you) revealed that they knew damn well what was causing the lack of support among women (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...):
1) cuts in benefits affected women far more disproportionately than men; 75% of cuts affected women, including housing benefits, cuts to child-care services, disability benefits for those in their care either immediately or for relatives, child-tax credits for the middle class have been cut, school lunches for the children of the middle class (due to be extended) have been cut, after-school services are facing severe cuts due to local council cuts arising from government cuts and refusal to allow increases in local council taxes) (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...; http://www.guardian.co.uk/...);
2) increased university tuition fees meant that they would not be able to send their children to university (£9000/yr which is half the median income in the country; http://en.wikipedia.org/..., median income is £18,500) and would mean that any savings towards this end would be insufficient and extremely prohibitive for those with lower incomes;
3) the impact of the VAT (and rising inflation) has meant a serious hit in the pockets and hence spending ability of those on lower and middle incomes that need to cover basic necessities. Women are disproportionately trapped in low-paid part-time retail and service work and the decreased real wage is affecting them significantly, and with cut-backs to services (including after-school programmes), care-costs are also rising hitting other parts of their household budgets. Add to this increased public sector worker unemployment and wage and pension freezes, and we are not only hitting real wages, we are actually decreasing money wages.
So while the Tories were quite aware of why the support of women was shrinking, they fell back on the classic sexist line that women were upset due to “maternal guilt (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...; http://www.guardian.co.uk/...).”
‘Maternal guilt’ here is referring to two somewhat distinct things: on the one hand, women are feeling “guilty” as they cannot spend enough time with their children as they are working (and are "buying them expensive things to compensate"), and on the other hand, women are feeling “guilty” as they cannot ensure their children a decent standard of living. Quite honestly, there seems to be a serious tension in these points, given decreased income for the middle and working class and the poor, but that never stands in the way of a good ideological argument; nor does the fact that this would mean rather different things depending on what class said "guilty mothers" belong. As such, both of these things are being linked in the comments by the Tories:
The representatives told Tory policymakers that women were overwhelmingly describing feeling "guilty" during the squeeze on living standards, since they felt they could not give their children the material comforts they themselves might have had as children, and in some cases, that their children's friends do have – in some cases leading to their children then being bullied.
The fear in No 10 is that the government is being blamed for this. The view is pushed up the agenda by a report from Unicef (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...), which suggests that parents are compulsively buying their children the latest clothes, gifts and gadgets in a guilty attempt to make up for the lack of time spent together. Crucially, that pinpointed economic pressures on families as a cause of the problems, recommending the introduction of a living wage to take the pressure off (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...).
Certainly women do feel guilt: we feel guilty that we cannot provide for our children, we feel guilty that we need to work in order to cover their needs and hence cannot spend enough time with them, we feel guilty that we use the school system as child-care, we feel guilty that perhaps we have not saved enough to send them to university. But our guilt is misplaced; these problems arise from the failure of the system to provide for all. Moreover, we know this and whatever guilt we feel is overwhelmed by our need to feed, clothe and house those we love and care for and that is our priority.
Maybe it is me, but when a group of wealthy white men tell us we feel guilty due to insufficient mothering because of the fact that we need to provide for our families, when they tell us that our work and our contributions are leading to guilt and that is why we are not supporting this government’s atrocious political and economic choices, the only thing that I think is who are these fools that know nothing of our situations, our lives and our choices telling us what we should be feeling and why? In addition, it is their failures, their political and economic choices that are giving us little or no choice but working at whatever we can do to bring money into our homes to cover ourselves and our family’s needs. Such a perfect example of upper-class mentality that they try to make us feel guilty for doing what is necessary when the government and economic system fails to provide for all. Is free child-care too much to ask to help us out of the poverty trap? Is access to equal wages too much to ask for? Is equal access to all jobs too much to ask for? It seems to be the case …