A Life Of Service: For Love, Money or Both?

The recession may not only be changing household budgets and habits, but also challenging longstanding gender roles.

The New York Times reported that 82 percent of the job losses in the recent months have befallen men. For many households this means that women who once were full-time homemakers are now switching to be full-time careerwomen as their husbands are getting laid off.

Although not thrilled that their husband has lost his job and the family income has taken a nose-dive, women are finding opportunity in the situation, fulfilling personal desires and career goals. Others however are not entirely sold on the idea that they will be both the main breadwinner and caregiver in the family. And of course there are the many women who have been doing the balancing act between motherhood and career woman for plenty of years. For most, there has been a battle between guilt for leaving their child for a job, or guilt for choosing to stay with their child instead of taking a job. With more layoffs, comes even more pressure.

Last week in The New York Times Sunday business section there was an article and graph that caught my eye entitled "Why is Her Paycheck Smaller?" As an obvious advocate for parity of pay between women and men, I stopped my page flipping to check it out.

I knew already from government stats that women in full-time jobs make 80 cents to the man's dollar. But I was not prepared to see this set out before me in a graph...the visual cold hard facts. What I saw was not okay.

In jobs such as education administrators, marketing and sales managers, real estate brokers and retail sales, women actually earn 30% less than their male counterparts (70 cents to the man's dollar)! In other industries such as advertising, finance and food service, women are earning 20% less. Teaching, bookkeeping and waiting tables, 10% less. The only areas where the graph showed parity of pay? Postal service and shipping clerks, data entry keyers, ticket agents and special education teachers.

The graph showed me that in most industries, women are earning between 10 to 35% less than men. Oooh la, la. This was shocking.

Fortunately, in its first week, the new Administration made pay equity and fairness to women in the workplace a priority. On January 29 President Obama signed a bill, the very first bill of the new Administration, expanding a worker's right to sue for wage inequalities to push employers to reduce gender discrimination. "It stiffens penalties for employers who discriminate based on gender and it protects employees from retaliation for sharing salary information," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut and chief sponsor of the bill.

While the bill helps women move toward salary equity in the workplace, it does not address a bigger question on my mind: What are we going to do about the service sector jobs that pay incredibly lower rates than management and business positions?

I bring this up because the current reality is that more women work in the service sector where wages are low and more men work in management and business where wages are higher. Pre-recession, a family could have been earning $200,000 from the husband's management position combined with his wife's work as a full-time teacher, for example. Now that same family is living off of $35,000. Another family that was earning $300,000 from the husband's financial services job is now living off $30,000 without any health insurance or unemployment insurance from the wife's two part-time jobs as a medical assistant and bookkeeper.

I suppose I am digging into a few issues here, but it all concerns me. Let's look at it this way: Numbers show that most women are working in the areas of education, healthcare and other service industries. How about we place a higher value on service work? What I mean by that is more take-home dollars for the teachers of your children and the nurses who help us heal.

What are your thoughts?

How can we do this?

Comments

[Anne Naylor - Huffpost Blogger]

Hi Tabby,

Your question is a really difficult one for me to answer. A lot of the high value service I offer I do for no monetary return because I receive other benefits like well-being, joy, peace of mind - hard to give those monetary value. A lot of commercial work that pays well has less attraction for me.

I am not sure how you change values relating to health care and other vital social services. How do you change values and perceptions? I would be very interested to know.

Warm regards,
Anne

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

As you say, this has many many facets. One of them is that there is an obvious suspicion to be brought up: are the lay-offs hitting men more often than women because employers are trying to cut costs while keeping the quality and quantity of work-done optimal? Would be quite galling. It would be the most sickening way of implementing effective salary cuts I can think of.

On the other hand, strategies such as the one imagined above are not restricted to gender discrimination. It certainly is important to demand high standards of employers in their down-sizing decisions. It also seems clear that external advice is inevitably necessary in many cases, because such conflicts look quite insoluble otherwise: since the market obviously fails at determining salaries across gender differences, it's hard to tell whether in 'normal times' men are overpaid or women are underpaid. In fact this is probably an ill-defined question, given the background dysfuntion.