Go Over Here Now

I'd like to point y'all toward two very interesting comment-based discussions going on elsewhere on the internet: Feministe guest blogger Habladora takes on the work/family pressure cooker. At the same site Allison Martell takes on the pay gap. Dang, Feministe has some good guest bloggers this summer. Jill should take the bar exam more often!

The Good News, The Bad News, And The Funny News

The good news is that I got the job. The bad news is that my new paycheck will be 65% of my current one. This is actually a little better than I first feared, because I was bracing for a 50% paycut. The funny news is that my monthly takehome pay will actually be about the same as in my current job.

How does a 35% reduction become no loss at all? It's not fuzzy math, I promise. Right now, I max out my 401(k) and save just under $2,000 a month. Not counting these two deductions, which I never see or touch for living expenses, my annual after-tax income is about $49,000. In my new job I am not eligible to contribute to a 401(k), and I will not be saving any of my salary--Shiner and I plan to live off my salary and save his after we get married. Ta da! Annual income of $48,270--that's not counting the $5,000 I'll put toward a Roth IRA. And just like that, the pay cut disappears.

Well, not really. My retirement savings will feel the hit. Our savings won't grow as fast as they could if I weren't seizing this professional opportunity. But it makes me more comfortable with the pay cut to know that it won't affect our standard of living any more than we want it too, and I won't feel like a mooch like I was afraid I would.

Frayed Bootstraps

Peter Gosselin, whose book High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families languishes on my to-read list, has an op ed in the LA Times today. He writes, "[t]he prosperity we enjoyed [between 1980 and 2007] was purchased at a price of diminished security for our families and ourselves. Even as our incomes went up, economic risks -- the costs of being laid off, of suffering a work-stopping illness or of a catastrophe like a house fire -- that were once largely borne on the broad shoulders of business and government were being shifted onto the backs of ordinary families, from the working poor to the reasonably rich."

Gosselin's thesis, both in the LA Times and (so far as I understand) in his book, is that from employer-sponsored health insurance to homeowners insurance to college funding, individuals continue to bear more and more responsibility for ensuring their own financial stability, and that the consequences of failure are more and more serious. Although my memory is not long enough to corroborate his theory through my own anecdata, I find the whole thing just depressing enough to be completely plausible. Many pf bloggers wax poetic about the bootstrap approach to financial stability: those who have the guts and the fortitude can lift themselves by their own bootstraps into a better financial position; those who lack those qualities get what they deserve. If Gosselin is correct, many of the bootstrappers are positioned more precariously than they would like to believe.

Let's be honest. If you had a medical emergency and your health insurance provider (assuming you even have one) rejects your claim for coverage, how much of a hit can you afford? A broken leg? A car accident? A chronic illness? Chemo? If I had to cover the costs for anything requiring any sort of lengthy hospital stay, I would be knocked flat on my ass, economically speaking. And I'm not in the least hurting to begin with.

A bootstrap mindset is attractive to people on the upswing because it affirms their own deservingness of their success, and provides mental insulation from having to think about whether that success might not be permanent. It might be comforting to someone in the depths, too, because it provides a road map out. But although the bootstrap concept might be useful for any of these reasons, it's true only in a limited way.

Homefront Updates

Some quick hits of the personal variety:

1) In the nick of time Shiner and I bought airline tickets for a honeymoon using frequent flyer miles. I'm glad I never jumped on the frequent flyer credit card bandwagon. Pretty soon you're going to have to pay to redeem them. Oh wait...

2) I have an interview for that job with the big old pay cut I've been hoping for. Gooooooo pay cut! Still need to print out a fresh copy of my resume and writing sample, skim a couple recent publications for topical talking points, finish up a draft of an unrelated project that has to by done tomorrow morning, shave my legs and/or find my sole pair of nylons that are not in a disgraceful condition, and get a good night's sleep. That's kind of a lot yet to accomplish tonight. Eep.

3) I wish people would stop asking me if I'm going anywhere over the Fourth of July. I'm not. I'm working. Shiner's working. It's going to be a truly delightful celebration of our overthrow of monarchical tyranny in favor of market tyranny. Except with firecrackers.

Quick Hits 1 July 2008

Unite ye models of the world! I know, I didn't expect to be agitating for labor protections for the oppressed masses of fashion models, but dang, this Jezebel piece is eye opening. Most models apparently make crappy wages, pay commissions from 20 to 50% to their agencies, are expected to take gigs for free in exchange for exposure and reputation, and may work in dangerous situations. Shards of broken glass on your eyelids for the sake of a photograph? No. Under no circumstances. The end. Shudder.

CNN notes that women are more likely than men to be trailing spouses, taking a career hit to relocate for a partner's job. Well, no kidding, when women's jobs are typically considered to be more "flexible" than men's, no matter what the actual job. The NYT's recent piece on coparenting mentions this. Author Lisa Belkin--remember her from all those "if seven rich white female Ivy League graduates are doing it, it must be a trend!" pieces?--writes that one researcher "suggest[s] that the perception of flexibility is itself a matter of perception. In her study, she was struck by how often the wife’s job was seen by both spouses as being more flexible than the husband’s. By way of example she describes two actual couples, one in which he is a college professor and she is a physician and one in which she is a college professor and he is a physician. In either case, Deutsch says “both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.” Go figure.

Paula Gregorowicz posts at BlogHer about the economics of DIY.

Single Ma does what she has to do so she can do what she wants to do. As my own ma would say, she's one smart cookie.

How Not To Lose A Job Before You Have It: Notes For Interns

This is a post that seems like it shouldn't need to be written. Alternatively titled, "Don't Piss Off Your Boss," it catalogues a set of minimum behaviors that any intern should be aware of--if not a priori, then through some aggressive childhood or early adult socialization. As I said, this post really should not be necessary, but evidently it is.

Some internships will not lead to offers of employment after graduation because that is not what they are designed to do. For example, most small and mid-sized nonprofits don't have the luxury of hiring new staff every year, so the summer interns those offices take on get some experience, an entry on their resumes, and maybe a reference, but they're backto job hunting come fall. Other positions will not lead to permanent employment because the intern sucks at their job, or are so unpersonable that their demeanors overshadow any competency they may demonstrate. I offer the following as a last ditch effort to keep you out of the latter category (although if you need this concise list it is perhaps to late for me to help you).

You do not have to like your job to act like you like your job. Yes, you will be given some boring or otherwise not compelling assignments. Your workplace will have idiosyncracies and quirks and norms all its own, some of which may seem inane to you. Your coworkers may not be people you would choose to hang out with socially. These considerations are relevant when evaluating whether you would like to work here, but they should be irrelevant to the quality of work you produce and to the attitude you present. By all means, refrain from outright disdain. You're insulting those who do choose to work here, you're nuking your likelihood of getting positive evaluations or references, and moreover you're shooting yourself in the foot--you won't be getting interesting, challenging assignments once you've made it clear that you think you're above working here.

Don't be late. Don't show up late to the office, to meetings, to lunches or presentations. If you routinely force your colleagues to wait for you, you're telling them your time is more valuable than theirs. I assure you this is not true, and you will come to be deeply resented. I am not a babysitter, I should not need to check in on you to make sure you are where you ought to be. Likewise, complete assignments in the time allotted for them. If you expect to be late, or that your work will be delayed, check in with your supervisor well in advance. They will either tell you it's not a problem, or will decide on another course of action--giving the assigment to someone else, doing the work themselves, modifying the scope of the assignment so it can be completed on time, etc. Oh, and don't ask for an extension for stupid reasons. "I have a three-hour lunch at Chez Fancypants and then an afternoon outing to a major league baseball game" will not ingratiate you to a supervisor who is working on a deadline and who has been counting on your timely delivery of a project to meet it.

Be polite, even kind. To everyone. To your supervisors, to your fellow interns, to your support staff, to the folks in the mail room, to the strangers in the elevator. In the best of all possible worlds, rudeness is unacceptable. Even if you are working in a craven environment in which rudeness is tolerated, you have not been here long enough to know who you can safely alienate without repercussions. Hint: if you piss of your secretary, you have probably also pissed off her boss, and this bodes poorly for you.

Ask questions. I greatly prefer the periodic interruption of questions about an assignment I've made to a work product that has nothing to do with what I asked for. If you're not sure what you're supposed to be doing, or if you suspect your research is going off on a tangent, check in with your supervisor to make sure you're still on the right track.

Personality is at least as important as competency. Not everyone agrees with me, but unless someone is grossly incompetent, I will be more generous in my evaluation of a pleasant person with average work than of an unpleasant person with good work. I can teach work skills to someone I enjoy being around and who seems to want to improve. I cannot teach social skills to someone who makes me want to gouge my eyeballs with spoons. Don't think your work product will excuse your temperment. First, relatively few interns produce work that is as good as they think it is. That's only natural, because an intern is by definition just starting to gain experience in a given field. But this means it's a bit risky to assume that your work product is on its own enough to warrant a job offer--you're much more attractive as a prospective hire if people are actually interested in spending time teaching and mentoring you. Second, if you're irritating enough, a good work product ain't gonna help.

I must be getting old and crotchety, as my tolerance for whippersnappery has plummeted in the last year. I've had to write bad work evaluations for a couple of interns already, and it sucks. I know I may be costing those people job offers, so I am in the unpleasant position of lying about their performance and thereby dooming myself to have to work with them in the future, or sending them back to school unemployed in the worst economic situation of recent years. Hopefully (for them) they've done good work for other people and those positive evaluations will counterbalance my negative ones and they'll be hired to work in an office that is far away from mine. But that's not my responsibility to un-screw up their screw ups. There is no blasted reason I should have to write bad evaluations. It's not actually that hard to be a mediocre intern--it's not even difficult to be a really great one.

Quick Hits Tuesday 24 June 2008

Ugly ladies need not apply for hedge fund jobs. By which I mean "for PR jobs with hedge funds." If you're interested in number crunching, women still need not apply no matter what we look like.

Student loan rates to drop 1 July. Be there or be square.

It never hurts to ask. All they can say is no. Or, you know, "yes, we will forgive all your medical debt."

An Iraq War spending bill passed the Senate without an amendment that would have made birth control pills more affordable on college campuses.

Manufactured Scarcity: Diamonds And Other Crap You're Paying Too Much For

I don't know if it's because of wedding season or what, but I've seen a lot of coverage of diamonds lately. You may remember that I have my own opinions about diamonds, and deliberately don't have a diamond engagement ring. Women who want the look of the clear, shiny rock without the guilt or expense of diamonds have had the options of cubic zirconia or moissanites for years. But did you know there are lab-grown diamonds out there? I had no idea! They are chemically identical to and pretty well indistinguishable by gemologists from natural diamonds. Best of all, they can also be cultured in different shapes--like flat, as for a window of a spaceship. Science is so awesome. That's a diamond I can get behind, even if the whole engagement ring thing leaves a sour taste.

White lab-grown diamonds are still roughly the same price as their mined counterparts, but colored diamonds--yer pinks, yer yellows, yer browns, all of which command a premium among mined diamonds--are about 15% cheaper for lab-grown specimens. The technology to produce high-quality stones is fairly new, though, and I expect those costs to decrease as the process is further refined. Meanwhile, the natural versus synthetic gemological divide is blurred even further by tinkerers who use modified mopeds to "cook" the naturally occurring impurities out of gems to artifically heighten their clarity. (Abstract only on the New Yorker's site; grab it from the library, it's a fascinating read on the global gem trade).

DeBeers, which controls the vast majority of diamond sourcing around the world, has spent the last several decades bottlenecking the diamond trade to create an artificial global sense of diamond scarcity and thereby to inflate prices. (Aside: as I sit here typing, one of DeBeers's "A diamond is forever" commercials just interrupted my date with Anthony Bourdain as we eat our way through Argentina. Bite me, DeBeers. I want to get back to the food.) Diamonds aren't rare; thanks to the industrious underlings who figured out how to jerry rig a moped, high-clarity diamonds aren't even rare now that they can be made out of something of much lower quality. Truly: who would buy these rocks at these prices if they knew just how common they were, when there are adequate, in some cases identical, substitutes that are less pricey? Why?

But diamonds are not the only area in which people pay for rarity, even if they are one of the most extreme (and most extremely silly). Plenty of people want to pay to be "in the club" whatever that club may be. Whether it's impulse buying the last Wii on the shelf because it could be yours and no one else's or, my personal downfall, reflexively purchasing imported or limited release 7-inch records of a song I already own, rarity--or exclusivity, or scarcity, or "hipness," or whatever term you want to use--is alluring. But it's pretty much the opposite of as close as we can get to objective value. Rarity does not create intrinsic value. Be suspicious. Be very suspicious.

What To Do When You Screw Up At Work

I know, I know, you're a shiny happy employee who gets in before everyone else, goes home after everyone else, and gets shit done in between. But even Mary Poppins has an off day. What do you do when you screw something up?

I did that today. Or rather, I did that a while ago, and only realized it today. It's not a screw up that's my fault, fundamentally, but it's one that if I had been asking the right questions of the right people at the right time (instead of the right questions of the wrong people at the wrong time) would have been caught a lot earlier. So I am the one taking the brunt of it at work, at least in terms of righting the ship. On the up side, it's been a while since I've done something that made me feel totally stupid, so that's... good-ish. Go team competence. But it also means I needed a refresher course in what to do when I screw up at work.

Step 1: Does it really matter?
The first thing you've got to do is assess the importance of your screw up. And honestly, it's probably doesn't matter that much. Lots of things feel embarassing when you're the one who screwed up, but if someone else had done the same thing you might not even notice. If you circulate a memo that uses the wrong form of "their" the grammar fascists (me included) will think less of you for a brief moment, but we're petty. It won't make your memo unintelligible. If your screwup falls into this category, learn your lesson and let it go. Don't go to the rest of the steps, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. You'll only draw attention to your mistake and annoy your coworkers with your drama.

But even if your screwup matters it's still important to get a sense of the magnitude. Maybe it matters, but not in a life-or-death sense. For example, maybe your project can go forward, but only on a slightly delayed schedule, or only after you call in some favors to keep the schedule on track (this is where you want to have a well-stocked Pay It Forward bank account from which you can readily make withdrawals). In a case like this, you may be able to fix it without anyone else--at least not the boss--having to know. On the other hand, maybe you screwed up. Like, real bad. Lose the case, piss off the client, and crash the company car type of bad. OK, have you taken honest stock of just where your screwup falls on the Seriousness Scale? Good for you, it's not easy.

Step 2: How can this get fixed?
Think creatively about this. Is there something you can do to make it better? Someone whose assistance you can ask? If you are going to be unable to meet a deadline, can you rush a step down the line to make up the time? Whatever it is, figure out what the course of action is that can mitigate whatever screwup has just occurred, and figure out how you fit into it.

Step 3: Own up to it.
If something's really wrong, don't pretend like nothing is wrong. Get it out there. Usually at this point it will mean talking to a supervisor. State what the problem is as objectively as you can, apologize if appropriate, and then say what you're going to do to fix it. Prepare to have people be less than happy with you. This is not the end of the world. It looks a lot like being human and therefore fallible.

Step 4: Be sensitive to psychology (and not just your own).
Who are you breaking the news to, and what do they need from you in order to deal with it in a quasi-professional way? Insofar as you can without damaging your own psyche, try to give it to them. Remember, no one is at their best when they are receiving bad news. In my case, my supervisor needed to get snappy at me to vent some steam before deciding that I was handling the situation pretty well. That's his modus operandi. It's not my favorite part of the job, but it's not actually that bad (or that frequent, thankfully). I know I'm doing the best I can with a crappy situation, and it's up to him to react however he chooses to react.* In the larger scheme of things, those are his issues to deal with and not mine. He can vent if he needs to vent, that need doesn't reflect on me.

Step 5: Fix it as best you can Remember Step 2? Do whatever it is you decided to do there. Then take yourself out for a beer.

Everyone screws up. Everyone. Not everyone fixes their screw ups well. In my observation ,if you're generally conscientious and competent, and you deal with it responsibly on those few occasions when you do screw up, that is what people will remember about you. And if you deal with it poorly that is what people will remember about you. In neither event will their memory of the screw up be nearly as clear as their memory of how you handled it.** Developing this skill is maybe the most important thing I can think of in terms of building a good professional reputation.

Me, I'm in the middle of Step 5, and I will be for a couple of days. See you on the flip side.

* That realization is huge, and comes in handy in more areas of my life than just this one.

**Except in politics, where everyone has videocameras and blogs. Goddamn those bloggers, they can make everyone look like an idiot. But if you want to go into politics, you are reading the wrong corner of the internet. In a few years time, just knowing this website exists will be enough to get labeled a pinko.

Top Chef's Tom Colicchio On Women, Cuisine, and Social Justice

I sometimes think about cancelling cable to save money and brain cells. Unfortunately there are a few shows on cable that make this a really hard plan for me to implement, Battlestar Galactica, The Colbert Report, Project Runway, and Top Chef chief among them. As you may have heard by now (spoiler alert) Stephanie won Top Chef on Wednesday night, making her the first woman in four seasons to do so. Throughout the season, the female contestants never let us forget about the boys club that exists not just within the show's history but in restaurant culture generally. "It would be so great to have a woman win this season," they would say. "It would be so cool to have three women in the finals."

Tom Colicchio, one of the show's judges, blogs about the dearth of women in professional kitchens and why Stephanie's win is significant (skip to page four for the quoted bits):

It used to be for lack of opportunity, but I don’t think that still applies today. None of the great American chefs (or at least not the ones I respect) have a glass ceiling in their restaurants. Quite the opposite: We like to hire women because they work hard without any of the competitive, macho bulls**t you often see among their male counterparts. The women I’ve hired help each other, don’t jockey for position, and work until they drop. So if the opportunities for advancement that make up the early part of a top chef’s career are there, why aren’t women availing themselves of them?

Because the perception of opportunity, on the part of women themselves, hasn’t kept pace. Women are reluctant to enter the culinary world because they believe (and this is not unjustified) that a cooking career is incompatible with raising children, which leaves those of us who want to hire, promote, and mentor women with a slimmer field to choose from than we’d like. And to an extent, they're right: The bottom line is our society does not yet provide women in the workplace with the type of social supports, like high-quality subsidized child care or extended parental leave, that allows them to fully go for it, and the impact this has on the scope and depth of a career is profound. Right or wrong, men plunge into their careers without much thought about how they’ll navigate the work/family balance. They assume someone -- spouse, parent, paid caregiver -- will materialize to take care of it (and usually someone does.) This one assumption opens up an entire world of possibility to a young person in a way that can’t be overstated. Ask yourself how many female Ferran Adrias, Thomas Kellers, or Joel Robuchons have chosen a different path -- say, catering or opening a bakeshop -- because it seems more family friendly? These may be great career choices, but they aren’t the breeding grounds of culinary legend.

So yeah, some of this seems oversimplified to me. Surely it isn't the case that all women want babies and therefore they don't become chefs. And the whole "women play nicer than men" bit is naive. But the lack of social supports for parents, gendered expectations about who ought to be doing the nitty gritty of parenting, and the effect those factors have on career self-selection and career success sound pretty well grounded to me.

I haven't found that level of macroawareness on network yet. So the cable stays for now.