Philanthropy For Billionaires, And For The Rest Of Us

NPR's Marketplace broadcast a bit on the ethical argument in favor of giving more during tough economic times (skip to 18:57)."It's especially easy to forget the needy when the economy slows down. Bioethicist Peter Signer says in his latest book, The Life You Can Save, it's called, that not only should we give more, even in a recession, it's unethical not to."

Singer tells the familiar ethicist's allegory of the person who sees a child drowning in a pond, with no one else around to help. He says that in such a case, we would all agree the ethical thing to do would be to jump in to save the child, regardless of whether we would ruin our most expensive pair of shoes in doing so. I would probably remove my expensive shoes first, as well as my expensive suit jacket, because those things would limit my range of movement and thus my ability to safely and effectively rescue the child. But details aside, I take his point: if you would sacrifice your clothing to save a life, you ought to sacrifice the cost of that clothing, in the form of a monetary donation, to save a life. And no matter what the tax code might say about it, charitable giving is not charitable giving is not charitable giving: money given to cultural institutions in the developed world, for example, is a very different (and less essential) category of giving than money given to basic, lifesaving health programs in the developing world.

Singer authored a thought-provoking story in the NYTimes Magazine a couple of years ago when the US wasn't in quite the scarcity mindset it is now. The story was called "What Should A Billionaire Give -- And What Should You?" In it, he suggests a graduated scheme of giving in which a household's charitiable contribution is tied to its annual income, anywhere from 33% of income for the superrich to 1% of income for those who are able to meet their basic needs. Under his scheme, I ought to be giving around 10% of my household income to lifesaving international development work--which I am not for a variety of reasons, most of which boil down to the fact that it is it too easy and too normal to be selfish.

More on Singer's ethics in the form of a Q&A here. At the risk of spoiling it for you, Singer himself does not live up to the standard he believes he ought to. In response to a reader's question on his point, he writes, "Ultimately, I don't think my indulgences can be justified. I know that I'm very far from being a saint. I should spend less on myself and give away more of what I earn. Of course, I give much more than most. But I know that that isn't the right standard. As for deciding how much is enough, I just do a little better each year."

This recession has reminded me that I should be giving more money away, and over the years work like Singer's and the nice people at Lazarus At The Gate has made me reevaluate where that money would be best spent. I don't give as much as I ought to, but like Singer, I am trying to do better each year. How has the recession changed how you think about your poverty-fighting obligations?

Black Men Hit Hard By Recession, Wide Employment Gap Between Black Men And Black Women

Really quick: The CS Monitor reports on a new study on the job losses faced by Black men during this recession:

No group has been hit harder by the downturn. Employment among black men has fallen 7.8 percent since November of 2007, according to a report by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

The trend is intimately tied to education, the report’s authors say. Black women – who are twice as likely as black men to go to college – have faced no net job losses. By contrast, black men are disproportionately employed in those blue-collar jobs that have been most highly affected – think third shifts at rural manufacturing plants.

It threatens to add to the difficulties of vulnerable families in a community already beset by high incarceration rates and low graduation numbers.

Moreover, it puts renewed focus on the cultural and economic stereotypes of black women and men – mythologies and realities about the black family that remain challenging for the country, and Washington, to address.

Check it out.

Save $500, Change Your Life

If you can get just $500 in a bank account, you might change your life. That's not just platitudes, I promise.

Saving money, building an emergency fund, and the like can be overwhelming. Three years ago, if someone had said to me "make sure you have an emergency fund that can cover all your expenses for three to six months" I would have laughed at them. Not because it didn't seem like a good idea in theory, but because I was starting from zero and, yes, even though I am currently in a high paying job, saving that much money isn't exactly something I was in a position to do overnight.

In fact, it took me almost three years to build up a four-month cushion--it was a steep hill to climb, and I would get close and then have an expensive house emergency, or would backslide a little on my spending targets. I wasn't blogging for most of that, but trust me: for those first two years I felt like I was never going to get there. If I weren't extremely stubborn, I'd probably still be working toward it.

Sometimes a goal is so far away it seems, if not unreachable, then at least like too much work for something with good odds of failure.

So if you are just starting out on your financial journey, take heart. Yeah, I will continue to advise that you build up a healthy emergency savings account in case you lose your job or have some other major setback. But that doesn't need to be your first goal.

Your first goal should be to get $500 into a savings account. Liz Pulliam Weston (who might be my favorite money writer, BTW) reports on a recent study done by Stephen Brobeck for the Consumer Federation of America. Brobeck focused on low-income households (earning less than $25,000/year) and moderate income households (earning less than $50,000/year) households and found that for each category, household that had at least $500 in savings had measurably better financial, psychological, and physical health outcomes.

Five hundred bucks is an amount within just about anyone's reach. Just five hundred dollars! (I'm starting to feel like an informercial here). The study's findings indicate that within each category, a household's income wasn't a great predictor of its ability to save--in fact, higher savers actually had slightly lower incomes ($17,000/year) than lower savers. And across many demographic categories, whether gender, marital status, or employment status, high savers were not that different from low-savers.

And what, specifically, is the benefit of having $500 in savings? Those who saved less had more money worries and paid more in fees or interest. Higher savers had fewer cash flow problems, better financial habits, lower rates of high-cost loans like payday or car title loans, and better psychological and physical health.

Some ideas for where you could find $500 to put into savings:
- a tax refund
- a gift
- a part-time job
- a raise (if they don't offer, ask for it!)
- selling unused items on ebay, a used book store, or a consignment store
- save all your change, or all your $1 bills
- take a roommate
- find cheaper car insurance/phone plan/renters insurance/internet and pocket the difference
- cash in aluminum cans for the deposit
- a rebate or credit card reward check
- sell plasma
- do surveys online through mysurvey.com or pinecone
- bike or walk more, drive or bus less

Most of these ideas are not going to make you much money. I speak from experience. I've done everything on this list but one, and very few of them were real money makers. But you don't need to make a lot of money to reach a significant money-management threshold that, insignificant as it may seem, is linked to measurably better outcomes.

Plus once you've got that first $500 saved, your first month of expenses is that much closer. Progress is progress.

Cheap Birth Control Days Are Here Again--Probably

Yesterday President Obama signed the Fiscal Year 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, which, like all appropriations bills ever, contains a some interesting provisions:

Want to breastfeed your child in a federal building or on federal property? Okeedoke, thanks to Section 724.

Have some abstinence education you'd like to fund? Sure thing, here's $94,659,000. (wait: isn't that an earmark? At least it's less than last year.)

But perhaps most crowed about is a little clause I like to call Section 728, but which you may recognize as the Affordable Birth Control Act. Yes, that's right, health care providers can now resume negotiating for and dispensing discounted birth control. There will be some lag time, but better later than never.

Get The Story Straight: Is The Economy Leading Women Back Into the Workforce Sooner? Or Leading Them To Stay At Home In Greater Numbers?

The evidence is thin and the data are self-selecting, but the Wall Street Journal claims that economic concerns are leading new mothers to take shorter maternity leaves or to otherwise return to the paid workforce earlier than they had planned. Makes sense to me, especially since we already know that for a variety of reasons this recession is hitting men and women in different ways: job losses have been more concentrated in jobs dominated by men, like manufacturing and construction; more women are the sole breadwinners for their families; and that even so, women are still doing disproportionately more work around the house. So if her husband's job is on wonky footing, and her own is no sure thing either, wouldn't it follow that these factors might be accellerating women's workforce re-entry? Seems to me like the rational actress would want to be shoring up her family's financial position as soon as she can, even if it comes at an unhappy cost.

This has other implications on family finances, of course. If her partner or other family member isn't able to stay home with the babe, you're looking at a new childcare bill, too, and infant care is really expensive. A clinical psychologist quoted in the article points out that the money stress and disrupted expectations about one's plans to take a maternity leave could lead to an increased likelihood of depression and post-partum anxiety.

More specious is the "trend" identified by National Public Radio, in which laid off women are opting to ride out unemployment by staying at home with their children. "For many of these women, unemployment has no doubt been terrifying. But for some — particularly those who have the financial resources to ride out the storm — it has been a precious opportunity to get to know their children a little better."

Rule of thumb: when a trend article is premised completely on anecdata about well-to-do women, that's a good sign you should be crying "Belkin." And why are we focusing on a job-loss-motivated return to domesticity by women when the piece itself admits that women are less likely to be out of work right now than men? Hullo, the fact that it's a handy meta-narrative doesn't mean it's a correct one. I can trade anecdata for anecdata, here: I don't know any women who have done this following a layoff, but I do know several men who have. How do you like that overturning of social expectation, NPR?

Why is this silver lining meta-narrative so troubling to me? First, it is theory passed off as fact, which always chafes my bottom. Second, it explicitly reinforces sexist stereotypes about women's real desires regarding work life versus family life (family life wins!), and implicitly reinforces sexist stereotypes about men's desires on these same subjects (men don't care about family life!) that are both personally restrictive and socially counterproductive. It might not be legal to admit it, but when a manager is looking at making layoff decisions between two equally valued employees, I have to believe that a subconscious belief that the woman would actually enjoy the layoff as an opportunity to stay home with her kids in a way her male counterpart would not is going to play a part in the decision of who to lay off. I don't doubt that in some cases, if you've got the means to float yourself, having some time off the clock to re-focus on meaningful non-work pursuits could be revitalizing. But that is mere background noise in this gendered, facts-optional treatment.

The Economy and Your Family (Planning)

More unplanned pregnancies, more abortions sought, more calls to so-called crisis pregnancy centers, more demand for birth control but less money to spend on it. That's the story in today's Chicago Tribune. It's not popular to say it, but goddammit, we know very well that reproductive health is an economic issue--and too frequently an economic injustice issue. Maybe someday we'll start acting like it.

Whether you actively want to have kids or are desperately trying to avoid them, I've got to believe the nauseating economic decline and its attendant job instability has being throwing a wrench in a lot of plans. Sometimes several wrenches. One woman who spoke to Trib reporter Deborah L. Shelton said that "she and her husband had made the painful choice to end her pregnancy because they could not afford a third child. But the family's insurance doesn't cover abortions, and not until her 14th week could they pull together money to pay." That's some pro-natalist culture we've got there, huh? You can choose between, on the one hand, ending a pregnancy you might actually want but can't afford, or on the other, an abortion you believe strongly that you need but alsocan't afford. What an enviable position.

Saddest to me were the stats from the National Network of Abortion Funds, a network that refers women who need help paying for an abortion to a local affiliate that might be able to help. NNAF has seen precipitous jumps in requests for referrals over the last few months, and an astonishing 75% of all the calls they fielded in November and December 2008 were for women who were at least four months pregnant. In the second trimester, abortions tend to be more costly, more complicated, and more difficult to procure, as providers stop providing abortions as the weeks progress. "No woman purposely waits until her second trimester to have an abortion procedure," said Gaylon Alcatraz, executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund. "They are trying to raise money, get resources, get things together."

NNAF, Planned Parenthood, and crisis pregnancy centers are seeing different faces of the same phenomenon. Women and families have fewer resources available to them, less job stability and reliable health benefits, and thus are more apprehensive about carrying through a pregnancy. At the same time, that scarcity of resources is precisely what's making it harder for them to avoid or end the very pregnancies they can't afford.

Oy. The rhetoric of the culture of life.

Quick Hits Tuesday 10 March 2009: Matchy-Matchy Edition

It's been a while since we had a good oldfashioned linkfest, and it's about time to fix that.

Miriam at Feministing on the equity implications of public transportation. More people than ever are clueing into this: 2008 had record high transit ridership numbers, Consumerist reports.

In New Zealand, it's just too expensive to worry about pay inequity. In the US, it's too expensive to (kinda) address housework inequity. In any event, life is heavy with opportunities for women to work for free! Or at least at a discount. Step 1: Lily Ledbetter Act. Next up: ThePaycheck Fairness Act. [Feministing, WaPo, Broadsheet, NYT, and Feministe, respectively]

Whew, I'm glad I got that off my chest.

Money Diary, January 2009

Inspired by Ramit's Money Diaries series, based in turn on New York Magazine's Sex Diaries, I give you... my month in money. I started this thinking it would be as boring as Doogie Howser's blinking cursor, but given the job instability talk I decided to post it for your voyeuristic enjoyment.

Friday, 30 January
10:09 a.m. It's pay day. Shiner has the money to open a Roth IRA. This $3,000 contribution could be $376,000 when we retire in 30+ years! As though an 8% annual return is remotely imaginable to me anymore.

12:01 p.m. I brought my lunch and learned there was a Superbowl potluck party at work. All food seems to have come from the support staff, no lawyers were asked to bring anything although I have been invited to eat a few times. Does this seem weird and uncomfortable to anyone else? I had some cake and grazed on the snacky bits to seem appreciative but not vulture-like.

Saturday, 31 January
1:59 p.m. Good to know: one of the local mall theaters still has a not crappy matinee rate. Slumdog Millionaire is very enjoyable. Shiner says it makes him want to go back to India. I wish.

5 p.m. Got a bee in my bonnet about taking a month between jobs this summer to study Spanish in Central America. Programs in Copas Ruinas, Hondouras; Antigua, Guatemala; and Suchitoto, El Salvador all look promising. I would love to go back to Suchitoto. Is this really something I could afford to do? Maybe with a tax refund? Uh... why the hell am I thinking about a luxury expense like this right now?

Sunday, 1 February
1:30 p.m. Go to the fancy eyeglasses place to try on specs. I'm trying to price out what I might want to get in this, my last year of vision coverage, so I know how much to pay into my FSA. The pair I like best is $540. Yoinks. I will look around some more. What am I going to do when I don't have vision coverage? Not break my glasses, I hope.

9 p.m. First married fight about money. Awesome.

Monday 2 February
6:32 p.m. Shiner thinks maybe our money fight last night was moot, because he has money to cover the shortfall coming in through various reimbursements. Arrrggghh!

Tuesday 3 February
9:08 a.m. American Express invites me to pay $450 for the privilege of telling people I am a platinum cardholder. Unless that designation comes with a complimentary everything, I can't imagine that being a good bargain.

Thursday 5 February
12:20 p.m. Three members of the support staff gather around outside my office to gossip about job stability. It's bad news bears. So far the gossip is that layoffs will be affecting staff only, not lawyers, but it's probably just a matter of time. Then it will be associates (I'm in this group), and they'll try at all costs to avoid cutting partners even though that's where the real savings (and frequently the dead weight) are. Ugh, I am feeling for our awesome staff. But what can you say? "Sorry your job's on the block while the overpaid lawyers like me are being coddled, can I get you anything at Starbucks?"

Friday 6 February
9:23 a.m. Go to the coffee shop to redeem my coupon for a free half pound of beans. This past year they've changed their loyalty club from a simple punch card you use every time you buy beans or a drink to a swipey debit card sized thing that prints out a coupon that's only good for a month. The new card takes up more room in my wallet and I'm less likely to take advantage of the rewards because of the expiration date. Also, the shamelessly tit for tat baristas can't give my card extra punches when I tip them. Damn those crafty corporate bastards and their revamped loyalty program!

Sunday 8 February
4:31 p.m. Wrap a bookstore gift card for a friend's child's birthday party, regifted from Christmas. Is it really regifting if it's pretty much exactly what I would have bought if I'd gone to the store? Probably.

Monday 9 February
12:30 p.m. On a work trip. None of my expenses are really expenses since they'll be reimbursed. But the credit card rewards are mine, all mine! I am approximately $1.08 richer.

Tuesday 10 February
4:30 p.m. Wild and speculative gossip with coworker about our job stability. Scary.

Wednesday 11 February
5:53 p.m. I've been out of the office today. A coworker calls to tell me a bunch of lawyers were laid off this afternoon, including some (that I know of so far) who are good friends. Fuuuuuuck. It is not surprising the layoffs have begun. It is very surprising that the ones I initally heard of were among those laid off. Shocking, actually. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Thursday 12 February
9:36 a.m. A coworker suggests coffee as an opportunity to debrief on the layoffs. Most of the day will be spent on this sort of conversation, in one way or another.

10:20 a.m. One laid off coworker is in. I stop by his office to tell him how messed up it is that he got the shaft and offer him any networking help I am able to provide. Subsequent conversations with my assistant, her staff supervisor, my big cheese. Everyone is extremely sad. I want to go home. I stick around, to no practical effect.

Friday 13 February
4:32 a.m. I can't sleep, still angry about what has happened at work. I get out of bed and putter while listening to the first news radio of the day. I dread work today, for the first time in a very long time.

5:07p.m. I call my mom. She gets angry on my friends' behalves. My mom is always good for sympathy outrage.

Friday 14 February
9 a.m. Board meeting. We, like a lot of other nonprofits right now, are having serious budget issues. Staff reductions may be a necessity. No matter where I turn it seems like I just cannot get away from this topic.

5:30 p.m. Trip to the grocery store for dinner-making ingredients. Smooshy cheese, bread, the fixins for fish cakes (which, like most stuff we cook, will make two or three meals for the two of us), and Karma Sutra ice cream, oooh, sex-ee. We listen to rockin love songs, make dinner, drink wine, get biblical, eat ice cream, and look through the proofs we just received from our wedding photographer. It's maybe the best Valentine's Day I've ever had. And not too spendy, either.

Sunday 15 February
1:13 p.m. I start making molasses cookies. I realize I am out of ground cloves. I hate running errands for one item. I grind whole cloves in the electric coffee grinder. They taste slightly coffee-y, but I am pretty sure that won't come through in the baked cookie. If it does I'll cover it by using extra rum in the glaze. I am fantasizing about an as-yet undiscovered recipe for a dense, coffee-flavored cookie when I find myself also out of allspice. I sub nutmeg. When did I run out of my favorite baking spices?

7:10 p.m. Our first nice dinner out in a while, and part of my V-Day present to him: dinner at our favorite Indian restaurant, somewhat improbably located in an outer suburb. About $50 with beer, and leftovers enough to provide lunch for both of us on Monday.

Tuesday 17 February
4:31 p.m. Submit expenses from my dental appointment to my FSA. It's nice to be able to do it by email rather than fax. I have an irrational hatred of fax machines. Hopefully I'll get this reimbursement check in the next week and won't have to float myself from savings to cover the credit card bill.

Wednesday 18 February
10:16 a.m. Email Shiner:
"Story about advertising on people's bodies:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/business/media/18adco.html?_r=1&ref=business
I wouldn't shave my head, but I'd totally put something on my pregnant belly for a few grand. Preferably a liquor ad."
I probably wouldn't do it in the end. Heck, I won't even wear shirts with logos on them. But the comic potential is high.

Friday 20 February
4:38 p.m. I get back on the name changing horse. Shiner has been lapping me in terms of getting his documentation changed. I fax in name change stuff for the ING savings account that holds my pre-marriage cash. I have the joint savings stuff ready to go but he needs to change his name with HSBC (he has his solo savings there, too) before I can officially add him to the account. I'm afraid if we add him under his new name before he's changed his name on his sole account things might get screwy. Having multiple identities is not all it's cracked up to be.

7:10 p.m. Work on my taxes while watching Dollhouse. Shiner owes about $800 between state and federal. Not too bad, but he's not happy. He thought he'd get a refund, but those mid-year job changes and pay increases will bite you if you're not careful. I will get about $2100 back, thanks mostly to my relatively new mortgage. That's less than in past years but still more than I'd prefer. Why can I not get those blasted IRS withholding calculators to work for me? And what should we do with the net refund? What I really want to do is spend it on four weeks in a Spanish immersion program between Job 1 and Job 2 later this year. Part of me says that's a great idea because I will have both the flexibility and the money at the same time, and I have always lacked one or the other of those things. But on the other hand, Paul Krugman is freaking me out. Really? Five or six years until we're back on track? Maybe my tax refund should just live in the bank for a while. At this point I can't tell if it would be irresponsible to go for it or paranoid to refrain.

Monday 23 February
12 p.m. Liz Pulliam Weston is a fun killer. Now she's got me thinking about all these more responsible things we should do with the tax refund. Saving for car expenses or home maintenance are two things she suggests that we haven't made a lot of progress on. Scratch that, over the last two and a half years I've saved about $10,000 for home repairs, which is really good progress, but a few major repairs later it's all been spent. Furnaces are expensive. Ditto water heaters. We would probably do well to assign most of the refund to one of those purposes. Dammit.

3:57 pm. Free ice cream in a conference room to celebrate something or other. Doesn't matter, I'm happy to celebrate just about whatever in exchange for ice cream.

Tuesday 24 February
8:22 p.m. Taxes filed! I am embarrassed about how little I've given to charity this year (just under $1,000 in deductions), though one mitigating factor is that a lot of the money I gave away this year went to political candidates and organizations that do lobbying or electoral work, so they don't show up on my taxes. Still. I'd estimate it's no more than $1600 total. And yeah, I take a pay scale hit at work for the pro bono work that I do, and yeah, I give my time to these causes, but seriously, money needs to be meeting mouth here. I resolve to get on the bandwagon during Lent.

8:23 p.m. Obama's economic address is better in HD, you get a much better view of pols pulling faces.

9:20 p.m. Shiner and I make three microloans with money we got as a wedding gift. We tried to make a fourth but the Kiva website was sticky. At least once we tried to fund someone just as her loan had already been fully funded by someone else. The other time I thought it went through, but it hasn't shown up in our portfolio so who knows. We'll try again when I'm back in town from some work travel. We have another couple of Kiva gift certificates we have to find, too.

Wednesday 25 February
5:55 p.m. On the way home from work I talk with Shiner about what I am thinking about giving up for Lent. I figure since I want to do something money-related, with the object of spending less money so I can give more to charity, it will affect him to and I should get him on board even though he's not an Easter celebrator. I suggest not eating out at all. He is anti. (rather, he's pro-eating out). We settle on Compacting again this year, but I have a couple built in exceptions like last year: I get to buy myself a birthday present, and I will continue shopping for suits since I need them for my job change and everything seems to be on sale right now.

Thursday 26 February 2009
2:55 p.m. Phone contact with a guy I met on couchsurfing for a free place to crash tonight--I am traveling for lawyer stuff that for various reasons I don't want to seek reimbursement for. He seems really nice. He has a puppy! And a fiance, which makes me feel, happily, like he's less likely to hit on me or be creepily overly friendly. I end up loving couchsurfing, my hosts are very cool people.

Friday 27 February 2009
10:25 p.m. Doing bills for the month. I still haven't gotten a reimbursement from my flexible spending account, and I have to float $220 from savings to cover a dental cleaning. I hate it when I can't get everything done at the end of the month. It makes me nervous I'll forget something. Habit is my crutch.

Saturday 28 February 2009
8:28 p.m. I HATE it when people pronounce the acronym for Individual Retirement Accounts as "Ira." As in Glass.

Gay Marriage Lawsuit In The Offing

Same sex couples can get married--that's spelled M-A-R-R-I-E-D, not C-I-V-I-L-L-Y U-N-I-F-I-E-D-- in Massachusetts. But that doesn't win them any door prizes in the federal benefits lottery, because the federal Defense of Marriage Act defines marriage as existing only between one man and one woman. That means same-sex couples don't get the goodie bags opposite-sex married folks do, like Social Security benefits following the death of a spouse, eligibility for spousal IRAs, health insurance benefits for the same-sex spouses of federal employees, the constellation of benefits available to spouses who file joint tax returns... Et freakin cetera.

Fifteen married gays and lesbians denied these benefits are filing suit today in federal court to challenge this aspect of DOMA. This is going to be a really interesting lawsuit to watch, especially since the 9th Circuit (the federal appeals circuit encompassing the left coast states) ruled about a month ago in two separate proceedings that DOMA aside, court administrators in that circuit had to give health insurance benefits to same-sex spouses. These were internal administrative proceedings, so they don't have any precendential value, and only one of those decisions directly addressed the issue of DOMA's constitutionality (finding: not so much constitutional). But when you've got both a judge with a reputation for being a liberal (Reinhardt) and a Reagan appointee (Kozinski) finding that certain federal benefits must be extended to legally married same-sex couples, that might hold some real persuasive power for the court hearing the Massachusetts case.

Something That's Sure To Shock You: Leisure Gap + Job Loss = Bigger Leisure Gap

Ha! Here's a blast from the past, but with an update for these modern times.

We all remember from our women's studies classes (or in my case, my college boyfriend's roommate's women's studies class) about the leisure gap, right? The findings made by Arlie Hochschild in her 1989 book The Second Shift that in two-income hetero households, in which both partners do equal amounts of paid work, women do the majority of all household and childcare tasks? In case you were wondering, the American Time Use Study, a project of the feds, suggests that is still the case.

But! And here's were the timeliness comes in: "When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities."

And why might this be? John Baruch, a man featured in the Times story who's been out of work since January 2008, is too busy treating job hunting as a full-time job to walk the dog. Which is great in theory, but one, if you're spending 8plus hours solid looking for a job, you are probably doing it wrong--you have time to walk the damn dog. And two, it reflects the relative value placed on men's work versus women's work in way too many U.S. households. It could go one of two ways (though is probably some combination of the two): If the work women did at home was valued by their male partners, men would pick up more of the housekeeping tasks following a layoff when they had more time. Or if women's paid work was valued more by their male partners, they wouldn't be picking up quite so much more housekeeping work during their out-of-work time because they and their partners would be busy attempting to return to the paid work force.