Superstition

I was trying to do some quick thumbnail calculations this afternoon on whether I could shove any more money into savings at the end of the month. I needed a pen and some scratch paper. But the only pen I could find was red and I refused to use it. I went from room to room hunting for a different pen. Totally irrational. But I cannot use a red pen to write down anything about money. The reptile part of my brain simply will not let me. I must have internalized the phrase "in the red" a little too literally.

What are your money superstitions?

It's Official: Women Are Equal

Louis Uchitelle at the NYT reports the Joint Economic Committee of Congress finds that women are leaving the workforce "on par with" men. Awesome! Equality! Ahem. Since the 1960s, women's participation in the US workforce has increased from one economic cycle to the next. This is the first cycle in which women's participation has declined--by 2.2%. It's a similar story across demographic groups. Why? Because the economy sucks right now. It's not surprising that when the economy sucks, people leave the labor force. They get downsized or laid off, they can't find work that pays as well, they regroup, maybe they get discouraged or maybe go to school for additional training. At some point, female workforce participation was going to hit something like critical mass, women's participation rates would climb no more, and would ebb and flow with those of their male counterparts.

But what is maybe most notable about this report is that it shines a light on the way policymakers and journalists talk about women's work and, by corollary, about men's work. When this trend reversal started to emerge, no one paid much mind. "When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many suggested that the pullback from paid employment was a matter of the women themselves deciding to stay home — to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households." These cultural biases about women's preferences and innate skills obscured the fact that women are dealing with the same economic fallout men are, and with the real story safely out of the picture, the data appeared to reinforce the cultural biases. Funny how that works when the bias writes the narrative.

I for one am tired of trend pieces and other cultural detritus telling me that when women leave the workforce it's because they make a considered and empowered choice to do so, and to thereby fulfill their essential natures. It's dismissive of the work women do, the wages they earn, and the fallout they deal with when the economy takes a nosedive. The assumption that women leave the workforce to raise kids but men only leave when they are forced out implies that men are more professionally committed or economically important and that they are less interested in parenting than women. It's insulting to everyone, and each in a different way.

But, even more perniciously, when these sorts of assumptions are made by those who are responsible with stimulating the econony, implementing job-creation and job-training programs, those initiatives are probably going to leave women behind. Feminists talk about how in a sexist culture "male" is "normal" and female is "peculiar/exceptional." It happens in language (policeman versus policewoman), law (the "rational man" standard), even sports (the Bulldogs versus the Lady Bulldogs). When those in power assume the default unemployed jobseeker is male, programs aimed to get those workers back to work are unlikely to address women trying to get out of the kitchen and into the office. And then we're set up for yet another cyclical argument about if women are choosing their choices then haven't we accomplished that whole equality thing even in the face of all demonstrable evidence that the deck remains stacked.