Pull Up The Ladder Behind You

Reuters carries a story this morning about a new study about the glass ceiling in the workplace. The article summarizes the study findings thusly: "Women are their own workplace enemies when it comes to cracking the glass ceiling." Women are less likely to promote themselves or their accomplishments, and women managers are seen as being less supportive of female staffers as male managers--the so-called "pull up the ladder" phenomenon in which those who have achieved hard-won success work against the achievements of those who come after them.

My own workplace experiences don't gel with the study's findings, in part because (1) I am a loudmouth who has always been happy to tout my credentials when they are relevant, and (2) almost all of my supervisors are men, and more than half of my peers are women, so I haven't had the occasion to feel especially undermined by female bosses. But it's not inconsistent with stories floating around in the conversational out there, and it can be pretty crazy making when it happens to you. One friend who got her sole poor job review from a woman boss went back and forth between "Is it me? Am I bad at my job? Am I doing something wrong?" and "Is she just trying to sabotage me because she wants to remain the Top Girl?" Both possibilities would create career obstacles for my friend, but driving herself nuts trying to figure out where she stood seriously messed with her self-confidence and made it difficult for her to know what to do with the criticism she'd received.

Half of the problem described in this article can be addressed on an individual level by becoming more assertive in one's strategic bragging. That's not easy, but it's possible, and largely within one's own control. But as for the phenomenon of women hindering the careers of other women -- and I don't have any claim as to how frequently this happens, only that I believe anecdotally that it does -- what's to be done about that?

Related: Female Science Professor has asked a couple of interesting questions about this phenomenon, at least as it relates to the fields of academic science. Do women have a particular responsibility to mentor women? When a boss undermines or hinders a female employee's efforts, is it worse if that boss is also a woman?

Spy Where? Resources and Methods for Pay Reconnaissance

Gloria Steinam agrees with me. And so does Marci Alboher, who blogs at the NYT. Do I get a cookie now?

Cookie aside, it appears that the three of us have all opined in favor of more salary transparency as a means to fight pay discrimination. But just how, precisely, do we do that? Alboher passes on two recommendations from Penelope Trunk, who blogs on career development, to check Payscale.com and Salary.com. In the legal field, sites like Greedy Associates allow law firm associates to seek and share that information with as much or as little detail as they want to disclose. For government employees, that information should be publicly available through state or federal freedom of information laws. You can either request it yourself from the appropriate agency or find someone who has already compiled that information as many newspapers do.

Alboher, who says her income streams aren't easy to categorize, flat out asks people who do similar work what they get paid. How do you like them ovaries? You, too, can go the direct route, even if your employer doesn't want you to--the National Labor Relations Act guarantees employees, even nonunionized ones, the right to discuss "wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment" for their "mutual aid or protection." Employers don't like it, and they can prohibit those discussions from happening during work hours or on the job site, but they can't legally retaliate against employees for sharing salary information so long as it is shared within those parameters. That doesn't mean they might not try, so use discretion and if you take your findings to your boss, be cautious about disclosing the source of your information. But you do have every right to have these conversations.

This post was featured in the 162nd Carnival of Personal Finance.

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.

More On The Pay Cut: Planning For A Long-Term Job Change

We all know people, or at least stories about people, who leave their lucrative jobs to follow their hearts, making less money but being far happier in the long run. In my last post, I talked about the fact that I was considering applying for a job that would involve taking a pay cut for a couple of years, but that would give me more flexibility down the road. No big updates on that job yet. I applied, and I have already been contacted by the person doing the hiring, who told me he was glad I'd reapplied and that he'd be in touch in July when he's ready to start scheduling interviews. So that's a good sign. I got so excited thinking about this job, and what it could mean for me, that I decided I should apply for a few more similar positions, just in case this one didn't come through. Eggs in multiple baskets, etc.

But what is the long-term game plan? It's my career, I should be thinking about this over the long haul, not just the couple of years this job would last. In talking to one of my recommenders for this job, my dirty little secret came out. I want to be a law professor. Eep! I said it. Low(er) pay, long hours, constant pressure to publish, those few horrid and overly entitled law students who can't be bothered to show up to your class but have time to bitch during your office hours when their grades are too low. What's not to love about that? Lots, honestly, but for me those aspects are outweighed by the facts that I love to read and write about legal theory, I love teaching students who are engaged with the material, and I love (and miss) the intellectual stimulation of a college campus. I think about my life as a lawyer and I think, "this will be worth it when I can retire early." I think about life as a post-tenure professor and I think, "so long as I am in good health, why would I want to retire?" That's a good sign about the direction I'd be happiest with in my career.

PF advice tends to assume that unless she screws it up or the economy goes to hell, a person's income will trend upward over her working life. That right out of school, you won't be making very much, but that economic growth and promotions and salary negotiations will gradually improve your situation. I'm looking at the opposite situation, in which my salary just out of school is really high, but falls sharply a few years out as my career path shifts. By the numbers, this choice is idiotic. As a human being with an emotional life not denominated by dollars, it's a wrinkle, but one that has workarounds.

So as I am thinking about this job change, and the job changes I hope to make down the road, two questions are at the top of my mind. First, what can I do to give myself the best possible set of credentials to go on the teaching market in three years? And second, what can I do now, as a high income earner, to improve my financial situation and ease the transition to a permanently lower paying job for which I may need to be geographically flexible?

Bloomberg Named In Pregnancy Discrimination Lawsuit

As though pregnancy, with its morning sickness, wardrobe limbo, and constant need to pee, was not already enjoyable enough, 58 women who work (or used to work) at Bloomberg LP, the financial services corporation founded by current NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg are suing the company, alleging they were discriminated against for getting knocked up.

The lawsuit also claims the women were paid less when they returned from maternity leave and were demoted and replaced by "junior" male employees.
...
Stanford Law School Professor Deborah Rhode said, "It's not uncommon to find employers responding in this way to employees who become pregnant."

Asked how hard it would be to prove discrimination, she replied: "It's not rocket science ... There's usually documentary evidence that shows what was their job before and what was their job when they came back. And is there any other plausible explanation other than discrimination."

Looks like it's time for a quick pregnancy discrimination primer. Gather 'round, chickadees:

It is illegal for an employer to refuse to hire a woman because she is pregnant.

It is illegal for an employer to fire a woman because she is pregnant.

It is illegal for an employer to demote a woman, reduce her hours, dock her pay, or backpedal her seniority because she is pregnant.

It is illegal for an employer to ask a woman about her baby-making plans.

It is illegal for an employer to tie a pregnant woman's eligibility for benfits, like health insurance or parental leave, to her marital status.

More from 'Lect law on what is and is not allowed, how much leave you're entitled to, and what to do if your employer decides to break the law.

More Job Discrimination From Uncle Sam

Normally, sex discrimination in the workplace is illegal. That general rule, however, does not apply to the U.S. military, which continues to discriminate against women by prohibiting them from working in combat operations.

Except that female soldiers do work in combat. And by all accounts they do it well. Monica Brown, an 18-year-old medic stationed in Afghanistan, recently received a Silver Star for running through gunfire to treat and shield wounded fellow soldiers when her convey was struck by Taliban fighters. She may now have the military's third-highest combat medal, but still critically lacks the ability to write her name in the snow from a stationary postion. So days after risking her life to treat her commrades, she was removed from her unit and restationed to a more lady-like position where she wouldn't have to worry her pretty little girl-head about fighting.

President Bush has forcefully backed the Army's restrictions, asserting in a January 2005 interview with the Washington Times that there should be "no women in combat." Since her heroic actions, however, Brown was promoted to specialist and has been congratulated by Cheney in Afghanistan, praised in a meeting with Bush at a NATO summit in Romania, and offered a job on the White House staff.

Military officers in the field and independent experts have said it is both infeasible and contrary to the Army's own warfighting doctrine to prevent women from serving in proximity to -- or together with -- all-male combat units in today's war zones. They contend that if the goal of the policy is to protect women from capture or bodily harm, it cannot be done in the scramble of conflicts such as those in the Middle East.

Across Afghanistan, female medics such as Brown are regularly sent to serve with combat units. "The real catch was to have a female medic out there because of the cultural sensitivities and the flexibility that gave commanders," said Maj. Paul Narowski, the executive officer of Brown's battalion. "It is absolutely not about gender in terms of how well they will do," he said, adding that he does not know why Brown was pulled out.

The only other female Silver Star recipient in the past 60 years was Sgt. Lee Ann Hester, a military policewoman in Iraq who the Army said had responded to a 2005 insurgent attack on a convoy by firing grenades.

"I didn't want to leave," Brown said, after being pulled from the platoon. Robbins said he and his men, who called Brown "Doc," also wanted to keep her as their medic.

"I've seen a lot of grown men who didn't have the courage and weren't able to handle themselves under fire like she did," said Staff Sgt. Aaron Best of Canton, N.C., Robbins's gunner that day. "She never missed a beat."

Army personnel largely agree that the military's ban on women in combat is crap, says a survey conducted last year by Rand Corporation. It certainly goes against common sense. And moreover, it's utterly sexist. Of course, the military has one of the worst track records of any large employer in the U.S. when it comes to fair treatment of women. But it doesn't really matter that I don't have the foggiest idea why a woman (or a man) would want to enlist in the military. They do, and they deserve to be treated fairly.

Republicans In Congress Could Not Care Less About Pay Discrimination

Earlier this week Republican Senators blocked a vote on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Say it with me now: that's crap.

Mommy On The Clock

The UK paper The Guardian recently ran a piece about a trend among US-companies to allow new parents to bring their babies (up to crawling age) in to the office with them. The thought appears to be that it's cheaper than maternity leave. The article is delightfully toungue-in-cheek, with this lede setting the tone:

The United States and Australia are the only two countries in the industrialised world that don't have paid statutory maternity leave (there are exceptions in some US states). At least in Australia, though, your job is protected for a year; in America, even the leave protection only lasts for 12 weeks. It's an astonishingly backward state of affairs, like discovering that France doesn't have a postal service. A Harvard Study of 168 countries, measuring how different governments meet the needs of working families, found the US to be in the bottom five. But rather than do anything so tedious as campaign for reasonable terms, American lobbyists have instead thought more laterally, with a softly, softly, looky-after-baby approach: bring your baby to work with you. Until it can crawl, it can think of your workplace as liberty hall.

The contributing reporters bring their children to work with them and document their utter failure to accomplish anything they're being paid to do. And it understandable that it would be difficult to engage fully in a task while also being primarily responsible for the every need of a needy little being. But these are the darkly comical situations we find ourselves in here in a country that has an singularly bass-ackwards approach to parenthood and parental leave.

Women Who Mentor Women

This remembrance of women's health advocate extraordinaire Barbara Seaman sparked a lot of thinking for me about women's networking and mentoring. As in, the way that women are mentors, and are mentored, and how it is so important to support other women's professional development along with our own.

Although the article doesn't use this word, it is an amazing testament to the power of mentoring among women. It's not that simple, of course. One doesn't achieve success simply by meeting the right people or being encouraged by them to do something great. But those things are a crucial help to people who do have the drive and the skills and the passion, but who might not have the confidence, or the connections, or the secret handshake needed to get a foot in the door or to work their way up whichever ladder they want to climb.

Oh wait, confidence, connections, and knowledge of the secret handshake? You mean, all the stuff that has been so hard for women to draw upon in the same way men are able to? Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Mentoring can be of immense help to anyone, but it's especially important for people who, for whatever reason--sex, race, economic background, sexual orientation--might be easier for the powers that be to dismiss or overlook. For us folks, it is particularly invaluable to have someone available to show you the ropes, to give advice and answer questions, and to encourage growth and accomplishments that no one else may be expecting from you because of who you are.

When I think about my own favorite mentor, a woman who worked for much of her life as a judge and who I knew first as a member of my parents' church, I can list with certainty the ways in which she has helped me in my schooling and my career. She helped me decide to go to law school, wrote letters of recommendation for me when I was looking for positions after school, talked with me at length about whether I might want someday to go into the judiciary or legal academia and what steps I might want to take to pursue those paths, gave me fantastically helpful comments on a legal article I published after school, and continues to send me articles or book recommendations she thinks might be helpful to my professional development. She has talked with me about her struggles as a woman in the legal profession, how she has dealt with issues ranging from work-life balance (leaving private practice to work as a judge!) to the sexist pronouns some of her colleagues prefer to use in legal opinions and texts (yup, still working on that one).

Being able to talk with someone who has been through not just the same professional training and substantive work experiences that I am going through now, but who had these experiences as a woman is invaluable. She gets it when I say how frustrated I am with marketing events for female lawyers that invariably involve spa treatments or child-centric outings with clients. She knows why I'm groaning that yet another woman has decided to leave the firm not two months after coming back from maternity leave. I have male mentors, too, whose help I am also grateful for, but these types of things don't sting them in the way they sting me. My favorite mentor knows where I'm coming from because she's been through similar things herself.

I would encourage anyone who would like to develop a mentoring relationship to think hard about what sorts of guidance you want in your career. Think big: it's a wish list. But when you're thinking about that list, don't forget about demographics. Do you want someone who can talk to you about how they have dealt with racist comments from supervisors? Or which partners haven't ever in living memory given an assignment to a woman? Or how they came out to their coworkers? As a woman in what has long been a male-dominated field, I can tell you: it helps to be able to talk to someone who is on my side and who gets it--not just academically, not just in theory, not just from a position of sympathy, but from firsthand experience. So maybe you look at your list and you can't think of a single person who fits each of these criteria. That's OK. I have multiple mentors, and they're all fabulous. Right now I'd say I've got mainly two: one male partner who has been working in my practice area for decades, and this female former judge. I wouldn't give up either of them. Together, they provide everything I could hope to put on my wish list.

I did have a strange thought when thinking about this article. I'm getting to a sandwichy part of my career--I can still benefit hugely from having mentors, but I also feel like I'm nearly at a point where I could be useful as a mentor myself. Not to young lawyers, but certainly to students interested in law or public policy. Holy crap, that's weird to realize. I find stories like this one about Barbara Seaman so inspiring, but have trouble thinking about myself serving a similar role in someone else's life. I suppose I'd better get used to it, since if I'm going to talk big about how women need female mentors, I ought to be willing to step up. Where does one even start?

WISER on Retirement

Women's Institute For A Secure Retirement (WISER), a nonprofit organization under the Heinz umbrella, recently published the monograph What Women Need To Know About Retirement.

Women And Retirement: The Backstory
Retirement income has in the past been described as a "three-legged stool" with "legs" made up of Social Security, employer-sponsored retirement programs like private pensions or 401(k)'s or 403(b)'s, and individual savings. This model is becoming increasingly irrelevant to all Americans, but is particularly inadequate when it comes to women. With the risks faced by Social Security and the fact that employer-sponsored retirement programs are frequently not available in lower-paying or sporadic work, the only "leg" available to many is their own private savings.

But in addition to these challenges, women face particular difficulties financing their retirement on personal savings alone. The persistent wage gap means that women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Due in large part to caregiving responsibilities that men are not asked to fulfill, women spend less time in the full-time work force and miss out on promotions and work experience in the meantime. They are more likely to work part-time than men are, and the average woman's total working life lasts 27 years, compared with 40 years for the average man. Yet on average women live longer than men, so their lesser earnings and savings must last them longer. Consequently, women's income in retirement is less than men's, and the rate of retired women living in poverty exceeds 20% for white women, and is over 40% for Black and Latina women.

So it's an uphill battle with daunting odds. Where to start?

A number of the chapters focus on government programs that are likely to change significantly over the next thirty to forty years. For those who are still a ways away from retirement, I wouldn't recommend doing much more than skimming chapters 4 (on Social Security) and 5 (on Medicaid and Medigap and long-term care insurance), since many aspects of those programs will almost certainly be quite different than they are now. It's worth it to understand how Social Security benefits are calculated, since that calculation tends to screw women pretty dramatically, and we might want to therefore plan around it. But Social Security is not a stable enough program to be a source of income I am counting on in retirement. If it's still around and I'm still eligible, it will be gravy. And while I expect Medicaid will last in one form or another until I am all wrinkles in my purple dress and red hat, I suspect it will only barely resemble the mishmash of programs we have now.

Chapter 3 is basically Investing 101, covering a lot of ground, but not in enough depth to be very useful to anyone who hopes to take action. Better coverage of investment how-tos can be found elsewhere.

There are, though, a few chapters worth highlighting out of this 78-page collection, covering ground such as how to budget in the present to protect your future, a brief summary of different vehicles that can provide income in retirement, and a short treatment of what to do if things go terribly wrong.

Chapter 2: Budgeting Now for Future Security is written by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, authors of The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Parents Are Going Broke and All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan. The chapter basically condenses the plan they describe in All Your Worth into seven pages. (The Simple Dollar provides a more in-depth review of the book here).

First, get a handle on your must-have expenses (mortgage, health care, utilities, daycare, basic food, minimum debt payments) so that they take up less than 50% of your monthly income. If you can't do that, cut your costs. And if you still can't make it down to 50%, get as close as you can, because 65% of your income spent before you have it is better than 70% is better than 75%. Second, pay off your debts by not taking on any new debt and by paying off all your existing debts, one by one. Warren and Warren Tyagi say to exclude mortgages, student loans, and car loans in this steps. Debt repayment and savings, addressed in section 3, should take 20% of your monthly income. Third, save three months' pay for an emergency, and fourth, pay off your home by chipping away at that debt.

The authors don't address retirement savings until step 5. They say only after your consumer debts are paid off and your emergency money is stashed should you invest for retirement by putting 10% of your monthly income in a workplace plan or an IRA (note: they don't specify a Roth IRA, which seems like a big oversight).

Chapter 6: Retirement Income covers different vehicles that can provides income in retirement--Social Security and Medicare, pensions, 401(k)'s and 403(b)'s, IRAs and Roth IRAs, regular investments--and looks at how they can work together to provide for you in retirement. It briefly covers how to make wise choices with the vehicles available to you, such as delaying retirement to maximize the benefits available under a pension or Social Security. There are several examples of couples using different combinations of vehicles for their retirements, and the chart on page 54 and 55 describes the advantages, disadvantages, and tax treatment of each vehicle as wells as penalties for late or early withdrawal.

Chapter 7: Planning for the Worst is premised on the idea that "good planning can help to prevent a personal tragedy from becoming a financial disaster." It provides a list of steps women can take before disaster strikes (that's now, my friends) to protect themselves financially:

Keep copies of important financial documents and records, and keep them organized. This includes account numbers, brokerage information, wills and prenups, house deed and mortgage documents, and safe deposit box info.

Have both joint and separate checking accounts. If all the accounts are in your spouse's name, it can be hard to do things like make sure the mortgage is still getting paid, because it can be a hassle to get access to that account and continue the payments yourself. Having your own, solely owned account is wise, though, so that you have access to your own funds if, say, the will is contested and your spouse's assets are frozen.

Establish and maintain good credit in your own name. If all your credit is in your spouse's name, you will be in dire straights in the event of widowhood or divorce. Should you need to refinance your mortgage or take out student loans for job training or open your own credit card, you'll have to find a cosigner or go without altogether. Monitor your credit reports to make sure they are accurate.

Buy the insurance you need, including home insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, life insurance, and car insurance. By the way, stay-at-home parents should investigate whether life insurance makes sense for them. Just because they're not drawing a wage doesn't mean their families don't need it. If the SAHP dies, would the family need to start paying for daycare? A housekeeper? Could they afford those expenses on the wage earner's salary? If not, get life insurance.

Get a will! I mean it. Especially if you have kids.

The chapter also has a list of financial considerations for women facing divorce or widowhood, unemployment, or medical emergencies.

What's Missing?
I feel like I'm going to say this a lot over the pages of this blog: This is good advice for anyone, but it's especially vital for women. Because we earn less money over less time and have to make it last for longer, a financial mistake made by a woman could jeopardize her future more dramatically than that same mistake could affect a man. And by "jeopardize her future" I mean "push her under water."

What's missing from this report is any analysis how to fix this disparity. Why do women earn less? Why do we carry the bulk of the non-paid caregiving duties? Surely not because we are better people or because we have no use for the money we forego. Neither of those describes me, at any rate. By asking how we fix it, I don't just mean at a political or social level, though those are certainly important aspects, since a lot of this difference in financial security is a result of cultural forces.

I mean that it is worth making explicit that when women take time out of the full-time paid work force to raise their children or to care for aging parents or in-laws, they are going to take a financial hit for it in ways that aren't intuitively obvious. The women making these choices and their partners need to fully understand the long-term ramifications of these choices. Not only do these women not draw a paycheck during periods of leave, but they don't get raises or promotions during that time. They don't get employer matches in their retirement accounts. Part-time workers may not be eligible to contribute to a 401(k), either, or may not be eligible for a match. They may not be re-hired or re-integrated to full-time at the same level of responsibility or seniority if and when they try to come back full time. They will deflate any Social Security benefits they might be eligible for having several years of no or low pay factored into their benefit calculations. These impacts are very real. Are they worth it?

If staying at home with the kids is what a woman ultimately decides to do, there are ways to mediate the long-term financial hit: spousal IRAs, or spousal deposits into taxable investment accounts solely in the stay-at-home parent's name. Families need to talk about the full range of impacts before making these choices, and decide how they are going to share these burdens. That's right, I said share.

This is not about Mommy Wars. This is about wanting every woman to safeguard her own future by making considered choices now. These financial impacts deserve thoughtful discussion ahead of time, both in terms of deciding whether taking the hit is worth it and in terms of taking action to mitigate it. If we're not seeing these important conversations modeled in the financial literature, how can we expect it to be on a woman's radar for consideration? The WISER monograph provides good basic info and good advice, but it doesn't go deep enough into those considerations that most uniquely affect women.

"Passing" as Young

Some people call it "passing;" others refer to it as "covering." It's the phenomenon of downplaying socially disfavored traits, whether they are race, religion, or sexuality, in an effort to blend in with the mainstream.

Kenji Yoshino, a professor at Yale Law School, and a gay Asian man who blends his own experiences of covering with legal analysis on the subject in his book Covering, writes:

We have not been able to see it as such because it has swaddled itself in the benign language of assimilation. But if we look closely, we will see that covering is the way many groups are being held back today. The reason racial minorities are pressured to "act white" is because of white supremacy. The reason women are told to downplay their child-care responsibilities in the workplace is because of patriarchy. And the reason gays are asked not to "flaunt" is because of homophobia. So long as such covering demands persist, American civil rights will not have completed its work.

So that's what I was thinking of today when I read Nice Resume. Have You Considered Botox? Hooray. There's another book out there telling women how not to look old. That's what it's called: How Not To Look Old. Written by a former beauty director for Glamour magazine, a jacket blurb advises, “Looking hip is not just about vanity anymore, it’s critical to every woman’s personal and financial survival.” So older women are encouraged to turn to cosmetic surgery, facial treatments, eyebrow dye, tooth bleach, hair color, clear lip gloss and more (ouch. and $$$$) to "pass" as young. Or better yet, as ageless. Everyone say thank you to that glorious intersection of sexism and ageism.

Isn't that a cute example of being damned if you do and damned if you don't? We all know we're not supposed to look too young or cute, or we will be perceived as being professionally inept and sexually inappropriate. But don't look too old or dowdy, or you'll come off as being outmoded and unsexy. Hew yourselves to that fine line of impossibility, ladies! Aerobecize your bum, but keep your sweater set buttoned.

The article notes:

Many people would shun a book if it were titled “How Not to Look Jewish” or “How Not to Look Gay” because to cater to discrimination is to capitulate to it. But the success of “How Not to Look Old” indicates that popular culture is willing to buy into ageism as an acceptable form of prejudice, even against oneself.

“Ageism is one of the last frontiers of discrimination where people think that a way around it is not to be seen to age, but we would never say that women should try to look or act more male in order to avoid sexism,” said Molly Andrews, a psychologist who is a director of the Center for Narrative Research at the University of East London.

Which is well and good but completely elides the fact that every example given in the article is not about the impact of visible maturity per se. It's about women who are seen as old. Men become distinguished. Women get old. It's just one more way in which we are very lucky.

And of course, a woman's appearance can have a real impact on how she is perceived professionally, and in that way can impact her bottom line. It's true for men as well, but the cosmetic standards are far less exacting, less pricey, and less stringently enforced. My male colleagues can wear the same brown or gray slacks and blue or white button down shirt every day and no one would notice. It's the default business casual uniform for professional men. If I were to pull that, it would be seen as sloppy and slack-ass, because the default business casual uniform for professional women does not exist. Our looks are always open for comment. And now we can't even visibly age. Great.

Political Violence And My Microloan

In November 2006, I made a $25 loan through Kiva.org to a Kenyan woman who took out a $1,700 loan to transition from maize farming to dairy farming by purchasing two diary cows. This is one of several loans I've made through Kiva. I don't make any money in interest, and I don't loan huge amounts of money, but I intend to keeping the money I currently have loaned through Kiva circulating to other Kiva clients because microlending is such a powerful tool for improving people's lives. The impact on the lives of women is especially remarkable. Microlending organizations have documented that microfinance extended to women is more likely to benefit family nutrition and children's education than loans made to men, and that loans to women are more likely to be repaid, allowing for the money to be lended to another client and further widening the circle. Many of the women whose loans I have funded through Kiva have been restuaranteurs or retail entrepreneurs. The loan to this Kenyan woman was my first agricultural loan, and as a fan of programs like Heifer International, I was especially interested in watching this woman's progress.

I get periodic e-mail updates about my various loans from Kiva and their partner organizations, the local groups responsible for administering Kiva's loans. Today I received an update from the Ebony Foundation, who administer this particular loan, describing the impact of the recent political violence on the Kenyan entrepreneurs repaying Kiva loans, and I wanted to share some of it with you:

The impact of the riots is most felt in the micro and small business
sector. Over 1 million small businesses were looted and or burnt down destroying the only source of income to millions of Kenyans. Most of the fighting and destruction occurred in slum areas in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru and Kericho in Rift Valley. These regions are home to over 70% of Ebony Foundation’s clients and as you can imagine almost all of our clients in these regions have been affected by the riots. Only one region- (Mount Kenya) which is home to about 20% of EbF’s clients was spared the violence. The economy in this safe region is now getting stretched as the residents have to now house the displaced population.


We have recently completed auditing the riot’s impact on our clients and as of yesterday about 4,900 of our clients had been badly affected by the riots:

-- About 1,532 of our clients were displaced and both their homes and business premises burnt down. This population is currently housed in church compounds and police stations.

-- Another 2,479 clients had their business premises burnt down or looted leaving them with no source of income at all.

-- 833 clients had their homes looted or burnt down and about 56 clients are missing and feared dead or critically injured.

We arrived at these figures through a survey being administered at holding grounds, police stations, and through reliable reports from groups and community leaders.

Of course I've heard news coverage here in the states about the political violence in Kenya, and clucked and fretted about how it sounded terrible and very sad. But receiving this email made it seem more immediate to me, and more personal. This is a set of impacts I had not thought about in much detail before, but it seems obvious to me now that political violence would have wide-ranging and potentially long lasting effects on the economic lives of the victims. I don't know yet whether "my" farmer was among those affected. The Ebony Fondation update talks only of loan clients in the aggregate. I hope for the best for all of them.

The Outsourced Uterus

I've continued to think about this piece by Judith Warner at the NYT about outsourcing surrogacy to India since I first read it a couple of days ago. Couples in the US who want to have a baby via a surrogate mother are looking at a steep price tag--the article says in the US it may cost couples as much as $80k. Faced with that cost, US couples are increasingly turning to India for women who will gestate and bear children for them for far less--$6k-10k. That is no small amount of money, particularly to these women, for whom that might be equivalent to ten to fifteen years worth of income. Consequently, the women featured in the article seem to enter into surrogacy willingly, even enthusiastically, because it provides them with a way to get a whole lot of much-needed income.

I admit to feeling quite muddy and conflicted about the situation. On the one hand, it seems so wrong to me, not because I think think there's anything inherently bad about assistive reproductive technologies, but because I think there is a point at which relying on another person's extreme poverty to make them willing to do hard, dangerous work for you is fundamentally disturbing. And also because in reading Warner's description makes me think of A Handmaid's Tale multiplied by Battlestar Galactica's The Farm:

Images of pregnant women lying in rows, or sitting lined up, belly after belly, for medical exams look like industrial outsourcing pushed to a nightmarish extreme.

And yet I feel like that's the wrong reaction to have, that as Jill at Feministe points out, this is just another example of the sort of economic exchange that greases the wheels of the global economy:

If we're going to do the surrogacy thing — and we already are doing it — then let's call it what it is: An exchange of money for services. And let's not pussyfoot around the fact that in a whole lot of service industries, the people providing services are poor, female and brown. Think of housekeepers, fieldworkers, childcare providers, elder-care workers — all of these women use their bodies in the service of others. Many of them are exploited, some are abused, and most are under-paid. But we only go into panic mode when the services provided are sexual.

Stick around for some interesting discussion in Feministe's comments.

And then there's the fact that if my pro-choice politics mean anything, they mean that a woman has the right to decide what to do with her body, and whether and when to have children, not just those children that are biologically or legally hers. If an Indian woman thinks she can best provide for her economic wellbeing, and perhaps that of her family, by acting as a surrogate mother for relatively wealthy, privileged folks from developed countries, shouldn't she have the right to make that choice? And the economics of it certainly make sense from the surrogate's end. There are repeated mentions of being able to buy a house with the proceeds of a stint as a surrogate, from women for whom that purchase would unlikely ever be possible without that money.

Of course that begs the question: am I content to live in a world in which the best path to economic independence for a woman--in India or anywhere else--is renting out her body for nine months to be treated in a manner similar to breeding stock? Not especially, no. But until global poverty and racism get dismantled (no short order!), I certainly can't fault Indian women who use the assets other people, rightly or wrongly, seem to value most: their ability to grow babies.

What do you think about this development?