Washington's No-Solution Solution

 
In an appalling display of congressional ineptitude, your elected representatives avoided the worst of their self-inflicted "fiscal cliff" wound.  However, what they ultimately agreed to fails to raise needed revenue, fails to reduce spending, and utterly fails to restore confidence in their ability to effectively deal with serious policy problems.  Not only that, they couldn't pass a relief bill for those suffering from Sandy storm damage while they were sitting around, as Vice President Biden and top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell hashed out the bill in private dealing.  The US Congress is hampered by an excess of testosterone.  Too much ego, aggression, money, and power concentrated in one place prevents the give and take bargaining absolutely necessary for compromise.  God help the new 113th Congress, now taking the oath for the next legislative session - with only 20 women in the 100 member US Senate and only 81 in the 435 seat House of Representatives, the stand off is bound to continue.  Ladies, you have your work cut out for you with this class of unruly school boys - we all wish you the best of luck.

Look Into My Crystal Ball

The Huffington Post lists 13 parenting trends  you can expect to see in 2013.  Check it out - you'll see pictures of Princess Kate, Jessica Simpson, Alicia Silverstone, and breastfeeding in public!  Not the customary content of the NAMC Advocacy eNews, but hey, it's the holidays!

Full-time Parent, Part-time Worker

We know that having children is likely to make a woman economically vulnerable.  But what's really amazing is the number of different ways that motherhood contributes to economic insecurity.  Under the spotlight this week - gender differences in part-time work, brought to you by the  Center for Economic Policy Research  (CEPR).  In the US, part time work is not simply the younger sibling of full-time work with the same rules, conditions and compensations of full-time work to a proportionately smaller degree.  It's in an entirely different league - for starters, the pay rate per hour is often significantly lower, even in the same jobs.  It rarely comes with benefits like access to the employer's group health plan, or retirement savings plan.  Also, federal legislation like the Fair Labor Standards Act which protects employees simply doesn't apply to part-time workers.

Can you guess who makes up the majority of part-time workers in the US?  Women!  Could it be that their economic needs are so well satisfied by their partners or others that they simply don't need to work full time?  No.  Twice as many women as men are in the part time labor force because of non-economic reasons.  From the CEPR blog:

Women "choose" part-time jobs primarily because they are more compatible with their outsized unpaid work responsibilities including household work and childcare. When asked why they work part time, women answer "Child care problems" at more than seven times the rate that men do, and are almost four times more likely than men to cite "Other family/personal obligations." In fact, of the people who usually work part-time and answered "Child care problems" as their reason why, 94.6 percent were women.

Connecting the dots - mothers trudge along, in a workplace tailored to non-mothers, hampered by inadequate and costly child care, taking part-time work as a consequence, with all its short-comings.  If the work of coordinating family life and raising children was regarded as more worthwhile, men would do more of it, public supports would exist to promote it (such as accessible quality child care, paid family leave), and it wouldn't predispose those who do it to poverty.

Single Mother Myths

A lot of people who act like they know what they are talking about will tell you that poverty and crime are the result of too many unmarried women having kids.  They are wrong.  The facts of single motherhood are vastly different from the characterizations that (mostly male, mostly white) politicians and pundits sling around.  Based on data from a recent Legal Momentum survey,  Greg Kaufmann writes in The Nation  single mothers in the US are mostly separated, divorced or widowed.  In other words, the vast majority were married.  In addition, in spite of the fact that they spend more hours at work than single mothers in other countries, US single mothers have much higher rates of poverty than those in other industrialized countries.  The reason?  A great deal of employment is for very low wages, and public income supports are too low.  Not to mention our status as the only advanced economy with no paid family or sick leave.  Welfare queens?  Not so much.

The Price of Motherhood Around the World

Get out your passports - we're taking a whirlwind trip to compare the motherhood penalty around the globe.  There's no country where a woman can escape it entirely, but there is quite a range between the best and worst.  What accounts for the difference?  Access to high quality and affordable child-care, mostly.  From The New York Times Economix Blog:

The United States is about on trend with developed countries over all: in the United States, the median childless, full-time-working woman of reproductive age earns 7 percent less than the median male full-time worker. For women with children, the wage gap more than triples, to 23 percent. That gap in Japan is even bigger - the median Japanese mother working full time earns 61 percent less than the median Japanese full-time male worker.

Note that the 23% gap is between full time working men and women. The post goes on to state that the gap for mothers over all is actually much greater, because about a quarter of them work only part-time.  Countries with fabulous early education and child care systems have the smallest gap in income between mothers and non-mothers.  Of course, the US doesn't fall into that category.

Mothers' Centers have helped thousands of families:

• Make friends
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• Find needed support  
• Advocate for our children's needs
• Discover valuable resources
• Find creative ways to manage work and family responsibilities
• And so much more!

Please consider making a tax-deductable donation  to the National Association of Mothers' Centers today.

Thank you for making a difference!