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A WORKPLACE THAT WORKS FOR FAMILIES
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
--ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
It shows up in all the statistics, but we rarely see it as it is happening. Still, the results are visible all around us--more men than women at executive meetings, few women in hard hats at construction sites, more male floor managers and more women cashiers. Too often, we don't dwell on it. We watch television shows and see an equal balance of male and female detectives, surgeons, and lawyers. We take comfort in the thought that life must be imitating art--maybe not in our community, but surely somewhere close by.
Every now and then, though, each of us gets a stark, jolting glimpse of discrimination against women in all its raw ugliness--discrimination that continues to seep unchallenged into the very fabric of American life. At these moments, we know in our hearts that the statistics are true, that the problems persist.
I was first elected to Congress after the women's movement had battled for three decades to secure hard-won rights for women in the workforce. Major civil rights victories for women in the workplace had been scored while I was still a teenager. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 established as law the principle of "equal pay for equal work." In 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, or national origin. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued an executive order that extended affirmative action requirements to the hiring of women as well as minorities. In 1972, Title IX guaranteed women equal access to education (including extracurricular activities), leading to a huge increase in women college graduates entering law, medicine, and nontraditional fields of study and work. In the 1970s, "women need not apply" job descriptions fell by the wayside, and women were finally able to get credit in their own names. In 1978, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act barred employers from firing, refusing to hire, and not promoting women because of pregnancy or related conditions.
By the end of the 1980s, it was no longer a novelty (although it was and still is a rarity) to see women construction workers standing on the beams of hotels as they were being built in addition to making the beds after the hotels opened, welding cars on factory floors as well as taking dictation, and working in the cockpits of commercial airplanes as well as in the cabins.
These advances, along with major shifts in cultural attitudes, brought women in the workforce substantial advances that enriched our lives, enhanced our self-esteem, created strong new role models for our daughters, and made our society more equitable, productive, and dynamic.
But all is not well.
In the mid- to late 1990s, as glossy magazines churned out cheerful stories about flexible, family-friendly workplaces, anecdotally, I wasn't seeing it. Women kept telling me that their employers were demanding more and more. Working mothers seemed to be having the hardest time. They were being passed over for promotions, marginalized if they asked for a flexible or part-time schedule, and fired first in the growing number of downsizings.
I was also hearing stories about pressure being put on employees to work longer, less family-friendly hours. Globalization requires companies to compete around the clock, so employees increasingly are asked to be available around the clock.
The workplace seemed to be placing more and more value on "ideal workers," a phrase coined by Joan Williams, professor of law and director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. "Ideal workers" are employees who are unconstrained by outside responsibilities, including family. By definition, mothers suffer the most in the face of the ideal worker standard, which negatively judges those who have caregiving responsibilities.
By 2000, my instincts were telling me that the workplace actually wasn't becoming more family friendly and that women no longer seemed to be making steady gains in workplace equality. I wanted to try to quantify this phenomenon, if there indeed was a phenomenon to quantify. I hoped I was just being paranoid.
So Representative John Dingell (D-MI) and I requested of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) a study on the wage gap. Unfortunately, the initial GAO study proved my paranoia to be fact and confirmed my worst fears.
. In 7 of 10 industries that employ more than 70 percent of women workers and managers, the wage gap between men and women managers actually grew between 1995 and 2000.1 Further, women held a share of management jobs proportionate to their share of the industry workforce in only 5 of the 10 industries.
. Being a parent held women back.
. After couples had children, fathers' incomes went north and mothers' incomes went south.2
. Sixty percent of male managers had children, compared to just 40 percent of female managers.3
Clearly, something was wrong, and we wanted more information.
So Representative Dingell and I requested a second, more comprehensive study to offer insight into the sources of the wage gap.
The second study reviewed nearly 20 years of data on workers at all levels, not just managers. It controlled for demographic and work-related factors such as occupation, industry, race, marital status, and job tenure. It also controlled for work patterns: the fact that women on the whole have fewer years of work experience, work fewer hours per year, are less likely to work full-time, and leave the labor force for longer periods than men do. These are many of the factors cited by wage-gap defenders who claim it can be explained by women's freely made career choices.
The report's conclusions were unequivocal. "Even after accounting for key factors that affect earnings," its authors said, "our model could not explain all of the difference in earnings between men and women."4 The study suggested that discrimination could account for at least part of the discrepancy.
Bad news, but hardly surprising.
But I was also concerned about some of the things the study's design did control for. Why do women have fewer years of work experience, work fewer hours per year, tend to be less likely to work full-time, leave the labor force for longer periods, and work in lower-paying professions? Are those "choices" really freely made, or are they dictated by the constraints of inflexible workplaces, discrimination, and stereotypes about what "women's work" entails?
Over the past several years, I've read a great deal of the related research and had many conversations with women and men in the private sector in an effort to understand why women aren't getting ahead. I've concluded that while some mothers cheerfully flatten or invert their career trajectories to raise children, there are serious flaws in the workplace and in public policy. More often than not, it is these flaws, rather than an enthusiastic choice, that force mothers out of the workforce.
In the American workplace, equality is still out of reach, as these statistics show.
. Women managers made 79.7 cents to a man's dollar in 2000--0.7 percent less than they made in 1983.5
. In 2000, 70 percent of respondents said earning enough to pay their bills and spend time with their family was getting harder, not easier.6
. The US Census Bureau reported that the percentage of women in executive management positions actually fell from 32 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in 2000.7
MORE LEAVE, MORE RETURNS
When I got the news in 1980 that I was pregnant with my first child, my first reaction was joy that I was about to become a mother. My second reaction was fear that my career might never be the same. There were two major questions: Should I quit my job to take care of my child full-time, and would my employer give me any choice?
I decided to try to hang on to my job because it was as hard earned as it was improbable. As I noted in the introduction, in the traditional South where I was raised, the role models for girls were teachers, nurses, librarians, secretaries, and homemakers. All of these are worthy, even wonderful choices, but back then, they were virtually the only ones. When I was growing up, I assumed I would make one of those choices.
After graduating from Greensboro College in North Carolina in 1968, however, I visited a friend in New York. I fell in love with the city and traded a genteel life in the South for the buzz of the Big Apple. The first job I had a passion for was, in fact, a teaching job: helping welfare recipients in East Harlem pass the high school equivalency exam. When funding for my employer was put on the chopping block, I became deeply involved in lobbying to save it. During that ultimately successful campaign, I realized that as a teacher I could help 20 to 30 students improve their lives, but working in public policy would allow me to help thousands of people.
First I took a job with the New York City Board of Education, then moved to the New York State Assembly, and then joined the office of Democrat Manfred Ohrenstein, the minority leader of the New York State Senate.
Have you ever seen a cowboy movie set in Massachusetts? Neither have I. There simply aren't many cowboys in the native habitat of Senator Edward Kennedy. But that didn't stop the Massachusetts State Police from requiring women to be proficient cowgirls if they wanted to maintain their duties during a pregnancy.
Caryl Sprague, Lisa Butner, Susan Howe, Sarah O'Leary, and Brenda Watts were all veteran Massachusetts state troopers who became pregnant during the same year. Four of them had worked during previous pregnancies and had stayed on the job until delivery without restriction of their activities.
This time was different. A new Massachusetts State Police policy required that unless a state police surgeon certified that the women could safely complete specific tasks, they would be put on restricted duty. Then, they could have no contact with the public and would be forbidden to wear their uniforms, drive their assigned cruisers, and work overtime.
The so-called essential tasks included shoveling snow, mowing lawns, and roping large animals off roads--so I dubbed it the "cowgirl standard."
Inevitably, all five were put on restricted duty.
They filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and eventually, justice was served. An appeals court ordered the Massachusetts State Police to pay four of the women $1 million total in punitive damages8 and called the episode an "unprofessional charade." Brenda Watts was denied compensation on technical grounds.9
I was Senator Ohrenstein's director of special projects when I became pregnant. Although Senator Ohrenstein was a strong advocate for women's issues, most employers at the time took it for granted that a woman would leave her job when she had a baby. But I wanted to go back to work after I had my baby.
I told Senator Ohrenstein that I was pregnant--and that I wanted to return to my job after having the baby. I just happened to mention this at a party I was giving in his honor.
He was very polite but incredulous that I would think of returning. The State Senate's human resources representative wasn't even polite when I called to ask what kind of leave was offered for pregnancy.
"Leave? What kind of leave?" the woman asked. "Most women just leave." She told me that a pregnant woman had never asked to keep her job. She suggested I apply for disability and see what happened. I rejected that idea on principle because pregnancy isn't a disability, it's a joyous event.
I realized I was going to have to get creative.
Political offices are themselves very political, and others were lobbying to take over my job. I didn't want another staff member to fill my position when I went on leave, lest he or she want to keep it when it was time for me to return. So I asked my friend Suzanne Christen to fill in for me.
Senator Ohrenstein was supportive and kept my job available for me.
But after combating the pressure to quit at work, I started being similarly pressured by my husband, Clif. He calculated that with the cost of taxes, child care, and other expenses that accrued with my working outside the home, my job would be a net loss. Our family would be better off financially if I were a stay-at-home mom!
I couldn't argue with the numbers. I could only argue with my husband about what to do next. I didn't want to quit my job. I loved it. But I loved my husband, too--and the idea of being a mom. So I was torn.
Then I went for a walk in Central Park with civic leader Eleanor Guggenheimer. She was a veritable lioness in New York City politics, and I was proud to call her a mentor. If you were a young Democratic woman working in government, when Eleanor talked, you listened.
"Don't do it," Eleanor told me. "Hold on to your job. If you continue working, you'll continue advancing. If you leave now, you're going to limit your options. It's going to be hard for you to get back to the level where you are now. As much as you love your daughter and want to be with her all the time, she will grow up and leave you. She will go off and live her life, and you'll be left without a career. And what if your husband leaves you? Where will you be then?"
I was sold. Telling Clif my decision was tough, but soon he not only embraced my choice, he became the most ardent supporter of my career as an elected official.
Ultimately, Eleanor was right. My husband never left me, but Christina grew up and moved out, as children do. She graduated from the New York University School of Law, is working for a law firm, and has her own apartment in New York City.
Making the decision not to leave the workforce--despite the fact that my job was costing us money--proved over time to be professionally and financially rewarding. Many of my friends yielded to the conventions and constraints of the times and grudgingly left the workforce to have children. As Eleanor had predicted, the careers of most never fully recovered.
Because of this experience of wanting to have both children and a career, as a member of Congress I supported the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 with great personal satisfaction. It was the first major federal bill that tried to balance work and life for Americans. It guaranteed a majority of American workers10 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a newborn or newly adopted child or a sick relative or to recover from a serious illness. Congress had passed the FMLA seven times, but presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush had vetoed it every time. President Bill Clinton signed it into law.
