It didn't take long before the tree on the right started growing in an unexpected way - faster and at a marked angle. In my efforts to take control of the situation - and to assertively guide the tree's development in what I thought should be its proper direction - I tied the little tree to a stake so as to pull it back on a straight and narrow path.

...And I left it tied up like that for about three years too many...

(My thumbs are more brown than green, as it turns out.)

I "rescued" it one day after I noticed in horror that its little trunk had arched and curved, trying its best to grow to its fullest heights despite the shackles I had blindly and absentmindedly placed upon it.

A kind soul reassured me that it would straighten itself out over time and would be just fine on its own. But now, years later, its trunk is still warped.

Another kind soul recently reassured me that "it's still the tallest and most robust of the two trees" (despite my impediments to its growth).

But just imagine what it could have been... I thought. Sure, it's still healthy, it still "stands out" compared to its nearby peer; it does do just fine on its own (even in spite of the now-removed shackles). But the restraint I placed on its natural growth is still clearly evident, too.

"Confine plant forms to a container and you will know exactly the dimensions they shall reach. Confine your teachers to your restricting curricula and your paperwork and you will know exactly the dimensions they shall reach. And each budding branch and each extending child shall not extend far beyond the perimeters of their confinement. Space determines the shape of all living things." ~ Bob Stanish ~

A new school year is almost upon us. In your classroom will be students who will "grow" (i.e. learn) in unexpected ways - faster and markedly different. Some guidance, as with all students, is necessary. But beware the shackles that can come with that guiding direction. What might be appropriate assistance and management for some becomes a tight leash, or even noose, for others. Cut them loose! Let them surprise and amaze you with how tall they can grow.

Closing the achievement gap by putting a lid on the top only results in harm to the top. We can't always "see" that harm as we can with my little trees, but it is there nonetheless. I love how Helen Schinske said it: "Closing the achievement gap by pushing down the top is like fostering fitness by outlawing marathons." The gifted and advanced learners in your classroom should be able to learn and grow to their potential, too. Let them find what that potential actually is!

(Check out Tamara's blog for more great articles!)

They will also require great care in implementation at the state, district, and school levels. In early August, 2010, the Campaign for High School Equity (CHSE) held a retreat to discuss this movement as well as the promises and challenges that common core state standards present for communities of color who have long advocated for more equitable education opportunities and outcomes.

On August 23, 2010, CHSE and its partners continued to build on this retreat by (1) helping ensure that advocates across the country are aware of this movement, (2) helping to bring the community together to think about this issue, and (3) beginning to prioritize issues for implementation of the common core state standards.

Agenda PDF
Speaker Biographies PDF
Webinar PowerPoint Presentation PDF

EVENT-DAY VIDEO (flash popup) and  AUDIO*

Peace is Possible.

So let’s think about the future. Let’s have the presence of mind to change that future by trying to understand and living side-by-side with the State of Israel.  Many words have been in my mind and other thousands others when we think deeply about the importance of ending this violence and it’s harmful consequences for both sides.

Yet, sadly and tragically, when you visit a mosque on a Friday service and listen to the extremist lessons given to attendants about (Al-Jihad), you realize how far removed these interpretations are from the real meaning according to the holy book of Al-Quran.  The holy book spreads a message of peace and understanding, tolerance and wisdom. Yet extremists give lessons about standing against projects that aim to solve conflict - such as the project of the Palestinian State - and lessons that oppose any peaceful resolution.


I want to change our thinking and encourage the idea that human beings must understand that terror and violence is never a solution and is always a threat to global peace.


It is very depressing, to say the least, when one observes young Muslims and adults listening carefully to the Liston teller and the saying (Ameen), which means “god wish,” when he asks God to uproot Jews or destroy the West. It is at such moments, that I feel the disconnection getting deeper. I can no longer remain silent.  Religion cannot and must not be used to invoke hatred between nations.

I am not proposing this to overcome unfair stereotypical images and irrational hatred towards the Muslim world.  I put forward, to all those of us who seek peace in our region, that we should develop awareness peace programs in the region that have a clear goal, especially in such a region like the Palestinian Territories, which needs people with peaceful intentions and visions.

Last week, I was quite depressed to learn that Hamas will never allow the Holocaust to be included in our students’ curriculums.  Selective knowledge is the path to tyranny. If this is allowed to happen, it confirms that Hamas is not concerned about building bridges with the world. Rather, they simply want to promote ignorance, misunderstanding and hatred – making us, the Palestinians, part of the problem and not the solution.  While this is completely wrong, our problem is with those who want to keep the occupation and the siege around the Gaza strip as much as it’s with those who want to keep using violence and shooting rockets toward Israeli civilians.      

In an article, which did not get published, I once tried to advise the Palestinian Prime Minister Dr. Salam Fayad to consider how young people can work towards the Palestinian State. I felt that young Palestinians had a crucial role to play in building a better image of our people for the future well- being of Palestine.  Young people should be encouraged by the authorities to play more of a leadership role and show the world how forward-thinking humane and open-minded we are.

I would hope that new ways of building peace and opening up hearts and minds can take place amongst Israeli youth too.  Under the Netanyahu government, the Israeli people should rethink about their government policies where their religion might be used to promote hate.

I call upon all Israeli and Palestinian youths to send out a shared message of peace and reconciliation in front of the world community.

I am trying to draw the world’s attention to the most serious stumbling block to peace between the two sides – the misinformation and dominance of political extremists and religious fundamentalists. Young people in Israel and Palestinian yearn for peace and a normal life. If we really want to develop a future of peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis - which should include a seed of hope and readiness for understanding between the two sides– then world leaders must be made aware of what is really influencing young people at mosques, schools and public places.

I believe that there should be action taken by young people for other young people, concentrating on giving both sides a clear and active role in the political process and even in the political progress.

Young Palestinians and Israelis are excluded from the political process and any future progress must include a free and open education that raises awareness and expectations, and limits the damage caused by ignorance and religious hatred – wherever it comes from.

 It is a human duty to build peace in all societies and encourage hope in the mindset of tomorrow’s leaders.

Here’s an idea:  why not have an Israeli-Palestinian youth congress that can influence both of our governments with a mission to send out a unified message of peace to the whole world?

(Check out Mahmoud's web site!)

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

As his horses amble along a dirt road through the thick forest outside of Boone, N.C. (pop. 13,472), Eustace Conway, 48, holds the reins in his hands loosely, allowing the animals to pull his buggy at an unhurried pace while he explains his purpose-driven life.

“Most people in the modern world don’t have a clue where food comes from, where water comes from, where their clothes come from,” he says against the rhythmic sound of clopping hooves. “But here, people get a chance to find out where fuel comes from and what it takes to get it. They see where water comes from. They make their own clothes. They can hunt for their own food or grow their own garden.”

Such is the purpose of Turtle Island Preserve, a 1,000-acre farm and environmental education center founded by Conway in 1987 in a remote, pristine valley in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Hand-hewn log cabins rest beneath towering hickory trees; roosters and dogs have free reign; cooks prepare meals over an open fire; and visitors get a taste of how most Americans lived before the 20th century.

Conway fashioned his vision of Turtle Island years before purchasing the land with money he saved as a young man by living frugally and from earnings he made speaking on environmental issues across America.

“One of the main things we do here is to get people to taste a little bit of reality,” he says. “We don’t want them to leave here the same that they were.”

Living deliberately

Like 19th-century author and pioneering naturalist Henry David Thoreau, Conway decided at a young age to go into the woods and “live deliberately” with a lifestyle of simplicity and ecological stewardship.

Though Conway was in his early 20s before studying Thoreau, he identified with his writings on economy, thriftiness and simple living. “Those are very sound, very important philosophies,” Conway says. “They’re more important now than they ever have been because of overpopulation and limited resources.”

Since growing up in the suburbs of Columbia, S.C., and later Gastonia, N.C.—where his parents took him to nearby woods to teach him to hunt, fish, camp and identify local flora and fauna—Conway has loved nature. His grandfather, who founded a summer camp for children in 1923 in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, inspired him to share his enthusiasm for the outdoors with others.

So, as his peers gravitated toward television and other sedentary indoor pastimes, a youthful Conway built miniature log homes out of sticks, sewed buckskin clothes, and learned to hunt small animals with a bow and arrow. At age 12, he lived off the land for a week, camping alone in the mountains. At 17, he left home to live in a self-constructed tepee on the outskirts of Boone while attending Appalachian State University, where he graduated in 1986 with degrees in English and anthropology.

As a young adult, the adventurous Conway canoed the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans, hiked the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, and crossed North America on horseback from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He kayaked along the southern coast of Alaska and backpacked wilderness trails of Central America, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. He gained inspiration and direction from American Indian cultures by living for periods with Navajos in New Mexico and Mayans in Guatemala.

Wherever he went, Conway promoted his cause. “Today more than ever, we need to understand and live by harmony and balance with nature,” he says, “because it makes sense, it feels good, it feels right. It connects us with what is sacred.”

His mother says Conway’s philosophy was born of a childhood immersed in the ways of the woods when he wasn’t in school or church. “I watched him follow this path from the time he was 11,” says Karen Conway, 79, a retired teacher in Gastonia. “He wanted to help others love the environment. Kids don’t get the chance, playing electronic games or living the city life. That gave him a vision to teach others the basic, fundamental things to take care of the Earth.”

 

Sowing seeds

Today, students, families and groups visit Turtle Island for workshops, summer camps or just to meet Conway, the subject of The Last American Man, a 2002 book by journalist Elizabeth Gilbert, and Full Circle, a 2003 documentary by director Jack Bibbo. Visitors discover a soft-spoken, modern-day frontiersman with long, graying hair and a shaggy beard, whose hands and heart have lovingly and deliberately shaped the preserve to help others discover the rhythms of nature.

At Turtle Island, guests sleep in tents or rustic cabins with outhouses and pay nominal fees for their accommodations to help fund the preserve. They learn traditional skills such as blacksmithing, harnessing horses, basket weaving, starting campfires without matches, or slaughtering roosters for dinner.

“Everyone who goes to a Turtle Island camp walks away changed, or sown with the seeds of change,” says Hunter Strickland, 16, of Raleigh, N.C., who has attended camps the last two summers. “Being removed from human-made environments is revolutionary.”

While choosing a path of rugged individualism, Conway is no hermit. He works with local alternative energy groups, speaks at schools, and engages in community life in ways consistent with his message of environmental ethics. For instance, when Boone’s town leaders decided to convert a vacant lot into a community garden in 2006, Conway volunteered to plow the land with a team of horses and mules.

“The intention of the garden was to be self-sufficient in a responsible way,” says organizer Matt Cooper, 29, “so the animals fit right in.”

Plowing with animals is effective but slow, acknowledges Conway, who in recent years has traded hand tools for modern equipment for some time-intensive tasks. For instance, he used to cut roads through the forest with horses; today, he uses a bulldozer. He prefers a chainsaw to an ax and, when making boards, he uses his own biodiesel-fueled sawmill. “I use knowledge I’ve built up from years of doing things the most primitive way,” he says. “Hopefully the ethics I’ve learned give me good direction.”

Conway’s overall plan has not wavered, however. He wants every visitor to walk away from Turtle Island with life-altering revelations about the roots of humanity and the resources that sustain their existence.

“Maybe they’ll never kill a rooster or rub two sticks together (to start a fire) again,” he explains, “but they’ll see where food comes from, and learn of their ancestral heritage, and that foundational insight may be a cornerstone to ground their reality forever.”

Community health centers across our country have a 45-year history of providing care in underserved communities for everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. By design, these health centers are run by a board of directors comprised mostly of health center patients, ensuring the care delivered is tailored for the needs of the communities they serve.

Community health centers enjoy strong bipartisan support. President George W. Bush committing to double the number of patients seen by these centers during his presidency and succeeded, and President Barack Obama committing an additional $2 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to help these important community health centers expand their operations and build new centers.

Community health centers quickly demonstrated they could put additional federal investments to work, ramping up to provide care for an increased numbers of patients and expand their services. With the $2 billion Recovery Act investment, these centers were projected to provide care to an additional 2.9 million patients over the stimulus act’s two-year funding period, but in fact registered seeing over 2 million additional patients in the first year of funding—indicative of the demand for community health services in our country.

Now, because of the passage of comprehensive health care reform earlier this year, an additional 32 million Americans will have health insurance coverage with about half of these individuals to be covered through an expansion of the Medicaid program. Once again, policy makers identified community health centers as ideal locations to provide this additional care. Through the Affordable Care Act, these health centers will receive an additional funding over the next five years to expand services and prepare to help meet the needs of these newly covered Americans. The new law provides an additional $9.5 billion in operating costs and $1.5 billion for new construction. With this additional funding, community health centers will be able to double the number of patients they serve to up to 40 million annually by 2015.

Along with providing quality health care at these sites, these investments in community health centers will help neighborhoods where they are located. Studies demonstrate that increased funding to health centers creates additional economic stimulus both within the center and beyond. The nearly $2 billion investment from the stimulus act, for example, generated $3.2 billion of economic activity, and in 2009, health centers generated approximately $20 billion in economic activity for their local communities. By intent, these health centers are located in lower income medically underserved communities mostly in rural and inner-city neighborhoods. In addition, studies find these are the same areas with the highest rates of unemployment and the highest rates of uninsurance.

This memo examines the important role community health centers play in both health care delivery and improved neighborhood economic activity, describes how stimulus act funding quickly translated into expanded health care and improved fiscal health, and estimates the economic impact the additional ACA funding will have on economic activity and the creation of more jobs. In the pages that follow, we also will demonstrate that all of this new funding will generate $53.7 billion in economic activity for some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country over the next five years, with $33.5 billion of this total attributable to the increased investments via the Affordable Care Act. Over this same period, these centers will support 457,289 jobs in these same communities (over 284,000 as a result of ACA funding).

Community health centers deliver

The passage of comprehensive health care reform was truly historic, setting the stage to achieve the dual goals set out at the beginning of the health care debate— expand coverage for nearly all Americans and rein in out of control health care costs. Community health centers are well placed to help the nation achieve both these goals. By design, these centers are located in medically underserved areas in lower income rural and inner-city communities and are prepared to ramp up quickly to provide health services to our neediest Americans. These centers boast strong primary care capabilities that decrease health care costs overall.

What is less touted is the economic activity that community health centers generate in their communities. Case in point: the $1.8 billion investment that the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act made in these centers in 2009 yielded $3.2 billion in total economic activity in those areas of the nation that needed it most. New jobs and in some cases brand new businesses that did not previously exist were created.

Why are community health centers so capable of putting these funds to work quickly and effectively? Because these neighborhood-based and patient-directed centers are so intertwined with their neighborhoods they can often identity the health needs earlier and design effective community-based solutions before others even understand the underlying dynamics. These critical providers developed these skills since their launch in the 1960s. Today, these health centers serve over 20 million patients at over 8,000 sites, including 941,000 migrant/seasonal farm worker patients and 1 million homeless patients. The statute that created these centers requires them to meet four basic standards:

• They must be located in or serve a high-needs community. These medically underserved areas are defined as having a high percentages of people living in poverty, areas with few primary care physicians, higher than average infant mortality rates and high percentages of the elderly.

 

• They must provide health care to all, regardless of ability to pay. All community health centers must commit to providing services for everyone, with fees based on a standard a sliding fee schedule that adjusts charges for care according to income.

 

• They must provide comprehensive health care services. All community health centers also must offer a broad range of “enabling” services to support the delivery of consistent, affordable health care.

 

• They must be governed by a community board. All community health center boards must be comprised of a majority (at least 51 percent) of health center patients who have the authority to oversee the operations of the center. These powers include approving budgets, hiring and firing chief executives, and establishing general policies.

These mandated links to the communities in which these health centers are located ensures they serve their neighborhoods efficiently and effectively. Let’s look in a bit more detail at who they serve, where they are, and what services they provide.

Who community health centers serve

Because of their mission and mandated locations, the patients these health centers typically serve are without access to other health care settings. These include lowincome people, the uninsured, those with limited English proficiency, migrant and seasonal farm workers, individuals and families experiencing homelessness, and those living in public housing. In fact, over two-thirds of the patients who receive care at community health centers are members of racial and ethnic minorities, which is one of the reasons these centers are so successful at reducing racial and ethnic health disparities in our country. (See figure one)

Because of the commitment to provide care for all, community health centers also serve a disproportionally high percentage of poor and uninsured patients. Seventy percent of patients seen have incomes below the federal poverty level (just over $22,00 for a family of four) and over 90 percent are under two times the federal poverty level (about $44,000 for a family of four). These centers also serve a much higher percentage of individuals with Medicaid. This is important since about half of the 32 million Americans who will be newly insured by the ACA will be eligible for Medicaid. These people will need access to care. (See figure two)

Where community health centers are located

These health centers are located in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and in the nation’s territories and commonwealths, but within these political boundaries they are located in the most underserved areas. The law requires them to be in areas with higher poverty rates within these states. These tend to be areas such as innercity neighborhoods or isolated rural areas particularly hard hit with the recent economic recession. One study finds that states with higher levels of unemployment have higher numbers of community health centers and after analyzing county level data finds that these centers were located in counties with even higher rates of unemployment.

Although there are over 8,000 community health center, the unmet need is still enormous. Last year, the investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, reported that 43 percent of federally designated underserved areas still do not have a community health center.

What community health centers provide

These health centers are required to provide a full range of health-related services, typically beyond what other health care providers such as hospitals or out-patient clinics provide. This means in addition to providing comprehensive primary health care services they also offer specialty care (such as orthopedic, cardiac, or podiatric care), dental and mental health services, as well as “supportive services” that can include nutrition education, translation services, care coordination and case management, transportation to and from health care sites, and outreach activities to help find eligible patients. This also means the care delivered is culturally appropriate and in languages that many in these communities speak.

Because of the influence of the community board and their commitment to comprehensive health care, community health centers tailor the services they provide to meet the specific needs of their communities. That’s why 89 percent of health centers provide interpretation/translational services on site, 79 percent provide weight reduction programs, 91 percent provide case management services, and 89 percent have services on site to help patients identify additional programs for which they might be eligible.

Studies consistently show that community health centers provide care that improves health outcomes of their patients. The patients of these centers are also more likely to identify a usual source of care, and report having better relationships with their health care providers. This focus on primary care and the provision of additional supportive services are among the reasons that care delivered by community health centers is less expensive and ultimately saves money to the broader health care system. Studies estimate that the provision of care in community health centers ultimately saves the U.S. health care system between $9.9 billion and $24 billion annually by eliminating unnecessary emergency room visits and other hospital-based care.

Recent expansion of community health centers

Community health centers expanded rapidly in the 21st century to meet the growing needs of medically underserved, lower income neighborhoods. The new funding necessary to grow found support from the Bush administration and the Obama administration, receiving the most recent boost in investment funds from the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009 and the Affordable Care Act of 2010. But the expansion began almost a decade ago.

Bush administration investments

In fiscal year 2002, which began in October 2001, President Bush launched the President’s Health Centers Initiative with the goal of adding 1,200 new and expanded health center sites over five years “to ultimately double the number of patients treated at community health centers.”15 This was the hallmark of his strategy to address the nation’s uninsured.16 Due to subsequent budget constraints, however, as the federal budget surplus of the 1990s under President Bill Clinton turned to deficits under President Bush, this goal shifted to expanding the number of patients seen from 10 million in 2001 to 16 million in 2006. Still, this patientdriven goal helped grow the funding levels of community health centers from $1.34 billion for FY 2002 to $2.1 billion in FY 2008.

Recovery Act investments

The Recovery Act granted additional funding of about $2 billion to community health centers for operating costs and new construction dollars. This one-time funding nearly doubled their annual funding of $2.1 billion in FY 2008. With this additional funding it was projected that health centers could provide care for an additional 2.9 million patients. In fact they served an additional 2.1 after only the first year of funding.

The important role that community health centers play in their neighborhoods proved to be especially evident as the Obama administration and Congress revved up to combat the economic consequences of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. One analysis found that counties receiving stimulus act funding for community health centers had an average unemployment rate (for January through November 2009) almost a full percentage point higher than average rate for nonrecipient counties. What’s more, these counties’ unemployment rates were growing faster that than nonrecipient counties because of the Great Recession, with the rates increasing by 4.4 percent in counties that already had community health centers compared to an unemployment growth rate of 4 percent in other counties.

Providing additional stimulus funding to community health centers in 2009 meant that economic benefits and job creation went hand in hand with expanded primary care access—targeted to the communities that need the most help. As a result of Recovery Act funding, community health centers generated an additional $3.2 billion in economic activity for the communities they served.20 Much of this is a result of the new jobs created. In the three-month period between January and March 2010, for example, it is estimated that this investment created or maintained over 7,000 jobs—over half of which were health professionals. These jobs also include ancillary staff directly employed in the community health centers and other jobs indirectly created by industries supporting the services these community health centers provide. The funding also created an additional 1,500 jobs related to construction.

We don’t yet know how many additional jobs were created as a result of stimulus act spending on community health centers because more research will be necessary to learn how this job creation influenced the unemployment rate at both county and state levels. But the past track record of investing in community health centers and broader economic data indicate the gains will be important.

Affordable Care Act investments

The historic passage of the new health care law earlier this year now poses a number of implementation-related challenges, including how to deliver care to the additional 32 million Americans who will have health coverage. Because there are still huge pockets of America without accessible health care services, community health centers are well positioned to ramp up and be ready to provide care to these newly covered health care recipients. The Affordable Care Act commits $11 billion to these centers over the next five years to expand services.

Community health centers are long recognized for their ability to effectively utilize federal grants to improve and expand patient access to medical, dental, and mental health services. The steady increase in federal funding has enabled these centers to provide high quality, accessible care to the nation’s most vulnerable populations. That’s why any discussion of how to expand access to health services while trying to slow the rising costs of health care must include maximum utilization of our nation’s existing community health centers and the new ones needed to meet future needs.

The new $11 billion in funding via the Affordable Care Act will help bring new health centers to communities in need and enhance capacity at existing centers. Most of the funding ($9.5 billion) will be used to provide for expansion and increased operating expenses at the existing centers, with the rest destined for new construction ($1.5 billion).

What does this increased investment really buy? With additional funding for operations, community health centers will add staff to accommodate more patients, and add additional services at the centers to improve care delivery and lessen the chances of patients needing to get care will go to more expensive locations. One study finds that increased funding from 1996-2006 resulted in increases in the provision of on-site mental health services, 24-hour crisis intervention, after-hours urgent medical care, and substance use counseling. But the increased funding also has enormous benefits outside the doors of the health center. To this we now turn.

Economic activity and jobs

An important but less widely discussed byproduct of the increased funding to community health centers is the enormous economic activity in the broader community generated by this influx of dollars. Studies demonstrate that increased funding to health centers creates additional economic stimulus both within the center and beyond. We’ve seen this from the stimulus act funding, which created new jobs in areas most in need of this investment. This is especially important during times of economic insecurity.

How does expanded economic activity occur? First, and most obviously, health centers directly employ people in their communities, including key entry-level jobs, training, and other community-based opportunities. The health centers then purchase goods and services from local businesses and expand and build new locations. These new health centers and the businesses that have ramped up to serve the centers also must hire new employees. Every dollar spent and every job created by health centers has a direct impact on their local economies.

Previous studies analyzed the economic activity generated in communities from having a community health center. Case in point: Using modeling developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota IMPLAN Group, an economic modeling firm, researchers determined how much economic activity a particular community health center will bring to a community, with details specific to each county and industrial sector. Using this modeling, we are able in this memo to estimate the economic impact and effect on job creation that the funding provided in the Affordable Care Act will have on communities in 2015 nationally and on a state-by-state basis.

The Affordable Care Act allocates that the additional $9.5 billion funding for operating costs be distributed by a formula over the next 5 years and indicates that the funding should be in addition to (not a replacement for) current, appropriated funding which was $2.2 billion in FY 2010.24 We estimate that total spending by community health centers (including base appropriated funding and the new health reform funding) will generate $54 billion in economic activity in 2015, with $33 billion of this a direct result of the additional investment in the new law. These dollars also translate into job retention and creation. We found that in 2015, community health centers will generate over 457,000 jobs, (284,000 as a direct result of the new ACA dollars).

To get the full picture of how this affects the neighborhoods served by the health centers, this economic activity can be broken down by what happens inside the health center and outside of them in the community at large. Because of a ripple effect, health centers often serve as an engine for stimulating existing and new businesses. So besides the direct economic effects within a health center, community health centers also provide indirect economic effects through their purchases of goods and services from other local business, as well as induced economic effects, which represent the response by all local industries caused by the expenditures of new household income generated by the direct and indirect effects. The following example from Access Granted: The Primary Care Payoff illustrates the how health centers have direct, indirect, and induced economic influences on its neighborhood.

Imagine a health center that purchases waiting room chairs from a local furniture store (direct effect). The furniture store in turn purchases paper from an office supplies store to print receipts and a truck from a car dealer to make deliveries (indirect effect). The furniture store, the office supplies store, and the car dealership all hire staff and pay them salaries to help run the various businesses. These employees spend their income on everyday purchases such as groceries, clothing, cars, and TVs (induced effect).

As this demonstrates, economic activity expands well beyond the walls of the community health center. These dollars can be broken down by direct investment in the health center and the additional indirect effects this funding creates in local communities. As seen in Table 1, although the majority of the economic activity ($31 billion) will be generated within the health center system, businesses in surrounding communities will enjoy a large percentage ($22.8 billion) of the economic growth.

Similarly, there will be about 285,800 full-time-equivalent employees (an economic term that basically means full-time employees) directly in community health centers as both health care providers and ancillary staff. There will also be an additional 171,500 jobs outside the health center, indirectly created as a result of the business generated by the delivery of care in the center and through additional local industries which are expanded as a result of the household income newly generated.

Although actual economic activity will occur predominantly at very local levels—in areas near the health centers—the national economic impact was broken down by state in Table 2. This table shows the total economic activity by state in 2015 generated by investments in community health centers and also estimates what proportion of this is a direct result of the additional Affordable Care Act funding. The same estimates were made for employment predictions.

It should be noted that we cannot know with absolute accuracy the precise amount each state will receive in 2015 because of the process of distributing these funds. We estimate the breakdown by state by examining the distribution of funds over the past five years and predicted similar growth patterns. Predominately rural states see substantial economic benefit driven by health centers. This is important because health centers located in rural areas are often among the largest employers in their communities.

Conclusion

The dual intent of passage of the Affordable Care Act was to increase coverage for nearly all Americans while attempting to rein in health care costs. Community health centers already are key players in providing quality health care for millions of Americans. Their role in helping to care for the 32 million Americans who will be newly covered by the new comprehensive health reform law was reinforced when they were acknowledged in the new law and set to receive significant increases in funding over the next five years. Although the extra funding was allocated to improve and expand patient care, the secondary economic effects of this investment on the communities they serve cannot be ignored.

Historically, funding community health centers proved to be a smart investment in exactly the communities that need it most. Health centers time and time again demonstrate they are able to ramp up quickly and provide quality health care services for communities most in need. In addition to health services, this assistance comes in the form of new economic growth and new jobs. Much of the funding for community health centers in the stimulus act went to states with the highest unemployment rates, and within those states it went to the counties experiencing higher than average unemployment growth. We have every reason to expect increased funding for these centers via the Affordable Care Act will follow these same patterns.

Minority communities were among the hardest hit during the Great Recession, and are among those recovering the slowest from that deep economic downturn. The combination of high unemployment and rising home foreclosures is especially felt in communities of color. Community health centers serve much higher proportions of minorities and are located in areas that are heavily minority dominated. The increased funding for these health centers through the Affordable Care Act will be funneled to centers serving these communities where the extra economic benefits will be especially valuable.

The key premise of the Accountable Care Act was to expand coverage to nearly all Americans. Community health centers have a key and obvious role in helping the nation meet this charge. The additional economic benefit this has on community development is an important byproduct that must also be acknowledged as we emerge from the Great Recession. This new funding will enable community health centers to provide the right health care, to the right individuals, right in the nick of time.

Twenty-five years into his career as investment research director, Chuck Cahn took on an assignment that would change his own life as well as hundreds of educators and thousands of New York City schoolchildren. His company was merging with a larger one, and the directors wanted advice on where to focus the efforts of their charitable foundation.

“Our directive was that it had to be New York City-based and associated with education,” recalls Cahn.

The final result was an excellent center, based at a business school that focused on leadership and ethics, but along the way, through a conversation with an officer at a major charitable trust, Cahn came across an idea that he found much more compelling.

“She said that if you found a good public school, it was sure to have a good principal, and if you found a bad one, it was certain that the principal was bad, too,” Cahn says. “She said there were a great number of principal training programs, because New York City needs upwards of 300 new principals per year. But when I asked her about programs for very good principals, she said there were none.”

Cahn became so taken with the idea that his wife suggested he create such a program himself.

“I had always believed, as a manager, that it’s better to leave positions open than to hire someone who isn’t effective,” he says.

He did a lot of research and became convinced TC (Teachers College) was the place to make it happen. And so, in 2003, the Cahn Fellows Program was born with the unique mission of strengthening the New York City school system by investing in its most effective leaders.

Since then, 197 principals, grouped in annual cohorts of between 20 and 30 members, have participated in the 15-month Cahn Fellowships. Each group spends two weeks together, usually at the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, and then meets throughout the year to work with TC faculty—and each other—on challenges in their own schools. Cahn Fellows also mentor aspiring principals from within their schools with an eye towards grooming their successors and the next generation of urban school leaders. To date, more than 15 percent of New York City principals, who work with a total of 200,000 school children, have participated in the Cahn Fellows Program.

The program emphasizes distributive leadership—the idea that, as Cahn puts it, “you’ve got to have good people, give them responsibility and hold them accountable.”

It’s a concept that Krista Dunbar, current director of the Cahn Fellows program, says that Cahn himself practices as well as preaches.

“Chuck stays strongly connected to the program, giving us the benefit of his passion and energy as well as his philanthropic support,” Dunbar says. “But he also allows each cohort to evolve in its own unique direction, and for new lessons to emerge. That’s as rare as it is wonderful.”

A Voice (and Appreciator) of Experience
Lily Woo, P.S. 130

At P.S. 130 in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, Principal Lily Woo schedules Parents Association meetings at the start of the school day. School concerts, too.

That’s because Woo, who grew up in Chinatown after her family emigrated from China to New York City when she was a child, knows from firsthand experience that many parents in the neighborhood work long evening hours.

“When we have parent meetings in the morning, we get up to 300 people,” says Woo, whose mother worked in a laundry and father worked in restaurants. “Knowing how the community ticks, and then having that understanding of what kids need, has really made a difference in the school.”

Woo has served since 1990 as principal of P.S. 130, where about 90 percent of the students are Asian and 81 percent come from low-income families. When she first arrived, about 38 percent of the students were reading on grade level. Today, even though a majority of the students come to the school not speaking English, 93 percent are reading at or above grade level, 99 percent are proficient in math, and 98 percent proficient in science and social studies.

Yet despite her Chinatown roots, Woo won her principalship at 130 amid great controversy. Parents and teachers were backing a beloved assistant principal, but the city administration turned to Woo, who had experience with programming for English Language Learners. After she got the job, the district superintendent offered to transfer the assistant principal in order to ease Woo’s transition, but Woo declined, choosing to work with the entire staff she had inherited.

Twenty years, later that same assistant principal still works collaboratively with Woo at P.S. 130.

“He’s a wonderful person and has become a great friend,” she says. “I felt that if I could bring him in and convince him to support the initiatives, then others would go along with it as well.”

Woo was among the first cohort of principals participating in TC’s Cahn Fellows program in 2003. After 13 years of leading P.S. 130, she was finding it lonely at the top without peers to give her feedback on new initiatives or thorny issues. She was mentoring other principals around the city, but her own professional development was at a standstill.

The program gave her the peer contact and support she craved. She also enjoyed being back in school, even though the Cahn Fellows study a lot of history—a subject she had never liked because “it was always about memorizing dates and places.” However, when the Cahn Fellows visited the Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg and read about the decision-making of the generals, history came sharply alive.

“It opened my eyes,” she says. And her ears—for one of the harsh realities of Gettysburg is that, in many instances, hundreds and even thousands of lives could have been saved if commanders had listened to their subordinates.

“It shows that you really have to be a good listener,” she says. “You really have to take people’s input into account and weigh all options. You can’t just say, ‘We are doing it my way because I said so.’”

We have four specific goals:

(1) Develop a 13-acre block in the center of the city as a “Green Arts District” beyond the LEED Platinum level for neighborhood development and use that development to catalyze a prosperous city-wide economy.

(2) Develop a post-carbon energy system for both the city and the College based on efficiency and renewable energy.

(3) Develop a 20,000 acre greenbelt around the city to revive local agriculture and forestry.

(4) Create the most exciting educational experiment in the U.S. by using the entire effort as an educational laboratory for students from Oberlin College, the Oberlin Public Schools, the Lorain County Joint Vocational School, and Lorain County Community College.

I’ve attached an updated version of the Project description that provides more detail on each of these goals and the organizational structure assembled around the Project. This updated version can be downloaded here.

Selected accomplishments of the past twelve months include:

• Completion of the first phase of site planning for the Green Arts District. BNIM architects, under Bob Berkebile’s leadership will complete the final site plan by late fall.


• Renovation of the Allen Memorial Art Museum—the anchor on the NW corner of the District is underway and will be completed in 2011.


• Planning for renovation or replacement of the Oberlin Inn—the SW corner of the District—is moving forward with a possible 2011 start date.


• The Oberlin Project was named one of eighteen “Climate Positive” Projects worldwide by the Clinton Climate Initiative.


• We have begun the search for an executive director who will handle the day-to-day operations of the Project, establish a web presence, manage communications and research, and create a permanent office.


• We have raised $1.91M from nine foundations and the US DOE to support costs of planning and development.


• Received another $.5M to develop a draft of an energy plan for North Central Ohio based on efficiency and renewable energy.


• The Project is being seriously discussed at national levels as a template for both greenbuilding at the city scale and as a model for a national security network of “sustainability sites, cities, and projects."


• Locally and regionally, we have assembled nine city-wide teams and seven more representing regional organizations (see page 12 of the attachment) to work on various aspects of Project implementation. We aim to engage the wider community as a “civic commons” and make sustainability the default setting for every sector of the region and the keystone for economic development in the era of post-cheap fossil fuels.

The economic viability of the downtown has been greatly enhanced by the completion of the $17 million East College Street Project (both commercial and residential), the addition of the Kohl Building—the first LEED-Gold Jazz building in the world; and the renovation of the historic Apollo Theater. The development corridor that runs two miles through the city from the Kendal retirement center to the Joint Vocational School includes a half-dozen projects including planning for a new consolidated “carbon neutral” school, and adaptive reuse of a former supermarket to a center that will market local produce and environmental products. Planning between the City and the College includes significant work to upgrade energy efficiency, add 3 megawatts of solar energy, and deploy other renewable energy sources that have the potential to make the City and College carbon neutral perhaps within this decade.

With your support and encouragement, Oberlin is transforming into a vibrant downtown, a resilient economy powered by efficiency and renewable energy, a model of integrated sustainable development, an exciting educational laboratory, and a catalyst for change throughout the upper Mid-West.

By providing at-risk youth in grades K-12 with individualized help on their schoolwork and equipping them with effective study methods, test-taking and organizational skills, BLAST strives to get youth back on track academically, with the ultimate goal of attending college or trade and technical schools.

And while BLAST organizers can use exit exam scores to gauge the efficacy of its mentoring model, an independent study conducted by Dr. Beth Manke and staff at California State University, Long Beach, recently confirmed Thomson’s belief: BLAST helps improve the academic performance and behavior of the at-risk students it serves.

“I was very pleased,” Thomson said of the study. “It’s nice to be scientifically validated by an unbiased third party. It really shows the power of mentoring.”

During the annual evaluation, which in this case surveyed BLAST’s 2008-09 participants, mentors, mentees and their schoolteachers were questioned before and after the mentoring process to assess change. More than 70% of teachers said their students’ grades and attitudes significantly improved after mentoring. In addition, more than 86% of students said they trust their mentor.

“I was one of those inner-city kids,” Thomson said. “We had no role models. We had gangs, crooks — there aren’t any positive role models in the inner city… For the first time, they (the students) can see them living where they live and not doing what everyone around them does.” Whereas many mentoring programs match youth with adults who are established professionally or philanthropically, BLAST’s model differs in that its mentors are required to be in college.

“You get college-age students who are smart and going to be professionals in the field they are studying,” Thomson said. “They are very capable, intelligent and perfect role models for the students you are serving… These are the kids you want to be. That’s why it’s so influential and powerful.”

With five programs that range from academic and after-school mentoring to literacy and technology-based tutoring, BLAST serves about 1,000 youth annually.

For more information about Long Beach BLAST, call 562-437-7766 or visit lbblast.org.

Since 2005, RJ, with other international partners - France, India, Kenya, Australia, Canada, UK and USA - advocated for global tuberculosis (or TB control). There are still more than 1.8 million people dying of TB every year, although TB can be quickly diagnosed and cured inexpensively.

We are working in cooperation with many organizations: Stop TB Partnership Japan (RJ’s executive director is the board representative), Diet Members Group for Stop TB Partnership, Japan Anti-Tuberculosis Association, Research Institute of Tuberculosis, GCAP Japan, Japan NGO Center for International Cooperation, Association of Citizens for International Solidarity Tax, the Promotional Council for International Solidarity Tax, etc.

Many of our advocacy projects have yielded results.  Here are three of our major achievements.

We advocated for an increased pledge by the Japanese government to Global Fund (or GF). As a result, the 2010 contribution to GF increased to $246.8 million, a 27% increase from the $194.4 million in funding in 2009. More than $2 billion has been funded (total) since the establishment of GF in 2002. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is an international organization that helps countries control three infectious diseases by investing a sizable amount of money into their programs.

RJ helped launch the 2008 Stop TB Japan Action Plan, which was supported by five organizations: Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Japan Anti-tuberculosis Association and Stop TB Partnership Japan. This was the first initiative pledged by both public and private sectors in Japan. The Action Plan reports that Japan will reduce global TB deaths by 10% annually (about 160,000 people).

Based on the Action Plan, Japanese bilateral assistance is creating TB control projects in countries such as Kenya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, etc.　With support of MOFA and JICA, RJ is disseminating this information to countries with high TB rates, during every opportunity.

Since 2006, RJ has been working on this issue with another NGO, Altermonde, IFM specialist in Japan. In 2009, there were two major groups established in Tokyo: Association of Citizens for International Solidarity Tax (IST) and the Promotional Council for IST.

RJ is a key member of both. Japan has become the chair of the Innovative Financing Mechanism leading group and hosts the 8th general assembly in Tokyo in December 2010, towards realization of air ticket tax, etc. in Japan, for which RJ is continuously advocating. 

It began with a typewriter. In a 1929-31 study Ben D. Wood, a Teachers College alumnus and pioneer in the field of learning technologies and testing, showed that using typewriters encouraged more and higher quality writing and better cooperation in the classroom. 

Years later the connection led to IBM where the study formed the basis of IBM's Writing to Read program, developed by one of Wood's associates. Wood, Professor of Collegiate Educational Research at Columbia University, was also a key figure in the proliferation of standardized tests and consulted on the development of the first commercial test scoring machine, the IBM 805. 

Wood's lifework was research; he wanted others to be able to do the same. Thanks to savvy, early investment in IBM, Wood established endowment funds at TC. In 1972 he set up the Elbenwood Fund for Educational Research, followed by the Institute for Learning Technologies Fund in 1986. In 1989, three years after her husband's death at 91, Grace Turner Wood established the Ben and Grace Wood Fellowship Fund, through which 26 doctoral students have received three years of full tuition and a stipend. 

Wood was awarded the Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service in 1969. Columbia University Professor Emeritus George C. Thompson, who became friends with his colleague after retirement, says that Wood, a native Texan, had a mind that was rarely at rest: "He was a self-made man, and a very kind person." 

Substantial gifts such as the endowed funds– made possible by the generosity and foresight of Ben Wood–make an enormous impact at the College. His scholarships have enhanced TC's ability to attract the best students and to keep them–and have given dozens of students the gift of graduating debt-free.

However, in response to the economic upheaval caused by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the AmpleHarvest.org Campaign will be focusing its outreach efforts in the Gulf States region for the immediate future.  Since the Gulf States regions’ economy has been so severely impacted by the oil spill, many more people will be relying on local food pantries to help feed their families – possibly for years to come.  The AmpleHarvest.org Campaign is now working closely with food banks from Texas to Florida to help local food pantries register at AmpleHarvest.org.  At the same time, AmpleHarvest.org is also working with the US Department of Agriculture, Master Gardeners and others to help local growers become aware of the opportunity they have to help their neighbors in need.

According to David Coffman, of the Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana, “AmpleHarvest.org is a tremendous resource to connect food pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens to neighborhood gardeners and farmers.  Now, with the ongoing crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, these agencies are experiencing increased demand as families struggle with the uncertainty about their futures and livelihoods.  By using AmpleHarvest.org, agencies and gardeners can provide much needed support through nutritious and high-quality produce.”

With help from a grant from Google Inc., the AmpleHarvest.org Campaign has created a special “ad campaign” targeting regional gardeners to inform them about the opportunity to share their excess harvest with local food pantries. The one glimmer of hope in this tragedy is that, although it will probably take many years for the Gulf region to fully recover from this, gardeners in this part of the country will be able to grow food, and therefore help out local food pantries year round. For example, LSU AgCenter reports that the state has approximately 349,000 home gardeners.  Those gardeners who grow food can make a significant impact on the amount and quality of fresh food available to hungry families.

Anyone knowing of a food pantry in their community should urge the pantry manager to register at AmpleHarvest.org.  Food pantries do not need refrigeration for the produce (most produce except for leafy greens will store for several days without refrigeration) and they do not need an Internet connection to take advantage of the AmpleHarvest.org Campaign.  There is no cost to the food pantry for participating in the campaign.

AmpleHarvest.org, Inc. is a not-for-profit organization which has received backing and support from the US Department of Agriculture, Google, Inc., National Gardening Association, the Garden Writers of America, Rotary International, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and numerous faith groups.   The AmpleHarvest.org Campaign works to diminish hunger in America by enabling gardeners to easily find a local food pantry eager for their garden bounty.  For more information on the campaign, visit AmpleHarvest.org or call AMPLE-6-9880 (267-536-9880). 

Follow AmpleHarvest.org at twitter.com/AmpleHarvest and at Facebook.com/AmpleHarvest.org.

The process of socialization varies greatly in different families and different cultures, so the rules may vary and the intensity with which they are given to us may vary. The principle remains the same, however, and at very early ages we are developing primary selves out of which we live our lives.  The unconscious starts knocking at our door trying to show us the other side of us, the one that was forced out of the picture by this socialization process. These disowned selves live within each of us, often for the whole of our lives. If we are married to our primary selves, then it is very difficult to discover this, let alone start the process of separation from these primary selves.

If the primary self of a family system is basically very rational and rejecting of dreams and other aspects of the creative imagination, then the child grows up either identifying with this viewpoint or eventually rebelling against the rationality and over-identifying with the unconscious and the world of the dream. A marriage to either side isn’t good news and so it is that the idea of the Aware Ego emerges to embrace these opposites. There are a multitude of scenarios when it comes to selves and what we do with them. This is only one possible scenario.

There are two considerations that determine which dreams come knocking at our door at night. There are, first of all, the rules/primary selves that we live by and secondly there is the emotional intensity that attaches to the rule/ primary self. The more emotional intensity that the rule carries, then the stronger is the disowned self inside of us. All of these considerations have an effect on the kind of dreams that appear and the strength of their emotional content. The stronger the disowned selves that a child is carrying, the stronger will be the emotional content of the dream.

One other basic consideration is very important in understanding the dream process in both adults and children. Whatever is chasing us in our dreams is a disowned self of the dreamer. Whatever frightens you in a dream is a reflection of a disowned self in the dreamer and the stronger the disowned self the stronger the fear or panic and hence we move towards the nightmare kind of dream, something that is very common in young children. A nightmare type dream simply means that the disowned self-system has reached a more extreme place and thus manifests as nightmare, with strong emotional content.

Now let’s take a look at how this works in a real life situation. Jimmy is a very active four year old who has been somewhat over- protected by his mother who fears very often that he will come to harm. One afternoon Jimmy is playing outside after school and he comes running into the house crying and sobbing and yelling that his friend Steve had hit him and that he had run away with his ball. Steve’s mother, Sally, is upset by this. Her worst fears center around the possibility that something bad will happen to him.

She embraces him and quiets him down and then she suggests to him that he stay with her while she is cooking and cleaning and they can talk together. Jimmy is only too happy to not have to face going out into this dangerous world that he feels increasingly he lives in. His mother supports his fears because she shares his fear of the world and his emerging sense of being a victim to life. She doesn’t know all of this in a conscious way but it is there to do its work nevertheless. So for the rest of the afternoon the two of them have a lovely and intimate time together and the outside world of scary Mongol warriors riding their horses on missions of destruction does indeed feel far away from them—but not too far away once we are asleep.

A few hours after Jimmy goes to bed that night he wakes up screaming and sobbing. He has had a nightmare. He is being chased by a lion, and he can’t get away from it. Sally tries to comfort him. She is very well intentioned, but since she herself is essentially a rational woman, she has no connection to the unconscious. The life of the dream world has never opened for her. So she says to Jimmy—“Jimmy—This is just a dream—Nothing more.

Come, I’m going to look under the bed with you and in the closet with you and you will see that there is nothing there.” She doesn’t know how to honor the dream just as she didn’t know how to honor his instinctual energies that were badly in need of support when his friend punched him. She didn’t support his inner lion, his natural aggression, and his capacity to fight when necessary. She herself had been over socialized in growing up so any kind of fighting was dangerous to her.

Without meaning to and without understanding anything that we are talking about now, she had stifled the budding warrior in him that needed to emerge at this time in his life. When this natural instinctual energy is blocked, the unconscious brings the next best thing that it can bring. It brings to him his lion but his lion is chasing him. It is angry at him. This is how our lions behave when we betray them in this way. They chase us and keep trying to get our attention and we keep running away from them.

So Sally opens the lights and she and Jimmy look under the bed and they look in the closet and they look behind the curtains and sure enough, there is nothing there. It was just a dream—just as she had said. To hear the words—“It was just a dream”—is something that has always brought great sadness to me. There is so much of the world that still lives in this kind of consciousness; unable to hear the music of the dream world and begin to learn about all the treasures it can bring us. It certainly takes time to learn about this world, but the rewards are so very great.

Sally has done two things to harm her son, the last thing in the world that she would ever willfully do. First she was unable to support the deeper voice of her son’s jungle heritage, his instinctual energies. That night she is unable to support the symbolic picture of those same energies. The dream image of the lion is only a dream—it isn’t real. Sally is not alone.

The vast majority of the world lives without any kind of objective understanding of, and appreciation for, the world of the dream. We do so at our own peril. To take dreams seriously, to realize that they are not “just a dream” is to discover the OTHER that lives within us. The other reality is the source of a profound intelligence that is just waiting to be awakened so that it can begin to operate in our life and bring us a new way to look at ourselves.

Of course here we have yet another problem to be aware of and that is that our dream life is monitored by our primary selves. When most of us do remember our dreams it is our primary selves that think about them and reflect on them. This is why the process of separating from our primary selves is so intimately bound to our work with the dream process.

If George Bush had a dream that a very cute Easter bunny was sitting at the right hand of God in heaven, his way of looking at the dream would probably cause him to think that terrorists were invading heaven directly and we would have a new Guantanamo Bay for Bunny Interrogation. (By the way, I am referring to Easter Bunnies and not Playboy Bunnies, though it probably wouldn’t really matter to the primary self-system.)

So Jimmy finally goes back to sleep and Sally goes back to bed and what happens an hour later? Jimmy is screaming again. The lion is back again but it’s bigger. Of course it’s bigger! The dream is like a fairy tale. Dragons grow heads and the bad guys and the scary guys of our dreams get bigger when they aren’t dealt with, when we don’t know that the enemy we think is out there is really our friend inside of us, waiting to come to our support in life.

Sally goes through her routine again and they search the room and of course there is nothing there. “It’s only a dream Jimmy! It isn’t real!” This time Jimmy gets a cup of hot chocolate and he goes to bed again. Soon Jimmy will stop remembering his dreams. They will only come back as an occasional nightmare or he will feel an unknown anxiety that becomes so natural to him that he doesn’t even know that it is anxiety.

Years later when he is a lawyer defending a client in a court of law, he will find himself shaking with fear and dread for reasons that are unknown to him. He is working against a killer lawyer whose lions roar in extremis, a lawyer who is Jimmy’s polar opposite and Jimmy is victim when he is anywhere near this man or any man or woman like him. Jimmy’s lion has long gone to sleep as he pursued his path of intellectual excellence.

There is nothing wrong with intellectual excellence so long as the lions and tigers are available to us on the other side. The really good news is the level of awakening that is starting to happen to so many people in the world as they begin to catch hold of these realities and begin to work with them.

Let us imagine a different scenario for Sally. Imagine that she was somewhat comfortable with the world of dreams and they are alive and real for her. Jimmy starts to scream and she runs in and comforts him and he tells her his nightmare. She might say to Jimmy—“What a wonderful dream. Your lion wants to meet you.

Tell me what he looks like?” They begin a talk. She asks if the lion has a name and Jimmy tells him that the name of the lion is Jilson. It doesn’t really matter what she does or says so long as she honors the dream and stays away from any kind of attempt to interpret the dream to him. Maybe she brings out a pad of paper and asks him to draw a picture and then she may ask him to tell a story about Jilson.

It is no longer “just a dream.” It is now the magic of the dream. She is teaching Jimmy to dance with the world of his own creative imagination. She is teaching him how to build a bridge between the marvelous world of the rational mind and, on the other side, the magical kingdom of his creative imagination, the world of fairy tale and myth. She can even, if she wishes, make him a large cup of cocoa. Personally, I prefer coffee—but then I’m not four years old and Sally isn’t my mother—or is she?

Please find the Stone's web site at voicedialogue.org

Fortunately, the web site DonorsChoose.org makes it possible for teachers to post their classroom’s need and for people to donate directly to that need.

DonorsChoose.org is the brainchild of Charles Best, a Bronx high school teacher who saw the problems of ill-equipped public classrooms, knew that people wanted to help, but were wary of where the money would be going. In 2000, Best created DonorsChoose.org so that people could give directly to public school classrooms.

DonorsChoose.org makes it easy to give to the classroom of your choice.  After logging on to the web site, one can give to classrooms by location, subjects, “most urgent” need, or by performing keyword searches on the web site.  It’s an easy three-step process: (1) You donate funds, (2) DonorsChoose.org buys the materials and ships it to the classroom that you designated, (3) and the kids thank you with photos of their classroom and notes.

DonorsChoose.org states that they are “vigilant” about “providing end-to-end integrity for each classroom project funded” via their web site by:

    * Vetting every classroom project request submitted by teachers.

    * Processing donor transactions using the most secure technology available.

    * Purchasing the classroom materials, shipping items directly to the school and alerting the principal when the materials are on their way.

    * Providing photos of the project taking place, teacher and student letters, and a cost report showing how every dollar was spent.

American Idol singer Adam Lambert joined the cause in the fall of 2009, encouraging people to give during his tour, and he’s doing it again this fall with his Glam Nation Tour. He’s not the only well-known name behind the cause.

DonorsChoose.org’s board of directors includes: Bill Bradley (Former U.S. Senator and Presidential Candidate), Jeff Weiner (CEO, LinkedIn.com) and Stephen Colbert (Writer and Host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report). 

Their national advisory council includes: Sherry Lansing (Former Head of Paramount Pictures), Bob Daly (Former Head of Warner Brothers and CEO, Rulemaker, Inc.) and Dan Rosensweig (CEO and President, Guitar Hero).

DonorsChoose.org states: “Our mission is to improve public education by empowering every teacher to be a change-maker and enabling any citizen to be a philanthropist. Our vision is a nation where students in every community have the resources they need to learn.” 

Many education reformers will rightly point to solutions involving teacher preparation and development, extending the school day or year, reducing class sizes, or strengthening the curriculum, standards, and accountability measures.  All are vital.  But if all we do is spend more on these things in the same way we do now, we will not see real progress.  We need to end the Band-Aid approach to school improvement by embracing innovation.

Innovation in education can have a real impact in three areas:  school operations, classrooms, and partnerships with the private and not-for-profit sectors.

There is an enormous opportunity for innovation in school operations.  Some 15,000 K-12 school districts across the country collectively spend nearly $55 billion on operations. While we all believe in local control, does each school district really need to order supplies, process payroll, route buses, manage data centers, deliver food programs, and handle other operational issues in an endlessly duplicative and costly fashion?  We need to move instructional decisions as close to the classroom as possible but move "back office" operations where they belong for efficiencies sake.  If technology were used to create shared services centers by state, as much as $5 billion could be saved. That savings could be used to reduce class size, lengthen the school year or hire 100,000 additional teachers.

Innovation must also be applied in the classroom. North Carolina State University is providing K-12 students throughout the state with access to advanced educational resources through the university’s Virtual Computing Lab, a cloud computing technology developed in partnership with IBM. Through these Internet-based resources, students get access to the most advanced educational materials, software applications and computing resources.  For example, a first grader from a rural town can learn about geography using the same interactive 3-D animation as her counterparts in a high-profile school district and the cloud technology reduces the cost.

Innovation can extend to the classrooms of our youngest students.  Last week, a panel of Harvard economists released findings on the importance of kindergarten teachers, proving that early education can impart skills that last a lifetime.  Working with local non-profits, IBM is placing special technology centers in the hands of North Carolina’s youngest students by donating and distributing another one hundred KidSmart learning centers.  KidSmart uses innovative technology to integrate interactive teaching and learning activities into pre-K curricula.

Finally, we need innovation in how districts partner with the private and not-for-profit sectors. Our schools cannot bear the burden of educating our children alone. By partnering with nonprofit agencies and businesses, schools can enrich after-school programs by offering science and technology enhancement or arts and cultural opportunities. In New York City, the After School Corporation was able to increase the school day and year by 35% at only a 10% added cost via such partnerships. Over the long term, programs like this pay for themselves.

The private sector can also provide an innovative way to meet the demand for new teachers.  As the baby-boomer population nears retirement, companies can help streamline the teacher certification process, making second careers in education more attractive. IBM’s Transition to Teaching is one model.  It provides company-paid tuition, leaves of absence, and other support, such as mentoring, to interested employees.  If other companies joined the effort, the result could be tens of thousands of highly qualified new teachers in a variety of academic fields.

We can find other innovative ways create smarter schools, but only if we work together to end business as usual. Ensuring that our young people have the skills they need to succeed in the global economy is as vital to America’s long-term economic health as a stimulus package is in the short term. Let’s make sure that the money is spent wisely to create a brighter future for all our children.

At that point, as world market prices for grain and soybeans were tripling, governments in food-importing countries suddenly realized that they could no longer rely on the market for supplies. In response, some countries tried to nail down long-term bilateral trade agreements that would lock up future grain supplies. The Philippines, a leading rice importer, negotiated a three-year deal with Viet Nam for a guaranteed 1.5 million tons of rice each year. A delegation from Yemen, which now imports most of its wheat, traveled to Australia with the hope of negotiating a long-term wheat import deal. Egypt has reached a long-term agreement with Russia for more than 3 million tons of wheat each year. Other importers sought similar arrangements. But in a seller’s market, few were successful.

The inability to negotiate long-term trade agreements was accompanied by an entirely new genre of responses among the more affluent food-importing countries as they sought to buy or lease large blocks of land to farm in other countries. As food supplies tighten, we are witnessing an unprecedented scramble for land that crosses national boundaries. Libya, importing 90 percent of its grain and worried about access to supplies, was one of the first to look abroad for land. After more than a year of negotiations it reached an agreement to farm 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of land in the Ukraine to grow wheat for its own people.

What is so surprising is the sheer number of land acquisition agreements that have been negotiated or are under consideration. In 2009 the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) compiled a list of nearly 50 agreements, based largely on a worldwide review of press reports. No one knows for sure how many such agreements there are or how many will eventually be. This massive acquisition of land to grow food in other countries is one of the largest geopolitical experiments ever conducted.

The role of government in land acquisition varies. In some cases, government-owned corporations are acquiring the land. In others, private entities are the buyers, with the government of the investing country using its diplomatic resources to achieve an agreement favorable to the investors. The land-buying countries are mostly those whose populations have outrun their own land and water resources. Among them are Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China, Kuwait, Libya, India, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Saudi Arabia is looking to buy or lease land in at least 11 countries, including Ethiopia, Turkey, Ukraine, Sudan, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Viet Nam, and Brazil.

In contrast, countries selling or leasing their land are often low-income countries and, more often than not, those where chronic hunger and malnutrition are commonplace. Some depend on the World Food Programme (WFP) for part of their food supply. In March 2009 the Saudis celebrated the arrival of the first shipment of rice produced on land they had acquired in Ethiopia, a country where the WFP is working to feed some 5 million people. Another major acquisition site for the Saudis and several other grain importing countries is the Sudan—ironically the site of the WFP’s largest famine relief effort.

For sheer size of investment, China stands out. The Chinese firm ZTE International has secured rights to 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on which to produce palm oil, which can be used either for cooking or to produce bio-diesel fuel—indicating that the competition between food and fuel is also showing up in land acquisitions. This compares with the 1.9 million hectares used by the Congo’s 66 million people to produce corn, their food staple. Like Ethiopia and Sudan, the Congo also depends on a WFP lifeline. Among the other countries in which China has acquired land or has plans to do so are Australia, Russia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar.

South Korea, a leading world corn importer, is a major investor in several countries. With deals signed for some 690,000 hectares (1.7 million acres) in the Sudan for growing wheat, South Korea is one of the leaders in this food security push. For perspective, this land acquisition is nearly three-fourths the size of the area South Korea now uses at home to produce rice, its staple food. The Koreans are also looking at the Russian Far East, where they plan to grow corn and soybeans.

One little noticed characteristic of these land acquisitions is that they are also water acquisitions. Whether the land is rain-fed or irrigated, it represents a claim on the water resources in the host country. Land acquisitions in the Sudan that tap water from the Nile, which is already fully utilized, may mean that Egypt will get less water from the river—making it even more dependent on imported grain.

These bilateral land acquisitions raise many questions. To begin with, these negotiations and the agreements they lead to lack transparency. Typically only a few high-ranking officials are involved and the terms are confidential. Not only are many stakeholders such as farmers not at the table when the agreements are negotiated, they often do not even learn about the deals until after they have been signed. And since there is rarely idle productive land in these countries, many local farmers may simply be displaced. This helps explain the public hostility that often arises within host countries.

China, for example, signed an agreement with the Philippine government to lease over a million hectares of land on which to produce crops that would be shipped home. Once word leaked out, the public outcry—much of it from Filipino farmers—forced the government to suspend the agreement. A similar situation developed in Madagascar, where South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics had pursued rights to more than 1 million hectares of land, an area half the size of Belgium. This helped stoke the political furor that led to a change in government and cancellation of the agreement. China is also running into on-the-ground opposition over its quest for 2 million hectares in Zambia.

This new approach to achieving food security also raises questions about the effects on employment. At least two countries, China and South Korea, are planning in some cases to bring in their own farm workers. Is the introduction of large-scale commercial, heavily mechanized farming operations what is needed by the recipient countries, where unemployment is widespread?

If food prices are rising in the host country, will the investing country have to hire security forces to ensure that the harvests can be brought home? Aware of this potential problem, the government of Pakistan, which is trying to sell or lease 400,000 hectares, is offering to provide a security force of 100,000 men to protect the land and assets of investors.

Another disturbing dimension of many land investments is that they are taking place in countries like Indonesia, Brazil, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where expanding cropland typically means clearing tropical rainforests that sequester large quantities of carbon. This could measurably raise global carbon emissions, increasing the climate threat to world food security.

The Japanese government, IFPRI, and others have suggested the need for an investment code that would govern these land acquisition agreements, a code that would respect the rights of those living in the countries of land acquisition as well as the rights of investors. The World Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development have drafted a set of recommended principles for responsible investment in agriculture. This will likely evolve as these agreements move forward.

Growing world food insecurity is ushering in a new geopolitics of food scarcity, one where competition for land and water is crossing national boundaries. The risk is that this will increase hunger and political instability, which could lead to even more failing states.


Adapted from Chapter 1, “Selling Our Future,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4

But I don't see it that way. Anybody who needs to be woken up at this point is so deeply asleep that they're not the target audience for global activism. We don't need to wake the sleeping so much as we need to harness the energy of those who are already awake. Enough people know we're in trouble; what they want to know is what to do about it.

We're living at a time when whole systems break down, calling for a whole systems response. It's not just outer change but also inner change that's called for. It's not just that this is wrong, or that that is wrong. The entire direction of human civilization is wrong, as we have placed economic principles before humanitarian values and in so doing have placed the very survival of the human race at risk.

Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be nuclear, environmental or terrorism-related. The probability vectors for the next twenty years are grim, and our job is to turn the probability vectors into possibility vectors... in other words, we have to turn this ship around.

In every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives, a common anthropological characteristic is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when she senses a threat to her cubs. The lioness, the tigress and the mama bear are all examples. The fact that the adult human female is so relatively complacent before the collective threats to the young of our species bespeaks a lack of proactive intention for the human race to survive.

Yet how things have been has no inherent bearing on how things have to be, and I think we're living at a time when Western womanhood is just a moment away from emerging into the light of our collective possibility. Especially given the relative lack of power - even basic rights - given to millions of women in other parts of the world, we have a particular responsibility to speak up not only for ourselves but for them as well; and we are ready, maybe not all of us, but enough of us. Western women should be a moral force on this planet. We should not be infantilized; we should not be pretending we don't know what's going on; we should not be giving in to the various and ubiquitous temptations to anesthetize ourselves. Quite the opposite, we should be taking the wheel of human civilization and saying to anyone who will listen: We're turning the ship around, and we're turning it around NOW.

One thing we should all be aware of is the Millennium Development Goals, a set of 8 goals signed on to by all 189 members of the United Nations in the year 2000. The goals are important because they speak to the underlying causes of so many of our most important problems, addressing them on a global level and giving everyone the chance to monitor how we're doing as a species.

The goals are a road map to cutting absolute poverty in half, improving health, getting children in school and reducing disease by 2015. When we think of "women's issues," we should be thinking of these issues. They should be our concern as the mothers of the world, the lovers of the world, and the leaders of the world.

Specifically, the goals are these:

1) Cut Extreme Poverty and Hunger in Half

2) Achieve Universal Primary Education

3) Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women

4) Reduce Child Mortality by Two-Thirds

5) Cut Maternal Mortality by Three-Fourths

6) Halt and Reverse the Spread of HIV/AIDS, Malaria, TB, and Other Diseases

7) Ensure Environmental Sustainability

8) Develop a Global Partnership for Development

We are five years away from 2015, the year we are supposed to achieve the Millennium Goals. We are making progress but not fast enough. We need an accelerated sense of urgency from our decision makers. And nothing would make that happen more effectively than for the women of America to learn this information, to take it to heart, and to refuse to shut up about it. No matter what else you're doing to make the world a better place, add a P.S. about The Millennium Goals.

Facts to consider: Putting a child in school is one of the most powerful things we can to do to reduce poverty. An educated child earns more later in life, knows how to keep their own children from dying, produces more food, is less likely to get AIDS, and in the case of boys, is less likely to engage in armed civil conflict. And we already know how to address the problems of AIDS, TB, and Malaria; we just need to do more of it via mechanisms like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.

So what can you do? You can call or write your Congress people as well as the President, and tell them you want them to actively and substantially support the Millennium Development Goals. Remember: Our Representatives are lobbied by wealthy corporations every hour of every day, but the poor of the world have no economic leverage. The only voice they have in the halls of power is yours.

And do more than that. Educate yourself. Look at un.org/millenniumgoals. Use your own platform, or create one. Consider ways to help spread the word. Use Facebook and Twitter and every other way you have of building a buzz about something that could matter to the lives - even the survival - of millions of people. And some of those people might someday be your own grandchildren.

Then, when it's all handled, when 17,000 children a day are no longer dying of hunger; when the ecosystems of the planet are well on their way to restoration; when nuclear bombs are scarce if not completely gone; when females of the world are no longer treated like chattel; and the nations of the world are beginning to achieve a real and lasting peace; then, we can celebrate. But until then, we should mourn. Anyone who's looking at the world and not grieving isn't conscious; but anyone who's looking at the world and not rejoicing in the possibilities for how we can turn all this around, is underestimating what human beings can do. We can learn to love each other.

We can be conduits for the miraculous. We can stop playing small and start playing large. We can stop giving in to our weaknesses and start claiming our strengths. We can tell truth to power. We can act like we mean it. We can never, never, never give up. We can be the mothers and the fathers of a new and better world. And all of this is possible because human beings can decide. We can decide to say something. We can decide to write an email. We can decide to step up and participate. But we must decide now... not later. There is no more time to waste.

I believe it’s time to start marching to defeat this devastating disease! We are inviting 5,000 women and men of all ages to join us in Long Beach and help benefit the incredibly important work of the Alzheimer’s Association. So, march with us! You can learn more about The March and sign up here.

We will be joined by Leeza Gibbons, Rob Lowe, Peter Gallagher, Natalie Maines, Soleil Moon Frye, Jane Fonda, Jake Steinfeld, and many others who are coming out to support this effort.

A minimum donation of $25 is required to participate. I am also encouraging all participants to enlist the support of their family, friends and colleagues to help raise additional funds.

As an added incentive for you to register today and begin building a fundraising team, we are giving away two free Loge tickets to the sold-out Women's Conference 2010 Main Event on Tuesday, October 26 to a randomly selected marcher who signs up by August 15.

That’s right – if you sign up for our March on Alzheimer’s by August 15, you are automatically entered into our Main Event ticket giveaway.  

I look forward to marching with you!

Aid for 1,000 families in Pakistan has been delivered in the last 48 hours thanks to UK-based disaster relief charity ShelterBox. Families whose homes were destroyed in the floods have now found emergency shelter beneath the canvas of ShelterBox tents after 1,000 ShelterBox tents were distributed in Kyber Pukhtunkwa (KPK) and Punjab regions of Pakistan in the past two days.

ShelterBox responds instantly to disasters around the world, wherever and whenever they strike, supporting an extended family with emergency shelter and lifesaving supplies at a time when they have lost everything.

Each ShelterBox disaster relief tent, made by Vango, can house an extend family of up to ten people. The tents undergo rigorous testing in wind and rain tunnels and can withstand extremes of high and low temperatures.

ShelterBox’s partners in Pakistan, the NRSP (National Rural Support Programme), delivered the aid to families who have been rescued from Pakistan’s worst floods in living memory.

The tents were pre-positioned in Pakistan by ShelterBox Field Operations Advisor, Mark Pearson, a month ago on NRSP’s advice.

‘We knew a particularly bad monsoon season was going to hit,’ said Mark. ‘We were operating in response to Cyclone Phet and the flooding in the Hunza Valley and it made sense to keep boxes on standby in readiness for any potential flooding.

‘I worked closely with NRSP and trained them on the best way to distribute our kit. They’ve been fantastic in getting aid to families most in need immediately after the floods hit.’

ShelterBox Head of Operations, John Leach, added: ‘We’ve been working in Pakistan since early June and monitoring the situation in the Hunza Valley since the landslide happened there in January.

‘We’ve worked with NRSP since the Kashmir earthquake in 2005 and it’s because of this partnership that we’ve been able to deliver aid to survivors of the floods so quickly. A distribution of this scale and magnitude wouldn’t have been possible without their efforts and the efforts of our supporters around the world.

‘It’s vital we’re always ready for the next disaster and our supporters have been magnificent this year. As we’ve seen with the floods in Pakistan, we don’t know when the next disaster will hit. To stay ready, we need your help, however great or small that may be.’

Since 2005, ShelterBox has worked in Pakistan in response to earthquakes, conflict, flooding, cyclones and landslides.

Public donations are vital to ShelterBox’s continuing work. To make a donation please ring +44 (0)300 0300 500 or go to shelterbox.org to donate online and get the latest updates on their response to disasters around the world.

Today, the Florida State Board of Education, in a unanimous and unified vote, approved the adoption of the Common Core State Standards for English/Language Arts and Mathematics. This approval marks a vital next step on Florida's long-standing and successful education reform journey by strengthening our curriculum standards for these critical subjects and laying the groundwork for the comparison of our state's academic progress with our nation and the world.

My most sincere appreciation goes out to Commissioner Smith for his heightened involvement in this national effort and in helping to ensure these new standards would not only be rigorous, but would pave the way for a substantial increase in the college and career readiness of our students. His leadership and the work of his talented team have helped us to arrive at this important point and I look forward to seeing the improved outcomes of all Florida students as these new standards are implemented in the coming years.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education cited the increased academic rigor and stronger expectations for student performance when it voted 8-0 to adopt the Common Core Standards in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics on Wednesday, making Massachusetts the 27th state to adopt the internationally benchmarked academic standards that promise to keep the Commonwealth's students national leaders in education. The Common Core Standards will continue to be assessed through the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), ensuring that all Massachusetts students continue to achieve at the highest levels in the nation and preparing them to succeed in the global economy.

Launched in June 2009, the Common Core State Standards Initiative is designed to develop and implement a single set of national standards in ELA and math to define what every student should know and be able to do in order to be fully ready for post-secondary education or a successful career. Massachusetts played a leading role in the development and review of the standards over the past 13 months. Curriculum experts and educators from across the Commonwealth reviewed and submitted comments on drafts that were incorporated throughout the development process to ensure that the expectations set in the final versions met or exceeded the state's strong standards for students.

"Today's vote is a strong statement of the Board's commitment to keeping Massachusetts competitive in the global economy," said Board of Elementary and Secondary Education Chair Maura Banta. "I am very grateful to all the professionals who provided the Board with such a thorough and thoughtful analysis. We look forward to your continued contribution as we identify unique Massachusetts standards that should be added to the Common Core."

"All along, the conversation about Common Core has been about the Commonwealth seizing the opportunity to improve upon our already high standards," said Education Secretary Paul Reville. "Today's action ensures that Massachusetts will continue to be the recognized leader not only in performance but in setting the direction for nation's future education reforms."

"Adopting the Common Core standards allows us to retain our standing as a state that holds all students to high academic expectations. These standards will spur academic achievement in the classroom," said Education Commissioner Mitchell D. Chester. "This decision also puts us right where we should be – at the table with other states to collaborate on innovative curricular and instructional strategies that will benefit students and educators for years to come."

The Common Core standards were developed using the most effective academic standards from across the country and around the world. These standards are designed to provide teachers and parents with a common understanding of what all elementary and secondary school students are expected to learn. The standards are aligned with expectations that define the knowledge and skills needed for success in college and and/or workforce training programs. They are designed to drive high quality instruction in the nation's classrooms. The standards include rigorous content and build on strengths and lessons of the state's current standards.

The Board has discussed the standards at four previous meetings over the course of the past year. BESE sought public comment while engaging department staff, outside experts, district curriculum leaders and teachers in a process involving analysis and feedback.

The standards were also fully vetted, reviewed and approved by national organizations including Achieve, Inc., which called them "a significant advance over current state standards," and the Fordham Foundation. The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE), in a side-by-side analysis comparing the state's current standards to the Common Core, deemed that Common Core "meets the business community's objective of enhancing the college and career readiness of our students."

In addition, external review teams of Massachusetts educators and academics assembled by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education did their own analysis of both the Common Core and the state's academic standards and found them to be of equal quality and strength. Both teams recommended adoption of the Common Core standards. In their final review, the team that reviewed the ELA standards noted that the Common Core document "bespeaks an abiding belief in high academic achievement through the pursuit of the best possible educational praxis."

Among the strengths officials highlighted as distinguishing factors within the Common Core:

• The focus on reading and writing across the curriculum


• The attention to speaking, listening and vocabulary


• The consideration of emerging new literacies (such as digital and print sources) for research and communication


• The treatment of varying student needs and achievement levels in the delivery of the math curriculum

Two former commissioners of education, Robert Antonucci and David Driscoll, who were responsible for the design and implementation of the Education Reform Act of 1993 and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) this week voiced support for Common Core based on the academic rigor set forth in the standards. Likewise, former Boston Public Schools Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant encouraged the Board to adopt the standards based on the value added to the state's current high expectations.

Business leaders also this week announced their backing of the new, higher standards. In addition to MBAE, the Associated Industries of Massachusetts, the Progressive Business Leaders Network and the Massachusetts Business Roundtable all encouraged the Board to adopt Common Core based on their review of the standards and conclusion of the strong academic foundation contained within both the math and English Common Core frameworks.

Later this summer the ELA and mathematics curriculum framework review panels will be reconvened and charged with identifying unique Massachusetts standards to augment and strengthen the Common Core. This will be brought to the Board this fall for final approval.

Once fully adopted, the new frameworks will be posted on the ESE website, and widely publicized. Regional statewide professional development sessions on the new standards will be offered over the next year, through the District and School Assistance Centers, the Readiness Centers and other venues. All districts will be expected to align their curricula to the new standards by the start of the 2012-2013 school year.

In addition to their individual accomplishments, this graduating class is special at ECHS for several reasons. Notably, this class has fulfilled our expanded environmental and college preparatory curriculum, which includes the addition of our award-winning Green Ambassadors program and an innovative SAT Prep program.

Not only have they completed our rigorous set of coursework, including four years of math and science, but these students have also inspired thousands of other youths, businesses, community members and leaders across the nation to care more about "being green."

Our graduates are full of passion and individualism.  This year, they captured the hearts of many across the U.S. as they demonstrated their drive to become successful and thoughtful citizens of our community by participating in the President’s Race to the Top Commencement Challenge. These kids are not just going off to college, they are poised to make a positive impact on our nation.   

The education and preparation ECHS has given them has been possible thanks to the generous financial and in-kind help of our sponsors, partners and supporters like you. As our Anniversary Gala celebration in November approaches, we hope you’ll continue supporting our extraordinary mission.

In order to turn around this apparent decline in rank, thousands of citizens in the United States have been collaborating. What they have come up with is an inspiring example of American Ingenuity.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) is a historic effort designed to advance nationwide education reform. In the summer of 2009, 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, all voluntarily agreed to help draft this document. Working through The National Governor’s Association (NGA) and The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), these entities forged the shared Common Core Standards in English language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics, which were released June 2, 1010.

What is most impressive about the Common Core State Standards Initiative is the depth of collaborative spirit, process and expertise that have gone into its development. It is not only the states, the NGA and the CCSSO who were involved. Work groups made up of representatives from universities and community colleges, as well as K-12 teachers and administrators, researchers, policy makers, community and parent organizations, foundations and NPOs, business men and women and civil rights groups all contributed. Educational organizations  (NCTM, AFT, CBMS, NCSM, ASSM, AMTE, to name a few) were consulted at opportune times. Thousands of comments were made upon individual drafts. International benchmarks were analyzed, and common core standards of other nations were evaluated, in order to learn from the successful steps of those countries that are now surpassing us. 

The result: A precise and comprehensive agreement from experts in many fields as to what is necessary in order to competitively prepare students for both college and the global workforce. These standards provide specific expectations of achievement for each grade, allowing students, parents, teachers and administrators a clear blueprint to follow on a national level. It is an incredible step forward for education in the United States (corestandards.org/about-the-standards).

So far, 24 states have adopted the CCSSI, with 26 to go (corestandards.org/in-the-states). 

There are many misconceptions about the CCSSI. It is not a system for nationalizing education. Indeed, this reform is driven by the individual states working together, and not by the federal government. The individual states have already collaborated and agreed upon what the standards are. Now, it is upon each state that adopts the standards to execute complete control over how the standards are executed. 

Again, this reform is state driven. Adoption of the Common Core will look different in each state, depending on whether the standards are adopted through the state board, the state department, or the legislature. Also, the timeline for the adoption process is under the jurisdiction of each state. The standards respect unique state context, and the authority of each state to govern its public education system.

One crucial commonality remains: if adopted, the standards must be preserved word for word, true to the CCSSI that the states drafted together and presented in June of 2010. Of course, these standards will continually be updated as time goes on and research is done. Also, there is a 15% flexibility of the Common Core that each state is allowed to add their unique spin to.

Some people have expressed concern that if their state ranks towards the top in achievement, adopting the common core and working with other states will bring them down. On the contrary, this reform results in strengthening what works in individual states, and fixing what doesn’t work, through a shared network. 

Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, Chairman of the National Governor’s Association states: “In Vermont, we are proud that our students are consistently rated among the most proficient in the nation. Working with our neighbors in Rhode Island and New Hampshire and Maine, we realize the benefits of working across state lines to align standards and expectations... The Common Core Initiative builds upon what we are already doing in Vermont, and provides an even greater opportunity for states to share experiences, lessons and best practices, while maintaining high standards of excellence in our schools. By making clear expectations to students, parents and policy makers, we will challenge all Americans to continuously meet and improve the quality of education across our great nation”.

These are inspiring words of hope, at a time when our educational system is in crisis. While some teabaggers may see the standards as a sign of federal intrusion, I find this to be an inaccurate judgment, steeped in a faulty vision of independence that we quite simply do not have time for. We are the only first world country that does not have common core standards; our lack of them is a big part of the crisis we now face.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a brilliant tribute to American resiliency and ingenuity, in that it provides a certified, researched and evidence based blueprint for success, with the added benefit and safeguard of mutual statewide support and autonomy. Currently, they are our only valid and timely solution to the education crisis. 

United we stand, divided we fall. For the sake of our children, our future leaders, it is urgent that all states work together as a nation, and adopt the Common Core Standards. Please contact your representatives in the House and Senate, and let them know you support the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Today, the United States’ high school graduation rate ranks near the bottom among developed nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And on virtually every international assessment of academic proficiency, American secondary school students’ performance varies from mediocre to poor. Given that human capital is a prerequisite for success in the global economy, U.S. economic competitiveness is unsustainable with poorly prepared students feeding into the workforce.

The United States has substantial inequities in achievement across the country, and international surveys show that the performance gap between the most- and least-proficient students in the United States is among the highest of all OECD countries (Kirsch et al. 2007). Despite the myth that other countries achieve only because they have small, homogenous student populations, data shows that many countries’ schools successfully assimilate immigrant or high-poverty populations that are proportionately larger than those in the United States

American schools, on the other hand, do little to mitigate the barriers that these groups face (OECD 2007b). Moreover, the rapidly growing minority populations that represent a disproportionate share of America’s lowest-achieving students are projected to make up more than half of the U.S. population by 2050 (United States Census Bureau 2004). Unless the United States begins to prepare all students for college and the modern workplace, America’s disturbing downward trend will only get worse.

The following details how fifteen-year-old students from the United States compare with fifteen-year-olds in other OECD member countries in the Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) measures of academic proficiency.*

Reading Literacy

In 2003, the United States ranked 15th of 29 OECD countries in reading literacy, and with a score of 495, came in near the OECD average of 500 (U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics 2004). However, a printing error invalidated the U.S. reading section of the 2006 PISA assessment, so the current U.S. standing is unknown.

Scientific Literacy

The United States ranks 21st of 30 OECD countries in scientific literacy, and the U.S. score of 489 fell below the OECD average of 500 (OECD 2007b). One quarter (24.4 percent) of U.S. fifteen-year-olds do not reach the baseline level of science achievement. This is the level at which students begin to demonstrate the science competencies that will enable them to use science and technology in life situations (OECD 2007b).

*PISA is a triennial assessment that the OECD administers to students in its member and partner countries. It is the world’s most comprehensive and rigorous comparison of international student achievement; participating countries make up nearly 90 percent of the world’s economy (OECD 2007b). Results presented in this fact sheet are, unless otherwise noted, from the most recent PISA, administered to students in 2006.

Mathematics Literacy

The United States ranks 25th of 30 OECD countries in mathematics literacy, and the average score of 474 fell well below the OECD average of 498. Scores have not measurably changed since 2003, when the United States ranked 24th of 29 countries (OECD 2007b). Over one quarter (28.1 percent) of American fifteen-year-olds performed below the baseline level of mathematics proficiency at which students begin to demonstrate the kind of skills that enable them to use mathematics actively in daily life (OECD 2007b).

Problem Solving

In 2003, the U.S. ranked 24th of 29 OECD countries in problem solving, and the average score of 477 fell well below the OECD average of 500 (OECD 2004). Half of American students fell below the threshold of problem-solving skills considered necessary to meet emerging workforce demands (OECD 2004). National surveys corroborate this finding; for example, 46 percent of American manufacturers say that their employees have inadequate problem-solving skills (NAM 2005).

Equity in Achievement

The United States has an average number of students who perform at the highest proficiency levels, but a much larger proportion who perform at the lowest levels. The United States is the only member country to have relatively high proportions of both top and bottom performers (OECD 2007b). Although American white students’ average science score of 523 ranked above the OECD average, Hispanic American (439), American Indian and Native Alaskan (436), and African American (409) students all fell far below (U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics 2007).

These groups scored similarly to the national averages of Turkey and Mexico, the two lowest-performingOECD member countries. The difference between the science scores of two students of different socioeconomic backgrounds is higher in the United States than in almost any other country (OECD 2007b). First-generation immigrant students in the United States lag an average of 57 points behind their native counterparts, which is the equivalent of nearly two years of schooling. Second-generation U.S. immigrants perform no better than first-generation immigrant students (OECD 2007b). Four of the five member countries that have higher proportions of immigrants than the United States also have higher national scores than the United States (OECD 2007b).

References

Kirsch, I., H. Braun, K. Yamamoto, and A. Sum. 2007. America’s perfect storm: Three forces changing our nation’s future.
Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
National Association of Manufacturers [NAM], The Manufacturing Institute, and Deloitte Consulting LLC. 2005. 2005 skills gap report: A survey of the American manufacturing workforce. Washington, DC: Author. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]. 2007. PISA 2006: Science competencies for tomorrow’s world. Paris: Author.
———. 2004. Problem solving for tomorrow’s world: First measures of cross-curricular competencies from PISA 2003. Paris: Author.
United States Census Bureau. 2004. U.S. interim projections by age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin. U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. 2007. Highlights from PISA 2006: Performance of U.S. 15-year-old students in science and mathematics literacy in an international context (NCES 2008–016). Washington, DC: Author.
U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. 2004. International outcomes of learning in mathematics literacy and problem solving: PISA 2003 results from the U.S. perspective. (NCES 2005–003). Washington, DC: Author.

The “Lobby Day” experience was part of the first annual CCL National Conference in the nation’s capital. The landmark event brought together climate scientists, oceanographers, environmental engineers, economists, activists, community leaders, small business owners and concerned citizens to deliver the message to members of both parties that citizens from the community, their own constituents, will support them if they take meaningful, comprehensive action to combat climate destabilization.

Citizens Climate Lobby is a national non-partisan, non-profit organization, working to organize citizen volunteers, by state, county or Congressional district, to lobby elected officials for a strong emissions reduction plan to prevent catastrophic climate change and speed the transition to clean energy. The group aims to motivate political support, across the political spectrum, for a pragmatic approach to emissions reduction and to speed the transition to clean energy.

The CCL strategy entails reaching out to all members of Congress, in both parties, regardless of their specific views or past staunch opposition to carbon-reduction legislation. The aim is to listen, to understand what specific elected officials and their constituencies most value and how they prioritize issues of energy and climate, and to work with them to help them achieve their goals in a way that is consistent with establishing a sustainable, responsible climate policy.

As part of the Citizens Climate Lobby, I can say it is integral to the organization’s mission to work to transition the United States from a legislative climate of full-time professional lobbyists to a new paradigm wherein ordinary citizens speaking for their communities, the well-being and rights of future generations, are the preferred interlocutors for shaping the nation’s laws.

The conference was a three-day event, in conjunction with the RESULTS National Conference, from June 20 through 22, where citizen volunteer lobbyists gather to push Congress to act to combat poverty at home and around the world. Sunday and Monday were training and informational days, in which the CCL volunteers heard directly from established scientists presenting the latest science regarding climate destabilization and carbon emissions. Volunteers also participated in workshops designed to prepare the teams for meetings with members of Congress and their staff.

The specific focus of Citizens Climate Lobby’s efforts on Capitol Hill is to promote proposed language for a fee/dividend approach to limiting and reducing carbon emissions and promoting the transition to a world-leading clean energy economy. The proposed legislation would:

1. Fee: place a direct and steadily increasing (year on year) cost on CO2 at the point of entry into the economy (well, mine or port);



2. Dividend: return 100% of revenues collected to the American people directly, an equal amount per capita to every household;



3. Clean Energy: set a price that will make renewables cheaper than fossil fuels within 10 years;



4. Level Playing Field: apply a border adjustment to balance carbon pricing for products from nations that do nothing to increase cost of carbon emissions;



5. Pollution: stop construction of all new coal-fired power plants and phase out all existing plants, starting with the dirtiest…

The plan is supported by Dr. James Hansen (NASA’s leading climate scientist), numerous retired military leaders and leading members of the faith community. It is designed to relocate the hidden costs of carbon-based fuels (‘negative externalities’ in economics-speak) from the citizen, the community and the small business, back to the interests that seek to profit from the resources that generate those negative externalities for which the rest of us pay.

The CCL approach is intended not to be punitive, but clear and transparent. It does not discriminate and does not in any way limit the freedom of carbon-based enterprises to join the clean energy revolution. Over time, as the cost of producing energy from carbon-based fuels goes up, investment will move toward clean energy resources, technology and infrastructure, which will allow private enterprise to profit more readily and consistently than the more costly carbon-based alternative, with its tendency to extreme volatility in pricing.

This method allows citizens, communities and small businesses to pay for any increase in costs that might come from utilities or other industrial enterprises passing along carbon fee costs to the consumer, and to drive demand for a clean energy alternative. The plan allows the American people to build the clean energy future they would prefer, drive a new wave of investment in innovation and ingenuity to secure the nation’s energy independence, and protect the natural environment against progressive global climate destabilization.

Having met with and listened to so many members of Congress and/or their climate and energy policy advisers, CCL has begun the process of working to find areas of mutual interest and shared principle that can build a fabric of common understanding and interest between rival political parties, community interests, ideological camps and even industries, to forge the political will to achieve the clean energy revolution this nation needs for its future economic, environmental and military security.

THE OPPORTUNITY 

Modern cities are thriving as increasing numbers of people recognize them as stimulating and rewarding environments in which to live and work.  Latest statistics show that half of the world’s population currently lives in a city, and this proportion is projected to further increase to a substantial two thirds of the world’s population by 20501.

As well as more people living in cities, the demographic of these individuals is changing, with the average age of the city dweller, along with that of the general population, getting steadily older.  According to the World Health Organization, the proportion of people aged over 60 is projected to reach 22% by 20501. Elderly people living alone in a city are even more likely than younger family members to experience feelings of insecurity and isolation.

These demographic trends in cities present new social, economic and environmental challenges. Cities need to constantly innovate to ensure basic infrastructure is available to their inhabitants, such as access to healthcare, care for the elderly and adequate energy to fulfill their needs. The quality of life in a city is also equally important – citizens today want to feel safe in their city and be able to lead fulfilled lives in an urban environment with community facilities, green spaces, and healthy workplaces.

Everyone who is involved with cities – either personally or professionally – has a valid contribution to make to continue enhancing and enriching our lives in years to come, and it is to this end that Philips has launched the Livable Cities Award.

PHILIPS’ INVOLVEMENT

Philips, a health and well-being company active in the areas of lighting, healthcare and consumer lifestyle, has a mission of improving peoples’ lives through innovation. Philips understands the challenges of ‘keeping cities livable’, and its solutions already contribute to resolving urban issues. For example, Philips offers solutions for better lighting of public space, which has an impact on crime rates and road safety, and enhances community interaction. In the area of healthcare, Philips solutions connect the hospital to the home, helping caregivers monitor and care for patients suffering from chronic illnesses as well as helping families care for the elderly living alone.  A well known consumer brand, Philips offers a wide range of lifestyle products, such as solutions to help people exercise despite a sedentary lifestyle and light therapy products that help people re-energize.

As part of the company’s mission to improve the quality of people’s lives, the Philips Center for health and well-being is researching what matters most to citizens all over the world in terms of their own health and well-being. The Center is currently conducting a worldwide survey, the Philips Index on health and well-being (Philips Index), the results of which are being published as a series of reports.  

Initial outcomes of the survey in the US, Brazil and China reveal that people’s health and well-being are affected by factors such as perception of their health, emotional well-being, personal relationships, occupation and the community in which they live. These results provide an insight into the trends that have determined the categories of the Philips Livable Cities Award.

AWARD CATEGORIES

There are three award categories:

 • WELL-BEING OUTDOORS

Feeling safe and secure in a densely populated environment is of paramount importance to anyone living in a city.  According to the United Nations, sixty million people move to urban areas every year, the equivalent of nearly seven thousand per hour.

The Philips Index on health and well-being in the United States revealed that 94% of people ranked safety and crime rate as the most important factor affecting health and well-being in their community. In addition the Index research in Brazil and China revealed that safety and crime rate had a significant effect on health and well-being, with crime being reported in Brazil as the top stress factor.

In this category, entries are encouraged that propose initiatives to help citizens feel safe and secure in public places, as well as initiatives that help create city identity and a sense of belonging.

 • INDEPENDENT LIVING

Rapid urbanization and aging populations are having a far reaching effect. Populations around the world are living longer and living alone in cities.  The Philips Index reveals a fascinating insight into the perceived life expectations of those surveyed in. 59%, 60% and 75% of people in the US, Brazil and China respectively expect to live beyond the age of 80. The World Health Organization provides guidance on the creation of age-friendly cities. “Making cities more age friendly is a necessary and logical response to promote the well being and contributions of older urban residents”1. In addition there is now a growing range of technologies that allow patients to be monitored and cared for at home, recognized by the King’s Fund (UK), thus providing patients with the ease and comfort of monitoring and treatment in their own homes.

The Philips Index research in the US, Brazil and China shows that access to healthcare and local hospitals was ranked amongst the top five factors affecting health and well-being by city dwellers.

Entries in this category should demonstrate initiatives that will help the growing number of elderly people living alone to feel secure and comfortable in a city and/or enable longer living at home with appropriate access to healthcare.

• HEALTHY LIFESTYLE AT WORK AND HOME

More people spend longer in artificially created environments such as offices, schools and at home. These may have an impact on their well-being and productivity. According to the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, if employers improve lighting, staff productivity could rise by 13%. Research by the Hamburg-Eppendorf University Hospital in Germany (published in 2008 and 2010) has also shown that children’s learning can be significantly improved by simply adjusting the lighting to suit the particular task at hand.

Lifestyle also has a significant impact on health - in all three countries surveyed to date in the Philips Index, a lack of exercise and a perceived lack of time for adequate sleep were seen as the main causes of ill-health.

Initiatives submitted in this category should support healthy body and mind, whether through a person’s surrounding or via other essentials such as exercise, sleep or diet.

AWARD VALUE

An overall Philips Livable Cities Award of 75,000 Euros will be made for the best submission from any of the three categories, with two additional awards of 25,000 Euros for the best submissions in the two categories NOT receiving the overall award.

The awards will be supervised by an international panel of experts and chaired by Richard Florida, Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He is a globally respected authority on new trends in business and community, and was recently named as one of the ‘Best and Brightest’ by Esquire Magazine. The supervisory panel will also include a senior executive from Philips, Gottfried Dutiné, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Markets and Innovation.

Further information on requirements, submission and timelines for the Philips Livable Cities Award is available at philips.com/because.

Tuberculosis - an ancient enemy that has devastated mankind for thousands of years. Almost all cultures of the world are well familiar with it and have given it different names: yaksma (India), phthisis (Greek), consumptione (Latin) and chaky oncay (Incan). In later times it was known as consumption – a disease that ate a person from the inside out – and during the 19th and early 20th century it was known as the white plague. Other names include Scrofula, Pott's or Koch’s disease.

From time immemorial, tuberculosis has been synonymous with death and immorality. It was seen as the consequence of a sinful life, being cursed, related to sorcery or vampirism. Known to be fatal, treatments varied from the mundane to the bizarre. The Sushruta Samhita, written around 600 BCE, recommends that the disease be treated with breast milk, various meats, alcohol and rest. Hippocrates actually advised his medical students against treating it, because it was almost always deadly, and a dead patient was bad for business. Pliny the Elder, in Natural History, suggested "wolf's liver taken in thin wine, the lard of a sow that has been fed upon grass, or the flesh of a she-ass taken in broth".

In a country of well over a billion, a vast number of who are either near or below the poverty line, the idea of life in India can mean mere existence; food enough for the day, any water to drink, a place to sleep and a few clothes to cover up. Even for the huge middle classes, survival is the name of the game - only the standard of living has been raised. To be sick in such an existence would be a burden, but to contract tuberculosis is a considered a curse. Unfortunately, that is exactly what is the easiest to catch.

With almost one in every third person carrying the bacteria, tuberculosis is the leading communicable disease in India. Accounting for 20% of the global burden, India has the highest TB incidence in the world. There are over 1.8 million news cases every year (infected, but not having the disease), with about 0.8 being smear positive (having TB disease). It kills close to a 1,000 people EVERYDAY in India - almost 2 people every 3 minutes.

While pulmonary TB is the most common form of the illness, it can affect almost every part of the body, with the exception of hair and nails. It is prevalent in the age group of 15 – 50, the most productive age bracket, with an estimated economic impact of US$ 3 billion to the country. India also accounts for 25% of the global HIV/TB co-infection burden. More than 50% of people living with HIV have TB and more than 60% will die because of TB.

Without early diagnosis, proper and complete treatment, not only do patients remain sick and / or die, the disease itself mutates. Multi-Drug Resistant (MDR) tuberculosis is fast becoming a major crisis, but is mitigated by the fact that it is treatable. What is most alarming, though, is the advent of the virtually untreatable Extensively Drug Resistant (XDR) TB. While accurate statistics are not available, XDR cases have been confirmed in over 50 countries.

The sad part of the story is that tuberculosis is easily curable; and treatment, in fact, is provided free of cost in India. Under the WHO recommended DOTS program, a patient can be treated within 6-8 months. The national tuberculosis control program achieved 100% DOTS coverage of the country by 2006 - which means that treatment should be accessible to anyone anywhere. Yet, the statistics above tell a different story. So why is this?

Dheza Marie Aguilar’s comments in the Manila Bulletin Online are revealing, “When a person is diagnosed with tuberculosis or TB, s/he is 'marked' for life...shunned by society and at worst, ridiculed and left alone by his or her own family. More than the pain of the disease, the real agony of tuberculosis is its effect on the social life of a patient.” Equally pertinent are the words of Mother Teresa, “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.”

Misconceptions, myths, rejection, superstition, fear – all the ingredients of stigma – are the invisible (and sometimes not so invisible) barriers to treatment. With 100,000 women having to leave their marital homes, 300,000 children having to drop out of school, thousands unable to marry and scores out of work due to tuberculosis, it’s no wonder patients want to keep a low profile.

“…people are destroyed from lack of knowledge.”(Hosea 4:6, The Bible). There is no truer statement for TB. People are literally dying because they have no knowledge, or worse, they have whole lies and half truths. This is why it is so critical to have a wider involvement of society around tuberculosis. The battle is not going to be won merely by newer drugs or better diagnostics. Beyond doubt, these are essential developments but all they will give us are “acceptable” outcomes on an ever increasing pool of patients.

The tide will turn only when we have all of civil society engaged – political / community leaders, industry / private sector, faith based organizations, students, housewives, everyone. Without involvement of society at large to champion the cause, tuberculosis is a battle that cannot be won.

Advocacy then becomes the tipping point – and it’s not to be confused with just awareness (a key component of advocacy). Work needs to be done to get various groups engaged at all levels – policy, resources mobilization and service delivery. Advocacy, Communication and Social Mobilization (ACSM) is the new buzzword on the block and a much need one at that. To win this war, tuberculosis must be kept up, front and center.

The Advocacy to Control TB Internationally (ACTION Project) is an international partnership of advocates working to mobilize resources to treat and prevent the spread of tuberculosis. Its work centers around engaging political will, facilitating interaction between key stakeholders, empowering civil society to be tuberculosis champions in their spheres of influence and  partnering with relevant organizations to ensure a TB-free world.

Many poverty programs serve families by trying to improve children’s lives, and helping children often translates into “family” policy. After all, children don’t stand on their own—families provide for their needs including housing, food, and clothing. But far too often, the notion of “family” translates into a focus on mothers and children. This needs to change.

Low-income fathers should definitely be a part of the family policy equation. Men are able to financially contribute to their children’s well-being and help lift them out of poverty in the short term. They also provide care and emotional supports that can improve children’s life outcomes and help break the cycle of poverty in the long term.

Unfortunately, far too many low-income men, and especially men of color, face barriers to playing these roles in their children’s lives. They are disproportionately disconnected from some extremely vital domains, and that harms them, their children, and families more generally.

These domains are examined in this paper and include:

• Employment. Shifts in the economy have decreased low-skilled workers’ job opportunities and wages over the last couple of decades. This impairs some men’s ability to financially support their children and families. The related financial stress drives wedges between family members.


• Society. More than 2 million people are in the nation’s prisons, and these are mostly low-income men. Their absence deprives children and families of income and emotional connections. And even after fathers are released, families continue to experience such negative consequences as income-impairing employment barriers linked to criminal records and reconnecting emotionally after a long period apart. Fathers are more likely to recidivate if family disconnections persist.


• Housing. Housing is unaffordable to the lowest-income workers throughout the United States. Spending a disproportionate amount of income on housing depletes resources families have available for other needs associated with childrearing. Low-income families are also at risk of housing instability, which often physically divides families and harms their relationships with one another.

It’s clear that low-income children can’t afford it when their fathers experience these disconnections. Their mothers, who are low-income women, are the poorest of the poor and earn less than their male counterparts. Low-skilled African-American women and Latinas are at the absolute bottom of the economic ladder, with incomes that are less than similarly situated white females.

This means policies should seek to maximize the level of financial help fathers provide in addition to increasing women’s earnings and available work supports. Additional income from husbands, cohabiting fathers, or nonresident fathers via child support payments financially benefits children. And repairing men’s disconnections that impair their ability to provide care, love, and attention also benefits their children.

The United States ought to be concerned about the status of its low-income men. It is undesirable and unacceptable for an entire segment of the population to be disconnected from one or more basic domains that most people in this country enjoy—freedom, income-producing work, and a stable roof over one’s head. When these disconnections contribute to depriving men of stable connections to intimate partners, children, and families more generally, the realities that some face appear even more bleak. Not only do these factors dramatically depreciate men’s quality of life, but they deprive the nation of these men’s productivity, ingenuity, and other contributions. Policies at all levels should recognize that the lives of these men have value.

These concerns about fathers and families were brought up in debates about the Responsible Fatherhood Program and the Healthy Marriage Initiative that occurred in 2005 when the legislation creating the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program was last reauthorized. It is now time for Congress to both reauthorize that legislation and make relevant funding decisions for the next fiscal year. The legislation has encompassed cash assistance, funding for employment services, and work supports such as child care, child support enforcement, and marriage and fatherhood programs.

As this process moves forward, it is clear that TANF must be a viable safety net that provides income support to low-income families when necessary. But it must also aim to ensure that more and more families will not require public assistance programs in the first place, which means it should strive to reduce poverty. Job training and work supports must be strengthened, for example. For some families, such services are all they need to overcome poverty.

We should pay far more attention, however, to parents who face the greatest challenges— mothers and fathers who experience continued barriers to employment and effective parenting. That is the role the administration’s proposed Fatherhood, Marriage, and Families Innovation Fund should play. The fund, which could be connected to TANF’s reauthorization, would provide two equal streams of funding for custodial parents, who are largely mothers, and fathers. Future CAP products will discuss how the fund should benefit mothers who are facing the most significant challenges, but this paper focuses on the fatherhood side of the equation.

The paper offers the following recommendations for how the fund should be used to help low-income families based on the areas of need explored in the paper:

• Further include men within the notion of “family” for policy purposes


• Reduce poverty by addressing the known disconnections and challenges of fathers


• Offer comprehensive solutions that address the complexities arising from men’s various disconnections


• Relieve stressors that divide families, which would provide them with greater freedom to make personal choices about family formation and maintenance based on reasons other than those associated with poverty

The best results will require more than the $500 million the administration recommends for the Fatherhood, Marriage, and Families Innovation Fund. And while increasing the amount of the appropriation is important, greater resources can also be garnered by better coordinating existing programs, including other comprehensive service models that are reaching families facing similar challenges in such systems as homeless services, child welfare, and reentry/crime prevention.

We see innovation in action every day in our lives. Whether it’s listening to music on a cell phone, or taking the latest medication to help tackle an ailment, our lives are better and easier as a result of the work to create new products and services.

When we think of innovation, most of us think of the private sector. And that’s hardly surprising since private-sector innovation accounts for more than 85 percent of economic growth in the United States.

But innovation is needed just as much in the public sector. Some of the impetus for innovation comes from new challenges such as childhood obesity, or climate change. Others come from public demands—public services can easily become stuck with outdated and ineffective approaches. And still more urgency emerges from fiscal pressures: as money gets tighter, public agencies will have to find more efficient ways to conduct the census or administer social security, improve workplace safety, or tackle crime. Public-sector productivity matters just as much for future prosperity in these days of fiscal tightness as private-sector productivity.

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt, governor of New York, Looking Forward (1933).

Finding the right way to tackle these issues is rarely straightforward. But it nearly always requires a cycle of coming up with new ideas, testing whether they actually work, and scaling up those ideas that are most effective.

We know from other fields—such as science and medicine—that innovation doesn’t just happen by accident. There are well-developed systems to foster innovation in the commercial sector. Yet too often in the public sector, even though there is a great deal of talk of the need to be innovative, there is little specific action. It’s still rare for innovation to be at all institutionalized in government budgets, roles, and processes. And it’s even rarer to find officials and politicians who are aware of the full range of tools that they could be using to accelerate the development and spread of better ideas.

This report looks at the actions that leaders in the public sector can take to ensure that there is a constant flow of promising ideas into the federal government. Across government, we recommend that Congress and the Obama administration work together to:

1. Identify priority fields for innovation: The government must first identify the fields of public action where innovation is most needed. These may be ones where problems are intensifying—such as climate change or aging. They may be fields where the evidence points to underperformance—such as schooling. Or they may be fields where new technologies and knowledge are opening up new opportunities. Some innovation happens through serendipity. But scarce time and resources need to be focused where the returns are likely to be greatest.

2. Open up the space for ideas: The second priority should be to widen the range of options, creating more space for creative and entrepreneurial solutions. This report identifies many tools that the federal government can use both inside agencies and to mobilize social entrepreneurs, the public, and others to help generate promising ideas.

3. Finance innovation: We propose a broad target that at least 1 percent of agency budgets should be used to develop, test, and scale up new and better ways of doing things in the public sector. There are a wide range of ways that the government can use financing to spur innovation, from very small grants for ideas from frontline staff to stage-gate investment models.

4. Fix incentives: Existing incentive frameworks dampen public servants’ desire to come up with newer, potentially better ways of doing things. We need greater recognition that new methods may be both more effective and more efficient than existing programs and initiatives.

5. Change the culture: Innovation has to be supported from the top, and senior leadership in the executive and the legislative branches should signal that they recognize that some ideas will fail, and that’s acceptable—as Franklin D. Roosevelt first proposed in the 1930s. The need to recruit large numbers of federal employees over the next few years provides an opportunity to change federal employees’ skill set. Future federal employees need to be clear that they should be constantly looking for better ways to accomplish government goals.

6. Grow what works: There should be a much stronger focus in government on trying to scale up ideas that work—even if that means closing down popular programs or initiatives that have been less effective in the past. Our accompanying report, “Scaling New Heights: How to Spot Small Successes in the Public Sector and Make Them Big,” recommends building a social innovation mentorship program and creating Institutes for Effective Innovations to help the scaling process.

Action is also needed in each government agency. Effective agencies need to become better at generating great ideas—both from within and from beyond their boundaries. We set out a series of techniques to generate promising ideas under five themes:

• Unleashing the creative talents of agency staff
• Setting up dedicated teams responsible for promoting innovation
• Diverting a small proportion of agency budgets to harnessing innovation
• Collaborating with outsiders to help solve problems
• Looking at issues from different perspectives to notice things you wouldn’t otherwise

This report includes more than 20 different ways that public agencies are promoting the generation of great ideas. Few public-sector organizations will wish to implement all of them. Instead, leaders should establish what they think will work best in their organization under each theme—and focus energy on implementing those. It is, in effect, a menu of practical ways in which organizations can help to generate a flow of great ideas. By choosing elements from each of these five themes, public-sector organizations will be able to ensure that there is a strong flow of great ideas on how to improve the way they go about their business.

Generating ideas is only one part of the innovation cycle. Our companion report focuses on how to scale up those ideas that have been proven to be effective.

What is the sense of spending all this money for more and more armaments? Yes, I know we have to do it so long as the nations are doing it. But, where does it lead? Nowhere but to war, because, while it seems the only possible thing to do as a temporary measure to prevent the outbreak of war immediately, no one goes beyond the immediate necessity and talks about the final elimination of the difficulties which have thrust the various powers into their present situation.

We invited the nations to sit around a table last spring. But, though I feel very sure that among the people of the world there is a desire for action of this kind, some of the leaders invited to come together, were not prepared to do so and refused.

It is wearisome to read of the balance of power. I would like to see somebody write about a balance of trade and of food for the world and the possibilities of so organizing our joint economic systems that all of us could go to work and produce at maximum capacity. This would mean much to the next generation in every country.

I cannot help feeling that the best minds of every nation should be working out a way to find some of these solutions, even though temporarily their attitude may have to be: "Gentlemen, if you move to war, we move too with all the power we have."

It may be somewhat impertinent for a mere, unimportant citizen, and a woman at that, to have the presumption to suggest that we are not moving forward toward the fundamental solutions at the present time. But, after all, if war comes, it is the individual citizen— man, woman and child—who carries the war through and pays for it, so we might as well begin to think about it before it is on our backs.

Let's do a little more than think. Let's ask our leaders not to weaken their stand against war, but to tell us what more could be done for permanent peace.

Though the Dayton Peace Accord ending the war in Bosnia was signed in 1995, the effects of the war did not disappear, especially among women.

During the war, rape and humiliation were used as weapons; including rape concentration camps. Though the end of the war brought some peace, the inequality and lack of self-sufficiency among women has yet to disappear.

Women for Women International is working to give women in Bosnia the confidence they deserve. Though their ideas are not always well respected in their communities, meeting with other women has given them sympathy and a support network. “I wanted to get together with other people and to hear how they managed to survive, what were their stories… this really helped me to calm my own nerves…” a woman in the Bosnia program said.

In addition, the training programs have helped them survive the harsh economic situation that was left behind when the war ended. With 60% of all houses destroyed and 50% of the schools gone, the country has a lot of rebuilding ahead. In the Women for Women International programs, more than $57 million in loans has been distributed in Bosnia, with a 99.5% repayment rate. One participant started her own chicken-breeding business, and said, “I sold everything! If I had more I could sell even those. Therefore I am going to buy more next time and earn even more money.”

The programs in Bosnia have given women job opportunities, leadership positions in their communities, and an increased say in their family life.

“I am beginning to understand the importance of women’s role in society. When I was young, I thought the only work I could do was in the home and being a mother. Those were the obligations of my own mother, I believe that was all she knew.” 

Inform yourself, read about the issues. If you want to know what happened to earlier civilizations that found themselves in environmental trouble, read Collapse by Jared Diamond or A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright or The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. My latest book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, can be downloaded free of charge from Earth Policy Institute’s (EPI’s) Web site, earthpolicy.org, along with complementary data sets and a slide show summary. If you find these materials useful in helping you think about what to do, share them with others.

Pick an issue that’s meaningful to you, such as tax restructuring, banning inefficient light bulbs, phasing out coal-fired power plants, or working for streets in your community that are pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly, or join a group that is working to stabilize world population. What could be more exciting and rewarding than getting personally involved in trying to save civilization?

You may want to proceed on your own, but you might also want to organize a group of like-minded individuals. You might begin by talking with others to help select an issue or issues to work on.

And communicate with your elected representatives on the city council or the national legislature. Aside from the particular issue that you choose to work on, there are two overriding policy challenges: restructuring taxes and reordering fiscal priorities. Write or e-mail your elected representative about the need to restructure taxes by reducing income taxes and raising environmental taxes. Remind him or her that leaving costs off the books may offer a false sense of prosperity in the short run but that it leads to collapse in the long run.

Let your political representatives know that a world spending more than $1 trillion a year for military purposes is simply out of sync with reality, not responding to the most serious threats to our future. Ask them if the Plan B budget—an additional $187 billion a year for eradicating poverty, stabilizing population, and restoring the earth—is an unreasonable expenditure to save civilization. Ask them if diverting one eighth of the global military budget to saving civilization is too costly. Remind them of how the United States mobilized during World War II.

And above all, don’t underestimate what you can do. Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

It doesn’t hurt to underpin your political efforts with lifestyle changes. But remember they supplement your political action; they are not a substitute for it. Urban planner Richard Register recounts meeting a bicycle activist friend wearing a t-shirt that said, “I just lost 3,500 pounds. Ask me how.” When queried he said he had sold his car. Replacing a 3,500-pound car with a 22-pound bicycle obviously reduces energy use dramatically, but it also reduces materials use by 99 percent, indirectly saving more energy.

Dietary changes can also make a difference. The climate footprint differences between a diet rich in red meat and a plant-based diet is roughly the same as the climate footprint difference between driving a large fuel-guzzling SUV and a highly efficient gas-electric hybrid. Those of us with diets heavy in fat-rich livestock products can do ourselves (and civilization) a favor by moving down the food chain.

Beyond these rather painless often healthily beneficial lifestyle changes, we can also think about sacrifice. During World War II the military draft asked millions of young men to risk the ultimate sacrifice. But we do not need to sacrifice lives as we battle to save civilization. We are called on only to be politically active and to make lifestyle changes. During the early part of World War II President Roosevelt frequently asked Americans to adjust their lifestyles. What contributions can we make today, in time, money, or reduced consumption, to help save civilization?

The choice is ours—yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over an economy that continues to destroy its natural support systems until it destroys itself, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that changes direction, moving the world onto a path of sustained progress. The choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.


For more inspiration about What You Can Do, see Earth Policy Institute’s Action Center. To connect with others interested in taking action, join EPI’s Facebook page.

Adapted from Chapter 10, “Can We Mobilize Fast Enough?” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at earthpolicy.org.

The following is from the Raise Hope for Congo webpage:

RAISE Hope for Congo seeks to fundamentally change the equation for Congo by using Enough’s robust field research, advocacy, and communications to bolster a broad grassroots movement that promotes lasting solutions. Our initiatives work to educate and empower individuals to be a part of those solutions to the conflict.  

Conflict Minerals

The conflict in eastern Congo is being fueled by a multi-million dollar trade in minerals essential to our electronic products. Over five million people have died as a result, and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped over the past decade. The armed groups perpetuating the violence generate an estimated $183 million each year by trading in four main minerals, the 3Ts and gold. 

Learn more >>

Violence Against Women

Countless women and girls have been raped or faced other forms of violence since the onset of the conflict. The United Nations has called eastern Congo the most dangerous place on earth to be a woman or a girl. Efforts to protect women are failing spectacularly. Yet Congo’s women are the backbone of Congolese society and the country’s best hope for a brighter and more prosperous future. 

Learn more >>

Speakers' Tour

The campaign spearheads a nationwide speakers’ tour of college campuses to educate students about the conflict minerals trade in eastern Congo, the resulting epidemic of sexual violence against women and girls, and how they can be a part of the solution that will bring lasting peace to the war-torn country. Potential speakers include experts from The Enough Project as well as journalists, filmmakers, and activists.

Learn more >>

Make Your Campus Conflict-Free

Your school may be helping to underwrite the deadliest war in the world. The thousands of dollars that your school spends on products for its libraries and computer labs may be indirectly lining the pockets of Congo's worst human rights abusers. You and your campus have an important role to play in ending one of the world's biggest human rights catastrophes in modern history. 

Learn more >>

“If we are to meet the myriad challenges around the world in the coming decades,” argues Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, then our “country must strengthen other important elements of national power both institutionally and financially, and create the capability to integrate and apply all of the elements of national power to problems and challenges abroad.” Gates’s experience leading our armed forces under two presidents underscores the importance of not relying solely on our unquestioned military might to protect our shores and national security interests around the globe.

Instead, Gates maintains, we need to adopt the concept of sustainable security—a strategy that embraces the need to slim defense spending, bringing our own fiscal house in order while investing in nonmilitary economic and social development programs abroad to combat the conditions that breed poverty and political instability.

Our current international posture is increasingly unsustainable. The reasons? First, the United States is simply spending too much continuing to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while total defense spending over the past decade grew in an exponential and undisciplined fashion. Second, the relationship between our key foreign policy institutions (in defense, diplomacy, and economic and social development programs abroad) became wildly skewed in favor of defense at the expense of nonmilitary functions.

This muscle-bound yet clumsy combination of assets leaves America poorly positioned to deal with the threats and opportunities we face as a nation around the globe today and in the future. Restoring a sense of balance and sustainability to our international posture is absolutely essential. The upshot: We need to spend less money overall on defense weaponry while investing a portion of those savings in sustainable security initiatives that simultaneously protect our national security and promote human and collective security.

Shaping this more balanced approach will require sensible cuts in defense spending and concurrent but smaller strategic investments in sustainable security. This will be challenging amid a rising chorus of concern in Congress and from the general public about deficits and the national debt. This year’s deficit is expected to exceed $1.5 trillion, over 10 percent of our nation’s gross domestic product—the highest deficit level since World War II. Yet we pay surprisingly little attention to the staggering cost of our current defense posture. U.S. defense spending has more than doubled since 2002, and the nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars that the United States is now spending annually on defense is the highest in real terms since General Dwight D. Eisenhower left occupied Germany in the wake of World War II.

Military costs continue to constitute more than 50 percent of all federal discretionary spending. Greater and greater sacrifices will have to be made in domestic and international priorities if more isn’t done to strategically reduce defense spending. No one questions the need to fight terrorism and protect our country. That’s precisely why it is so important for us to develop an international posture that is sensible, sustainable, and effective in achieving its core goals.

Bringing defense spending under control will clearly enhance the overall health of our economy and thus our overarching influence around the globe. But doing so without investing some of those savings in social and economic development and diplomacy abroad would be unwise. Indeed, Secretary Gates consistently notes that we need to strengthen U.S. civilian foreign policy and development institutions if we want to more effectively promote lasting stability and defend our interests around the globe. And he continually points out in public speeches, interviews, and congressional testimony that these institutions currently lack the capabilities and funding to be effective policy partners in promoting our interests internationally.

The mismatch is clear in Iraq and Afghanistan today. There is a massive capabilities gap between the Department of Defense and its civilian counterparts, the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, requiring the military to assume multiple civilian functions. What’s more, that civilian expertise will be needed even more as the U.S. military completes its withdrawal from Iraq over the next year and a half and begins its expected drawdown of forces in Afghanistan in July 2011. The U.S. government’s civilian-led development and stabilization efforts in both countries will need to be strengthened and empowered.

There are multiple problems in having the U.S. military carry out the roles traditionally and better conducted by the State Department and USAID. First, our men and women in uniform lack the specific expertise in diplomacy and development needed to carry out these jobs effectively. USAID learned the business of development the hard way—through years of experimentation and periodic failure, and by building the skills of its personnel. In contrast, the U.S. military sees diplomacy and development aid primarily as useful tools for helping to reach their dominant goals of pacification and stabilization. Sometimes that works amid active fighting, but sustainable security over the long term needs to be fundamentally owned by local communities if it is to be successful—something development experts are trained to accomplish.

Second, the work of diplomacy and development is ultimately a distraction from the U.S. military’s core missions. Our troops must be free to pursue their primary functions. This is exactly why Secretary Gates and others are so eager to invest in greater capacity for civilian institutions carrying out development and diplomacy. Third, using the U.S. military to carry out development and diplomacy is often exorbitantly expensive, in many instances costing twice as much as using USAID and regular development partners. Finally, the heavy involvement of our military forces in development and diplomacy has often blurred the line between military and nonmilitary actors, causing civilians to increasingly be seen as targets for military foes.

Initiating this more balanced approach to our national security needs can and should begin this year. With the support of Secretary Gates, the National Security Council, the State Department, and key voices in Congress, the Obama administration is in a unique position to strengthen its civilian foreign policy institutions to restore a greater sense of balance among the agencies that play such a key role in advancing our interests around the globe.

The effort will come down to money. A look into the budgets of the Department of Defense and the civilian International Affairs agencies is telling. The DoD’s fiscal year 2011 budget request totals $708.2 billion. The international affairs budget request for the same period, reflecting the sum of activities of the State Department, USAID, and a number of other smaller entities, was $58.5 billion—8 percent of the total request from the Department of Defense.

This vast gap is emblematic of the imbalances in this arena in the proposed FY 2011 federal budget, yet there are some positive developments in the latest international affairs request to help reverse what Secretary Gates calls the “creeping militarization of some aspects of American foreign policy.” The 2010 Supplemental Appropriations Act recommends $650 million be used to transition Iraqi police training from the Department of Defense to the State Department. Further, DoD’s so-called 1207 funds, which support stabilization and reconstruction, will be replaced by the State Department’s Complex Crises Fund. This fund will “target countries or regions that demonstrate a high or escalating risk of conflict or instability, or an unanticipated opportunity for progress in a newly-emerging or fragile democracy.”

Finally, the Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capabilities Fund, designed to help the Pakistan government build its capacity to conduct counterinsurgency operations, will move from the Department of Defense to the State Department. The FY 2011 request of $1.2 billion for this fund exceeds the FY 2009 funding level by $500 million.

These are positive steps, but in many ways they remain at the margins. Together, funding for the State Department and USAID represents just 1.4 percent of the national budget and less than 7 percent of what the United States spends on issues that can broadly be considered “national security” (see table).

This paper identifies approximately $40 billion that could be cut from the Department of Defense budget without undercutting our national security. We propose that $30 billion be used toward deficit reduction. In December last year, the Center for American Progress proposed 10 cuts to current defense spending totaling $39.3 billion—the basis of our proposed $40 billion reduction in defense spending.

The remaining $10 billion could be best transferred to USAID, an agency that is essential to preventing and managing conflicts in the 21st century. Together, these two steps would help reduce overall military spending while bolstering civilian development work in vital ways. This $10 billion would be transferred over a period of three years, representing an average annual boost of roughly 18 percent to the USAID budget.

In addition, we argue for ongoing budget reforms currently underway within the U.S. government to develop a unified national security budget encompassing defense, diplomacy, and development. In previewing the Obama administration’s national security strategy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We cannot look at a defense budget, a State Department budget, and a USAID budget without defense overwhelming the combined efforts of the other two, and without us falling back into the old stovepipes that I think are no longer relevant for the challenges of today.”

In the pages that follow, we detail how this sustainable security approach would improve our national security and our federal budget process. We will first examine the current state of USAID and its programs. We will then recommend three ways to improve the agency’s capabilities so that a sustainable security strategy will:

• Create greater economic prosperity and trading opportunities in the developing world
• Help prevent conflicts and instability in troubled developing nations
• Improve the health and well-being of people around the globe

Make no mistake—these goals are as important to our national security as our armed forces. As we will demonstrate, reforms to our defense spending and development aid agencies and programs should be undertaken now so that sustainable security becomes the operating strategy in our international relations with the developing world.

The time is ripe for the United States to take a fundamentally different approach to the world, and it is a rare moment when the United States can spend less money on improving our national security and advance the safety and well-being of millions of individuals while promoting shared interests around the globe.

(Editor's note: This quote was written by Marianne Williamson in her NY Times bestselling book, "A Return to Love." It is often misattributed to Nelson Mandela.)

She called us and asked to schedule an evaluation. Within 30 minutes his mother understood her child’s problem and signed him up for HIP Training.

HIP is the Hoffmann Integration Process, a core learning skills program developed by Dr. Lee Hoffmann, a former Resource Specialist Teacher with the Cupertino School District in California. During her first three years as a teacher, frustrated with the lack of improvement traditional intervention programs offered her students; Hoffmann began to look outside academic fields for data that might help her students.

When a physical therapist visited her campus to talk to teachers about the latest developments in that field, Hoffmann suddenly remembered a few basics about brain anatomy that might apply to her students’ learning problems.

The first level of processing in the brain is sensory. All incoming information is first processed by the five senses before it is sent to higher centers for further processing. Hoffmann asked herself: Could deficiencies at the sensory level interfere with the higher processing of abstract information - letters and numbers - presented in every classroom?

Hoffmann quickly devised a simple experiment to test her theory. She gathered a diverse group of students – gifted, regular, and special ed – all performing below their level. She had already decided to limit her targeting of sensory modalities to the three systems used most often in the classroom: auditory, visual and motor. Hoffmann administered assessments to measure her select group of students in their ability to process basic auditory, visual and motor tasks. Results were astonishing.

Every student in the underperforming group had major sensory processing deficiencies. She then tested another group of students, those performing well at their level, with the same assessments. This group’s sensory scores revealed they had no underlying sensory processing disorders. Her theory was correct. Students with low academic performance also appeared to have major sensory processing deficiencies. It was now evident (to Hoffmann) that disorganized and deficient sensory systems in the brain interfered with academic performance.

Hoffmann set about designing an intervention curriculum to target the sensory deficiencies and disorganization in her students. She reasoned that the three sensory systems she wanted to target needed to be strengthened and integrated simultaneously. Several studies had already been done targeting one system at a time. Their data indicated such a method didn’t offer enough improvement to academic processing to warrant investment. For the next fifteen years, Hoffmann continued to explore and refine her methods until she finally achieved an intervention program that had all the elements necessary to help her students. The Hoffmann Integration Process, HIP, consists of over a hundred specific exercises and a kit of materials.

HIP Training targets the three primary sensory systems in the brain necessary for classroom academic achievement with a series of exercises designed to strengthen five core learning skills necessary for comprehension of abstract information: 1) pattern recognition, 2) memory, 3) attention, 4) processing and 5) sequencing.

During each 50 minute training session, which is divided into three segments, students complete specific sets of repetitive drills. Visual drills might include recreating geometric patterns, matching images with slightly different content, or using tangrams.

Auditory drills might include listening to and following a series of instructions that begin with one task and increase to two or three, which must be remembered in order and repeated in the same order, or recreating a pattern on a grid by hearing and remembering the directives. Motor skills involve 10 specific skills of balance and cross-lateral exercises like walking a balance beam, jumping rope and static balance on one foot with eyes closed.

Generally, students complete training in 36 hours, depending on the severity of sensory deficiencies and/or disorganization involved. Some students need less, some more. Assessments are completed every 12 hours of training to mark progress. The ratio of instructor to students is 1:6. Our experience with hundreds of students leads us to believe that once HIP training is completed it doesn’t need to be repeated. Much like learning to ride a bike, once all the sensory systems are organized and efficient, they operate automatically.

When Vincent first began HIP Training, he constantly held the instructor’s hand or wrapped his fist in her clothing. He often needed to sit on her lap. His lack of self-confidence and need for reassurance was demanding. His assessment indicated he had a very high level of auditory processing, but his visual and motor levels were quite low. Dr. Hoffmann theorizes that students with these kinds of disparities suffer from high disorganization.

The low skills interfere with the high skills, sending the whole system into overload. In Vincent’s case, his high auditory processing meant he was constantly bombarded with auditory signals coming from all the commotion in a normal classroom. He couldn’t tolerate the load. It interfered with his ability to concentrate and focus on what he could do well.

Vincent needed 48 hours of intervention because, even though he was gifted, his sensory deficiencies and disorganization were severe. His progress, however, was remarkable. I saw his mother at the local farmer’s market the other day. She updated me on her son’s progress. Vincent is now in the fourth grade, yet reads and comprehends at a post high school level. His classroom experience is now smooth and balanced, but often runs to boredom because of his high level of intelligence. He truly is a genius and now has the opportunity of actually performing at his own level. HIP transformed a struggling student into an independent learner.

Tony’s story is more like the average student. He was also a first grade student. Unlike Vincent, Tony couldn’t process any academic information. He couldn’t read, write or do math. He was also aware that most students in his classroom didn’t struggle the way he did. This frustrated him so much that within the first two weeks of classes he decided he hated school.

Luckily his principal had invited the HIP team to their campus and Tony was enrolled in a HIP class. He progressed quickly and by the end of the 36 hour intervention was processing at the same pace as his classmates and his attitude toward school was completely different. He couldn’t wait to get there in the morning, and was eager to participate in classroom activities.

We’ve learned over the years that most students who suffer from sensory processing deficiencies and/or disorganization seldom find an intervention that helps, so they spend their entire academic career struggling with the same problems. This is the main reason HIP can be used in the same way, and with the same materials, no matter what age the student is, from first grade to college age. It also indicates how important a well- organized and efficient sensory system is to academic performance. HIP training offers a quick, relatively easy intervention for stubborn problems that have defied solution. It can also be used for students with severe brain disorders.

Abby came to kindergarten wearing a helmet; she was hydrocephalic, a condition commonly referred to as “water on the brain.” Her balance was so bad she fell over simply walking or even sitting at her desk, which is why she wore the helmet. While in the first grade, Abby’s mother took her to The Diagnostic Center of the California Department of Education, where she underwent a rigorous three-day assessment.

Their recommendation to her mother was that Abby would never learn to read using phonics nor was she likely to be successful with math. Luckily, Abby’s teacher was Dr. Hoffmann’s daughter, Debra-Lou Hoffmann, who had been trained in the HIP intervention and was willing to try it with Abby. Abby’s mother figured she didn’t have anything to lose.

It took two years, but by the second grade, Abby could read, write and do math slightly below level. She could also jump rope, walk a balance beam and stand on one foot; this from a child who initially came to school in a helmet. The brain has amazing powers of healing and regeneration if we offer it a method and materials to help.

Whether a student is gifted or not, learning is achieved either through talent or skill. If a student doesn’t have the natural talent for learning, he or she must develop the skills. HIP Training is designed to improve the brain’s learning skills, its pattern recognition, memory, attention, processing and sequencing skills, which are the foundation of all learning and aid in the comprehension of abstract information. Through HIP Training, learning skills are now focused in a systematically designed program.

Sensory processing is an area of learning largely ignored by the educational as well as the scientific communities. We hope to change that. For more information go to LearningisHIP.org.  

We women have been having conversations since the birth of this nation. We know when it’s time for a conversation to begin. Expressing ourselves as women, expressing ourselves as people of success and power and influence, it reminds me of a convention held in Akron, Ohio in 1852, where Sojourner Truth, a former slave whom I consider one of my great mentors, gathered together suffragettes asking, pleading, and fighting for the right to vote. Sojourner Truth, a proud, six-foot-tall Amazon-like figure, walked up to the podium and said:

Well, children, where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter. I think that ’twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about? If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right-side up again!

Those are the words of Sojourner Truth, who believed that without media, without mass marketing, without any social programs, women joined together, had the possibility of turning the world right-side up.

Now, in 2009, there’s so much racket again. Today, it’s about women becoming half of all the American workers, about making more money than men, about what men think about this, and about what our families, our government, and our politicians, bosses, clergy, and aging parents are going to do. Men and women, families of all kinds, are negotiating about household responsibilities, child care, work, and sex. There’s a lot of noise going on in this country and in this report about what it means to live in a woman’s nation.

It seems to me it’s an important conversation to have. Are our political, government, faith, and media leaders out of touch with the realities of how most families live and work today, just like they were out of touch in the day of Soujourner Truth? Some might say our nation has now been turned right-side up, but no one seems to recognize this outside of the families living and working every day. There is something a-kilter.

We have earned the right to celebrate the kind of power that isn’t about landing the corner office, but about stoking an internal fire.

Where do we go from here? One thing is for sure: Women have a new kind of power in the workplace, in the marketplace, in the boardroom, and in the bedroom. Women have as many definitions of power as there are women to use it.

Forget the idea that being powerful is about how rich or important you are, or whether or not you get your own coffee in the morning. What I find powerful is a person with grace, with courage, with the confidence to be her own self and to make things happen. We have earned the right to celebrate the kind of power that isn’t about landing the corner office, but about stoking an internal fire.

For me, there is no real power without spiritual power. A power that comes from the core of who you are and reflects all that you were meant to be. A power that’s connected to the source of things. When you see this kind of power shining through someone in all its truth and certainty, it’s irresistible, inspiring, elevating. I can feel it in myself sometimes, mostly when I’m sharing an insight that I know will have an impact on someone’s life and I can see that they “get it.” I get real joy from helping other people experience those “aha” moments. That is where my power lies. 

“When we align our thoughts, emotions, and actions with the highest part of ourselves, we are filled with enthusiasm, purpose, and meaning,” writes Gary Zukav in his best-selling book The Seat of the Soul. “When the personality comes fully to serve the energy of its soul, that is authentic empowerment.”

Fulfilling your purpose with meaning is what gives you that electrifying “juice” and makes people stand in wonder at how you do it. The secret is alignment: when you know for sure that you’re on course and doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, fulfilling your soul’s intention, your heart’s desire, or whatever you choose to call it (they’re all the same thing). When your life is on course with its purpose, you are your most powerful. And you may stumble, but you will not fall.

I know for sure that in every challenging experience there’s an opportunity to grow, enhance your life, or learn something invaluable about yourself. Every challenge can make you stronger if you allow it. Strength multiplied equals power. 

We have the power as women, as families, as a nation to rise to the challenges of our time. To hear each other out. To talk it out. To let the conversation begin. Together, we ought to be able to “turn it back, and get it right-side up again!”

As an adult, you have probably experienced a respectable amount of personal success in your life: graduating from high school, college, or possibly achieving an advanced degree. Along the way, you have almost certainly had other achievements: in sports, the arts, technology, or other interests. You’ve obtained and held a job. You have formed and maintained positive trusting relationships with family, friends, and co-workers.

Maybe you’ve been recognized for your achievements with awards, scholarships, raises, or other forms of acknowledgement. Before considering what is involved in bringing out the best in young people, I ask you to reflect on the personal traits or qualities that have enabled you to experience the degree of success you have achieved so far in your own personal, academic, and professional life.

These personal traits probably include, among others: responsibility, respect, perseverance, honesty, integrity, patience, a strong work ethic, self-discipline, optimism, empathy, compassion, and cooperation. These characteristics are necessary to survive and thrive in a highly and increasingly complex, competitive world and to build and maintain an increasingly complex network of proximate, distant and cyber-relationships of family, friends, and colleagues in an increasingly diverse and constantly expanding society.

It is virtually impossible to exhibit all of these positive qualities consistently, but when you consider your own personal, academic, or professional achievements, it becomes clear that without exhibiting most or all of these characteristics at important life junctures, you would not have experienced the degree of success that you have. And without the positive relationships, achievements, and success your positive character traits have made possible, you probably would not experience the degree of happiness you enjoy in life.

Today’s students face an even more challenging world than we did. The recent world economic crisis suggests that the next generation may enjoy neither the economic resources nor the professional opportunities that their parents did. America is involved in two wars and there is growing instability throughout developing nations. Nuclear arms continue to proliferate.

Not only are there complex economic and political problems, there are distressing environmental, social, health, and human rights issues awaiting today’s students as they come of age. Therefore, it is more important than ever for young people to have the same personal qualities that enabled our success, character traits that will help them learn and achieve well in school, perform effectively in the workplace, communicate effectively, and develop and maintain positive trusting relationships in their lives.

My recently published book, Inspiring the Best in Students (ASCD 2010), is about promoting character development. This article, based on the first chapter of my book, will address fundamental questions about the prospect of integrating a character education initiative into what many perceive as an already overwhelming curriculum through: 1) analyzing the need and providing a compelling rationale for addressing character in schools and classrooms through teaching essential social and emotional skills; 2) defining, specifically, what is meant by social/emotional learning (SEL);  3) explaining  my approach to inspiring the best in students; 4) analyzing the research connecting character development to academic achievement as well as success in other important areas in students’ lives;  5) describing the characteristics of effective social/emotional and character programs; and finally, 6) discussing how character development does not have to be an add-on to the sometimes overwhelming responsibilities with which educators are already charged, but can be easily and effectively integrated into the curriculum.

Subsequent chapters focus on specific social and emotional information and skills that will support students’ character development and provide specific, engaging, research-based teaching strategies.

What is the need for character education or SEL?

 Society has changed tremendously in the last several decades, and seems to be changing at an ever increasing rate. “Among the changes are increased economic and social pressures on families; weakening of community institutions that nurture children’s social, emotional, and moral development; and easier access by children to media that encourage health-damaging behavior.” (Greenberg, Weissman, O’Brien, Zins Fredericks, Resnik, and Elias, 2003, p. 467).

Subsequently, disturbing statistics suggest that what we are currently doing in schools to help students successfully meet the challenges of contemporary society leaves many children and adolescents behind. 20 to 60 percent of urban, suburban, and rural high school students become chronically disengaged from school – not counting those who already dropped out (Klem & Connell, 2004).

In America’s ten largest cities, the high school graduation rates hover around 50 percent. In New York City, Baltimore, MD, and Detroit, graduation rates in 2006 were are a dismal 38.9%, 38.5%, and 21.7% respectively (Toppo, 2006). Furthermore, approximately 30% of high school students “participate in or experience multiple high-risk behaviors (e.g. substance use, sex, violence, depression, attempted suicide) that interfere with school performance and jeopardize their potential for life success” (Payton, Weissberg, Durlak, Dymnicki, Taylor, Schellinger, and Pachan, 2008. p. 3).

Finally, approximately 20% of young people experience mental health problems during the course of any given year; yet 75% to 80% do not receive appropriate interventions (U.S. Department of Human Services, 1999). Perhaps the most disturbing information “comes from a massive survey of parents and teachers and shows a worldwide trend for the present generation of children to be more troubled emotionally than the last: more lonely and depressed, more angry and unruly, more nervous and prone to worry, more impulsive and aggressive” (Goleman, 1995, p. xii). Clearly, I.Q. and academic skills alone are not the answer.

Unfortunately, for the last decade at least, the emphasis, some might argue the obsession, in education has been on a fairly narrow view of human development, raising academic standards and student (and teacher) accountability through frequent state and other standardized testing. I’m not arguing that we should lower academic standards, nor should we decrease accountability.

However, we, as a society, need to address the question: What is the purpose of public education?  Is it enough to focus on students’ academic and intellectual competence alone, and leave all other aspects of their development to chance?  The statistics above shout a resounding “No!”  If we are to help all children reach their full potential, become contributing, successful members of a democratic society, and improve the unsettling trends discussed above, we must address the development and education of the whole child.

What, then, are the components, or dimensions, that make up a whole human being?  First, there is the physical dimension, the dimension of the body: a person’s health, strength, motor skills, and athletic ability. Next is the intellectual dimension, the dimension of the mind: memory, learning, thinking skills, problem-solving, and creativity. The third dimension is the emotional dimension, the dimension of the heart:  emotional awareness and understanding, self-regulation, self-motivation, and self-esteem.

The fourth dimension is the social dimension, the dimension of relationships with others:  forming and maintaining positive interactions with family, friends, peers, co-workers, our community, and society at large. Finally, there is the spiritual dimension, the dimension of the soul: our relationship with something larger than ourselves, whether we call it God, Allah, Jehovah, your Higher Power, Nature, Humanity, or even your purpose or legacy.

Although there are many religious schools that do address spiritual concerns, public schools and non-religious private schools do not, nor in my opinion should they.  The development of the spiritual dimension is extremely personal and is the rightful domain of the child’s family and the child him or herself. One dimension that almost all schools do address is the physical. Children attend physical education classes and participate in intramural and interscholastic sports.

Many teachers use manipulatives and other kinesthetic learning activities to improve learning and develop fine motor skills, and some utilize programs such as Brain Gym®, which employs the mind-body connection to prepare students for learning. Furthermore, most schools offer health class and family & consumer science, which concern themselves with important health issues and practices, nutrition, food preparation, and health-related consumer information. .           

The human dimension with which schools are primarily concerned is that of the intellect. Increased pressure from federal and state education departments to raise academic standards and increase accountability emphasizes intellectual development, particularly in math and verbal areas, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Many schools in America have lengthened the school day or school year for all, shortened or eliminated recess in elementary schools, and, in secondary schools, and reduced the number of electives available.

In some schools time designated for art, music, and health has been reduced or dropped entirely from the curriculum. All this is done to cover the curriculum, meet the standards, and raise scores on state and other standardized tests. Schools are then evaluated through the media (Many states publish a school “report card.”) based on how well their students achieved on these tests. As Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence states, “our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits, some might call it character – that also matters immensely for our personal destiny” (p. 36).

It may sounds as if I oppose high standards or accountability. Not at all. We, as educators, fail our students if we don’t also address the other two important human dimensions: the social and emotional. And that by intentionally helping students develop those facets of themselves, we will simultaneously improve both their physical and intellectual development.

Fortunately, this myopic obsession with academics alone is changing. Jonathan Cohen, author of Educating Hearts and Minds, writes

In recent years, teachers and researchers have rediscovered what good teachers and parents have known for many years: that knowledge of ourselves and others as well as the capacity to use this knowledge to solve problems creatively provides an essential foundation for both academic learning and the capacity to become an active, constructive citizen . . . Promoting social and emotional learning (SEL) helps students to learn and develop, and it helps teachers to be even more effective educators (1999, p. 3).

The current emphasis on verbal and mathematical literacy can be traced directly to the “A Nation At Risk” (1983) a report that was issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which stated that "The educational foundations of our society [were] being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that [threatened] our very future as a Nation and a people" (p. 6). This strongly worded report, suggested that leaving education in state and local hands was not effective, led eventually to the Federal No Child Left Behind legislation of the George W. Bush administration.

One of the rallying cries of the 1980’s educational reformers was “Back to the basics,” which in practical terms meant “the three R’s.”   However, if we were truly to go back to the basics, way back to a classical education such as that prescribed by the ancient Greeks, we would not just focus on math and literacy, we would indeed teach the whole child. Aristotle stated that the purpose of education is the “complete realization of man.”

He argued that education should allow people to achieve “the supreme good to which all aspire,” which is happiness. He goes on to say, “The happy man, the good man, is a virtuous man, but virtue is acquired precisely through education. Ethics and education merge one into the other” (Hummel, 1999, p. 2). Clearly, Aristotle believed that character education should be an integral part of a complete education. Similarly, Socrates’ well-known statement, “an unexamined life is not worth living,” and the famous precept inscribed at the temple of Apollo at Delphi to “Know thyself” demonstrate that introspection, an aspect of emotional intelligence, was considered essential to happiness.

More recently, America’s founding fathers held a more holistic perspective of the purpose of education than we do today. In 1822, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Cornelius Camden Blatchly, “I look to the diffusion of light and education as the "resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the conditions, promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man." (Coates, 1995, p. 179). Among the objectives of a good education Jefferson includes in his 1818 Report for the University of Virginia are: “to improve . . . [the student’s] morals and moral faculties; to understand his duties to his neighbors and country . . . and in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed"  (Coates, 1995, p. 181). In this report, Jefferson clearly articulates the need for moral (character) development, increasing social responsibility and social intelligence in general.

Today, there is an increased call to promote the education of the whole child.  Stating that educating “the whole child cannot happen if emphasis is placed solely on academic achievement” (p. 11), ASCD's  Learning Compact Redefined: A Report of the Commission on the Whole Child (2007) recommends that school districts incorporate social and emotional learning (SEL) into their programs. Over the last dozen years or so, in my role as a consultant, I’ve often been invited to work in alternative schools with students who have been expelled from their home schools and in residential schools with young people who have been involved in one way or another with the judicial system.

I am frequently struck by how intellectually bright and creative these students are. There problems don’t stem from the inability to succeed academically. In almost every case, it is the social and emotional knowledge and skills that have been deficient, which often leads to academic failure and chronically disruptive or anti-social behavior. If we fail to address these needs, we are indirectly sentencing many of these students to a lifetime of personal and often legal problems and burdening society with all the emotional, social, and fiscal issues that accompany them.

There is another important consideration. Just as there is a developmental window of opportunity for more easily acquiring a second language, the time when the frontal cortex gradually matures (the elementary, middle, and high school years) is the optimal time to encourage emotional, social, and moral development. “By leaving the emotional lessons children learn to chance,” writes Goleman, “we risk largely wasting the window of opportunity presented by the slow maturation of the brain to help children cultivate a healthy [social and] emotional repertoire” (1995, p. 286).

Ideally, social and emotional skills are taught from early childhood through early adulthood, but as we now know, the brain isn’t completely developed until the early to mid-twenties (Jensen, 2006) and even fully mature adults are able to grow new neurons. Neither intellectual IQ nor social or emotional IQ is set at birth or in childhood. So while childhood and adolescence is the times to have the greatest impact on social and emotional learning, it is never too late and should not be simply left to chance.

Finally, a contemporary phenomenon that impacts our social and emotional lives is our collective obsession with and dependence on technology: videogames, MP3 players, the internet, email, cell phones and Blackberries, My Space, Facebook, and Twitter. All these electronic forms of entertainment, communication, and networking provide interesting social and emotional challenges. On one hand, we are better able than ever to “reach out and touch someone.” On the other, we are increasingly isolated. Look around any airport, most restaurants, malls, or other public places and you will see a significant number of people hunkered over their electronic gadgets, ignoring everyone and everything around them – even when they are with family or friends.

It’s comical at times to watch a group of teenagers hanging out with, but rarely directly interacting with, each other. They’re all too busy texting someone who isn’t there. With all this technology, we have fewer and fewer opportunities (and less inclination) to practice good manners and social skills. Also, as technology continues to improve and innovations allow us to entertain ourselves and socialize in different ways, accepted manners and social norms have not kept pace.

People in general, and students especially, often don’t know how to behave in the variety of contexts (or cyber-contexts) they find themselves. A solid understanding of social and emotional knowledge skills can help the next generation develop safe, appropriate, and respectful social practices regarding the use of new technology.

What is social and emotional learning (SEL)?

Jonathan Cohen, the director of the Center for Social and Emotional Education (CSEE) explains that social/emotional learning (SEL) as the development of “the skills and attitudes necessary to acquire social and emotional competencies” (1999). Daniel, Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, defines emotional competency as having the knowledge and skills that channel “behaviors toward a positive end . . . Whether it be in controlling impulse and putting off gratification, regulating our moods [and emotions] so they facilitate rather than impede thinking, motivating ourselves to persist and try, try again in the face of setbacks, or finding ways to . . . perform more effectively” (1995).

Yet, emotional intelligence cannot be isolated from social intelligence: almost all emotions have a social component: “You can’t separate the cause of an emotion from the world of relationships – our social interactions are what drive our emotions” (Goleman, 2006, p. 83). Social competency, then, involves our ability to navigate the world of human relationships, while emotional competence enables us to cope with the myriad emotions that relationships involve. And do so with positive results.

CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning(Payton, Weissberg, Durlak, Dymnicki, Taylor, Schellinger, & Pachan, 2008, p.4) defines social and emotional learning as “the process through which children and adults acquire the knowledge, attitudes and skills to:

• Recognize and manage their emotions
• Set and achieve positive goals
• Demonstrate caring and concern for others
• Make responsible decisions
• Hander interpersonal situations effectively

Simply stated, emotional learning is gaining the knowledge, the desire, and ability to use intrapersonal skills, while social learning is gaining the knowledge, the desire, and the ability to use interpersonal skills. In terms of character development, it is social and emotional learning that enables and inspires character traits such as respect for self and others; personal and social responsibility; optimism; a strong work ethic; perseverance; compassion, cooperation, and honesty.

What does research say about SEL?

It simply makes sense that if more students were being academically and socially responsible, treating other students and teachers respectfully; restraining impulses; listening actively; motivating themselves; controlling stress, anger and other emotions; setting and working toward positive goals, and persisting, there would be fewer disruptions, more learning would take place, schools would be happier places for everyone, and test scores would improve! 

But common sense is not enough, nor should it be, to convince educators to initiate new practices, policies, or programs. More than ever before, educators are a research-driven. Fortunately, the latest research involving SEL (and character development in general) is compelling, positively impacting everything from students’ individual health and wellness to significant increases in standardized test scores.

Lickona and Davison’s Smart and Good High Schools (2005) reports on their studies of the impact of character education in general on schools. They found:

At every developmental level – elementary, middle, and high school – students who experienced quality character education programs out-performed comparison groups not only on measures of social behavior but also on measures of academic learning. There’s an emerging body of hard evidence that we’ll get an academic payoff when we invest in developing character as the foundation for excellence” (p. 211).

Indeed, since Lickona and Davison’s report, a hard body of evidence has continued to emerge. Most recently, a long-awaited report, the biggest study of its kind ever done, demonstrates the significant positive impact SEL can have on students and schools. Entitled The Positive Impact of Social and Emotional Learning for Kindergarten to Eighth-Grade Students: Findings from Three Scientific Review,( Payton, Weissberg, Durlak, Dymnicki, Taylor, Schellinger, & Pachan, 2008) the “report summarizes results from three large-scale reviews of the impact of social and emotional learning programs on elementary and middle-school students” (p. 3), The three reviews included 317 studies and involved 324,303 children. Students in effective SEL programs demonstrated improvement in multiple areas of their personal, social and academic lives, including improved:

• Social-emotional skills
• Attitudes toward self, school, and others
• Social behaviors
• Conduct problems
• Emotional distress (anger, anxiety, and depression)

Notably, SEL programming “yielded an average gain on achievement test scores of 11 to 17 percentile points” (p. 6). Also, significantly, SEL programs and interventions were beneficial grades K – 8; for schools in rural, suburban, and urban settings; and with racially and ethnically diverse student populations. The authors of the report compared the findings in their review with findings obtained in reviews of evidence-based interventions conducted by other researchers and concluded that “SEL programs are among the most successful interventions ever offered to school-aged youth” (p. 6).

While CASEL’s report focuses on K-8 SEL programs, there is a growing body of research that supports the Good and Smart High Schools report suggesting that high school is not too late to introduce character education of this kind. My own personal experience bears this out.

One of my first experiences teaching character through SEL involved working with an alternative high school near Elmira, NY.  Linda Hillman, the principal at the time, was interested in her students learning Choice Theory and the social and emotional skills that went along with it.

The year before this initiative, 1999, the 120 students in the school had racked up a whopping 3278 behavior referrals by March 1^st. That’s an average of almost 27 referrals per student, a figure which is shocking even at an alternative high school, especially when you realize that students only received referrals for serious infractions: defiance, violence and threats of violence, harassment, etc. Over the course of the 1999 – 2000 school year, I worked with the entire student body in groups of 10 – 15 for three full days (with two or three teachers and paraprofessionals participating as well). By March 1^st of 2000, the referral rate had decreased 78 % to 721. With continued work with new students, and with teachers reviewing and supporting the previous learning, the rate decreased another 13% the next year. Unfortunately, the next year there were big state budget cuts and that alterative program was terminated, but in those two years we had made a significant impact on the school culture and climate.

I have found students of all ages eager to learn these ideas and that developmentally -- at a time when adolescents and young adults are trying to understand and develop their own identities -- high school might be a wonderful window of opportunity for teaching SEL. In an ideal world, children would begin SEL as early as they can talk, but if you work with middle or high school students who have NOT had the benefit of SEL, that is no reason to give up on teaching it. Adolescents have a whole lifetime ahead of them, and will benefit from any social-emotional skills you can teach them.

What are the characteristics of an effective SEL or character program?

The powerful findings discussed above were all based on effective character education or SEL programs. It is important to understand what research says about the common elements of programs that are deemed effective. In 2005, the CEP (Character Education Partnership) along with the John Templeton Foundation funded research to “derive practical conclusions about character education implementation from the existing literature” (p. 2) Authors Berkowicz and Bier “selected programs with well-designed research” (p.7), investigated what the research revealed about the effectiveness of the programs, and after considering 78 studies, “identified 33 programs with scientific evidence supporting their effectiveness in promoting character development in students.”

They then looked at the strategies these effective programs had in common. In their report, entitled “What Works in Character Education: A research-driven guide for educators,” the authors state that programs that have demonstrated a positive impact include:

• Professional development for teachers
• Peer interaction
• Direct teaching
• Skill training and practice
• An explicit agenda
• Family or community involvement
• Models and mentors
• Integration into the academic curriculum
• A multi-strategy approach

Similarly, the CASEL report, cited above, analyzed the common elements of successful SEL initiatives, and found that effective programs were:

• Sequenced – applying a planned set of activities to develop knowledge and skills in a step by step fashion.
• Active – using engaging forms of learning, including role play and behavioral rehearsal
• Focused – devoting sufficient time exclusively to developing social and emotional skills
• Explicit – targeting specific social and emotional information and skills.

In addition to these criteria for effective character and SEL programs, research supports the use of an intrinsic-oriented approach to teaching in general, whether it is character development, SEL, or academic subjects. Many character education models use an extrinsic-oriented approach primarily, employing “Caught you being good” tickets and various forms of rewards for demonstrating positive social or emotional (or character) behavior. While recognition and positive, specific teacher feedback are important to student motivation (Marzano, 2001), the use of tangible rewards tends to backfire.

Motivation scholars and researchers Deci & Ryan conclude that “intrinsic motivation tends to be undermined when factors conduce toward an externally perceived locus of causality” (2002, p. 10). Their extensive studies demonstrate that “tangible rewards, whether concrete, such as money or symbolic, such as good [behavior] tickets– decreased motivation,” (2002, pp. 10 – 11), particularly when they were expected and obtaining the rewards was directly tied to engaging in a certain kind of behavior. Simply put, if our message is “If you do this, then you get that, “we are inadvertently decreasing students’ motivation to “do this” in the future.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon many times in my work in schools, but most memorably through my son, Nate’s educational experience. When he was in middle school, the principal introduced a rewards-based character education program. If students were “caught being good,” demonstrating respect or responsibility, their teachers were directed to issue the students a “bulldog bone” (The school mascot was a bulldog.)   Students were to put their names on the bone-shaped piece of paper and put it in a barrel located in the school lobby. Every two weeks, the student body was ushered into the auditorium and five or six names were pulled out of the barrel.

The students whose names were drawn selected gifts (generally gift certificates to fast food restaurants and video stores) out of a grab bag. There were a few problems associated with this approach. First, students in the audience (self-perceived raffle losers) were less than kind to the students onstage, cat-calling “Dweebs,” “Losers” and other epithets to the “winners,” totally humiliating them as only middle school students can do until the teachers and principal shouted them down. Subsequently, students shunned the dreaded “bones,” sometimes intentionally behaving badly when teachers were looking to avoid receiving one. Soon thereafter, that character education “program” was abandoned because no one was putting their bulldog bones in the barrel, the same students kept winning, and student behavior, instead of improving, deteriorated.

Instead of expending energy on reward systems (behavior charts, tickets, punch cards, candy, pizza parties, etc.) that don’t work and often distract teachers and students alike from the ultimate goal, it would be far more productive to direct that time and energy toward: 1) building a positive trusting relationship with students; 2) helping students understand the benefits for them of engaging in a particular activity or program; and 3) using pedagogy that is active, engaging, and perceived by students as needs-satisfying. If you focus on those three things, students will be intrinsically motivated and will eliminate the need for bribes and manipulation.

If we combine the findings of the CEP study with that of CASEL and include the Deci and Ryan’s findings on motivation, the following characteristics would define an effective character or SEL program:

1) Professional development: There would be sufficient training for teachers to implement the program.

2) Sequenced:  There would be a clearly identified step-by-step approach to knowledge and skills being taught.

3) Explicit : There would be clearly communicated knowledge and skills being taught and assessed.

4) Direct Instruction:  The program would include direct delivery of the curriculum.

5) Active: Direct instruction would be balanced by a multi-strategy approach of engaging integration activities such as peer interaction, behavioral  rehearsal, and role play.

6) Curriculum Integration: The program would be integrated into the academic curriculum.

7) Focused:  There would be sufficient time devoted exclusively to social and emotional (character) skills.

8) Models and Mentors:  The program would provide opportunities for students to observe and work with positive role models and adult or peer mentors.

9) Parent/Community Involvement:  The initiative would create parents and community members and organizations in a coordinated approach to character development.

10) Intrinsic Motivation:  The program would appeal to students’ intrinsic motivation to learn and grow, instead of relying on the traditional carrot-and-stick approach.

Relationships! Relationships! Relationships!

Everyone knows the first three rules of real estate: Location! Location! Location!  Less well-known, yet far more important, are the first three rules of education: Relationships! Relationships!  Relationships! Unfortunately, in the days of NCLB, “Test scores, not relationships, matter most to administrators and, hence, to teachers themselves. Yet, forming ongoing, caring, and responsive relationships with students makes a profound difference . . . Think about what you most fondly remember in your own life as a student. For most of us, it was a teacher whom we felt cared about us and helped us in some way, sometimes academically, more often socially and emotionally (Cohen, 1999, p. 17). In my own experience, the most positive school experiences involved teachers I liked and respected and who I felt cared about me.

A few of them were English teachers, which is probably one of the reasons I was attracted to that discipline,  but there were also science, social studies, geometry, health, instrumental music, and some elementary teachers. These are also, not coincidentally, the classes in which I worked hardest and learned the most. As Cohen states, “Virtually all learning happens within the context of human relationships. . . [T]he contacts we have with individual students affect how they feel about . . . what they are learning” (Cohen, 1999, p. 17).

As I tell teachers in my professional development workshops, if students like and respect you, and feel cared about and respected, they will learn anything you have to teach. And unless they are absolutely inspired by the content alone, if students don’t feel liked or respected and don’t like and respect you, they will not learn from you. Deci and Ryan’s research supports this view, stating, “children who [feel] securely connected to, and cared for by . . . teachers [are] the ones who more fully internalize . . . positive school-related behaviors” (2002, p.19).

Most importantly, often simply having a good relationship with a teacher or other adult at school, can have a profound positive impact on students social, emotional and even physical well-being: “A . . . groundbreaking study (Klein, 1997) of over 12,000 adolescents found that  parent-family connectedness and connectedness to school were protective factors against emotional distress; suicidal thoughts and behavior; violence; use of cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana; and early sexual experimentation“ (Cohen, 1999, p. 18).

Therefore, the best approach is based on a foundation of positive, trusting student-teacher relationships. And since power in the classroom resides primarily with the teacher, it is his or her responsibility to initiate relationship-building. The teacher’s initiative to get to know students at the beginning of the year and helping kids get to know them are essential to teaching in general, but particularly to teaching social/emotional content. It is well worth the time and effort it takes: slowing down and building trust speeds up and deepens the learning in the long run.           

Just how does the teacher go about building these kinds of relationships with students? As Glasser says, “It takes a lot of effort to get along well with each other . . . [but] the best way to begin to do so is to have some fun . . . together. Laughter {and fun] are the foundation of all successful long-term relationships” (1998, p. 41). After establishing some clear basic classroom expectations regarding rules, procedures, etc., it is important to explain the importance of developing trust in the classroom. (The teacher might tell them that all new learning involves taking risks and without trust, risk-taking is not going to happen.) 

Then they might play some teambuilding games and hold some class discussions on topics that interest students. If you are a teacher or work directly with kids, tell them about yourself: your family, your interests, interesting places you’ve visited, jobs outside of education you’ve held. (I gave my students a “First Day Test” – all questions about me: What’s my favorite kind of music?  Where was I born?  What is my favorite meal? Etc.)  Have students complete an interest inventory. Try to find a connection with each student. Greet them at the door each morning, attend their extracurricular activities, or sit with them at lunch. There are hundreds of ways of showing students that you like them and care about them.

WIIFM

Besides relationship building, a second important aspect of Inspiring the Best’s approach is the emphasis on appealing to intrinsic motivation. Whatever they are being asked to learn, students need to know, “What’s in it for me?” (or WIIFM). I’m not referring to stickers, candy, pizza parties, or other rewards. Students need to understand how engaging in SEL or character development is going to add quality to their lives, both long-term and short-term. Holding class meetings on the benefits of demonstrating positive character in general and then on specific SEL skills, such as impulse control, delaying gratification, cooperation, etc., will help them recognize why they are being asked to engage in character development, even if it isn’t on “the test.” 

Secondly, since most students live in the present, they need to experience SEL teaching strategies that are engaging, or needs-satisfying. So as a student, even if I don’t see an immediate need in my life for, say, empathic listening, if I learn the skill through an active, novel, and enjoyable learning strategy, that alone will most likely be enough to internalize my motivation to participate and learn.

Internal Control Psychology 

Finally, internal control psychology, specifically Glasser’s Choice Theory (CT) and how it relates to emotional/social knowledge and skills, is the foundation of my SEL approach. Each phase of Inspiring the Best in Students is devoted to one component of CT, including information that can be directly taught followed by activities designed to help students integrate and internalize the learning.

The knowledge and skills build from one chapter to the next, incorporating and expanding on those previously learned. While CT is the principal theory investigated, I don’t believe any one theory or model has all the answers, so throughout the book, I have included (and cited) ideas and strategies from a variety of other sources consistent with, but which expand and support, Choice Theory. Through the information and skills presented in these chapters, students will gain:

• An understanding of their locus of control
• An understanding of themselves and others’ motivation
• An appreciation for their common humanity as well as for individual differences
• An understanding of how our perceptions form and an appreciation for the role of perceptions in their lives.

• An ability to recognize and identify their own and others’ emotions
• An ability to regulate their emotions
• An ability to control impulses and delay gratification
• An ability to create a personal vision, set goals, and plan effectively
• Stress and anger reduction strategies
• An ability to self-evaluate their behavior
• The ability to take others’ perspectives
• The ability to experience empathy
• Social skills for a variety of social contexts
• Skills for building and maintaining relationships

Just as mastering musical rudiments (scales, arpeggios, rhythmic patters) is necessary for musical development, mastering addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division is necessary for mathematical development, mastery, or at least competence, in the social/emotional skills above is necessary for character development. Learning and applying these skills encourage and enable, among other important character traits: personal and social responsibility, respect, perseverance, self-control, compassion, and a strong work ethic.

Curriculum Integration:

Having spent many years in the classroom myself and working directly with teachers ever since, I know that teachers simply do not have room for anything more on their professional plates. That is why character education or SEL should not be seen as an add-on, but instead can be integrated into the core curriculum. Language arts and social studies provide the most seamless integration, but there are many ways of integrating SEL into science, art, music, drama, heath, and even mathematics as well.

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 Concluding Remarks

Before you stop reading, I’d like you to consider some of the tragedies we have experienced as a human community in the last fifty years: the recent oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; school shootings from Columbine High School to Virginia Tech., the violence in Tiananmen Square; genocide in Uganda; ethnic cleansing in Serbia; mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana; the untimely death of dozens of promising young musicians and actors, from Elvis, to Michael Jackson, to Jimi Hendrix, to Kurt Cobain, to John Belushi to Heath Ledger.

All of these sad events are due to serious character flaws or a lack of social-emotional skills or both. These are the infamous examples. We all know stories of personal tragedies, and there are millions of others that we either don’t hear about or can’t keep track of because of their sheer numbers.

Social emotional skills and character are essential for our students in their pursuit of happy successful lives and satisfying relationships both in school and later in life. If more people are achieving these goals, the community, society, and the world are all the better for it. SEL and character development, then, are not just important; they are of utmost importance. If having this knowledge and these skills can have such a profound impact, they must be taught intentionally.

The way is long – let us go together.

The way is difficult – let us help each other.

The way is joyful – let us share it.

The way is ours alone – let us go in love.

The way grows before us – let us begin.

- Zen Invocation

References

Berkowitz, M.W., & Bier, M.C. (2005).  What works in character education: A research-

            driven guide for educators.  Washington DC: Character Education Partnership.

Cohen, J. (1999). “Social and emotional learning past and present: a psychoeducational

            dialogue. Educating Minds and Hearts: Social emotional learning and the

            passage into adolescence. New York. Teachers College Press.

Deci, E. & Ryan, R. (2002) The handbook for self-determination theory research. 

            Rochester, NY. University of Rochester Press.

Erwin, J. (2010) Inspiring the best in students. Alexandria, VA. ASCD.

Glasser, W. (1992) The quality school: Managing students without coercion. New York:            

            HarperPerennial.

------------. (1998) Choice Theory: A new psychology of personal freedom. New York:

            HarperCollins Publishers.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: why it can matter more than IQ. New York.

            Bantam Books.

------------. (2007). Social intelligence: the revolutionary new science of human

            relationships. New York. Bantam Books.

Greenberg, M..; Weissberg, R. & Utne OBrien, M.; Zins, J.; Fredericks, L.& Resnik, H.; and Elias, Maurice J. (2003). “Enhancing school-based prevention and youth

development through coordinated social, emotional, and academic earning.” American Psychologist, June/July, 2003.

Lickona T., & Davidson M. (2005). Smart & good high schools: Integrating excellence

and ethics for success in school, work, and beyond. Cortland, NY, and Washington, DC: Center for the 4th and 5th Rs and Character Education Partnership.

Marzano, R., Pickering, D., & Pollock, J. (2001). Classroom instruction that works.

Alexandria, VA. ASCD.

Klem, A. M. & Connell, J.P. (2004) Relationships matter: Linking teacher support

to student engagement and achievement. Journal of school health, 74 (7),

262-273.

Toppo, G. (2006, June 20). Big-city schools struggle with graduation rates. USA Today.

Retrieved June 24, 2009 from www.usatoday.com/news.education/2006-06-20-dropout-

Scent is the ultimate time traveling magic carpet.  Which of our other senses can transport us in a heart beat to a time 20 years ago, or a place, thousands of miles away?  I can still literally remember my first kiss whenever I smell Pert Shampoo; it was the smell of the boy’s hair when he kissed me in Golden Gate Park, oh so many years ago.

Scent is also the most primal of our five senses.   From the beginning of time, we have used this sense to gather information about our environment.   Not surprising, this sense is no longer as strong as it used to be before we became so ‘civilized,’ but it still serves us regularly in a thousand different ways.  Though it is believed that we can discriminate between some 4,000 and 10,000 different odor molecules, there are still many unknowns about precisely how the process works.   Like the sense of taste, when we smell something, we are actually taking in airborne molecules which travel through a complex set of receptors and cells that comprise the olfactory system.  This path leads to the ancient portion of the brain that is concerned with emotion, pleasure, and memory. 

The use of plants to heal the body, the mind, and the spirit has been around for thousands of years.   Ancient civilizations used aromatherapy to enhance their physical, psychological and spiritual well being.   And scent has been attributed to influencing everything from warning us about our environment, to providing clues as to why we are attracted to our partners, to improving our creativity and focus.  Thus we can begin to see the subtle, yet powerful opportunities that exist when we begin to consider weaving scent into the tapestry of our gardens.

So as you contemplate your garden, ask yourself:  Do you want to create a meditation garden, filled with calm relaxing scents?  Do you want to be transported to the tropics, with their mysterious sultry aromas?  Or perhaps you want to be invigorated and stimulated by the scent of pungent herbs.   The possibilities are as limitless as your imagination. 

One last thing to consider is the way plants exude their odor.  There are two basic categories:  the first is a scent that is released from a blossom.  Nature deliberately uses this method to attract pollinators to the flowers.  And like the graceful butterfly, or the busy bee, we are attracted as well.  The second method is the plant that exudes its odor thru its foliage.   Think of the pungent odor that is left on your fingers after you rub rosemary or the fragrance that wafts in the air as you walk along a path of scented geraniums.  In choosing the plant, the way it releases its scent will influence their placement in your garden.

To get you started, I’ve provided you with a list of some of the many delicious possibilities.

Exotic Tropics:  Usually sweet, slightly musky, and delightfully mysterious, scent comes primarily from blossoms – a sensual invitation to indulge.   Night Blooming Jasmine (Cestrum nocturnum), Angel’s Trumpet (Brugmansia), Citrus, Honeysuckle (Lonicera), Heirloom Roses.

Herbal – fresh, invigorating, lifting the spirit, a splash of sunshine that makes you smile.  The scent primarily released thru the foliage.  Any of the herbs: rosemary, thyme, oregano, lavender, lemon verbena, or the scented geraniums (Pelargonium).

Windswept Bluffs – tangy, pungent, filling the lungs with a taste of freedom and the search for adventure.  Oddly enough, many of these plants are found in our local Southern California mountains:  Wormwood (Artemisia), Sages (Salvias), California Lilac (Ceanothus), Copper Canyon Daisy (Tagetes lemmonii).

And like nature herself, there are no rules, only considerations.  That is what is glorious about a garden.  It is a place to play, to explore, to experiment.  Your scented garden does not have to be limited to one category.  Mix them up, place them in different parts of the garden:  Herbs as you walk along a path, night blooming jasmine outside your bedroom window, salvias at the entry gate.   Then bring the scents inside with cuttings: sprigs of honeysuckle on your dresser, fresh basil on your tomatoes, or a rose on the pillow of your love.  This is nature’s abundant gift to us – relish it, rub your skin and soul in it, and then breathe deep and enjoy.

According to the website of the House Committee on Education and Labor, the proposed bill aims to improve child nutrition standards while increasing school lunch reimbursement rates by only 6 cents per meal. As has been mentioned by Two Angry Moms, Chef Ann Cooper and many other child nutrition experts, this amount is not enough to buy a single apple per student each day nor is it the 10 billion dollar increase called for by President Obama earlier this year, nor does it come close to doubling the existing budget as called for by Two Angry moms and other advocacy groups. 

It has also been pointed out by Two Angry Moms and others that this increase of 6 cents per meal per child is actually a step backwards in funding levels when accounting for inflation since the last significant increase in funding was put in place some 30 years ago.  Comments on funding levels and other aspects of the proposed Improving Nutrition for America's Children Act can be mailed or phoned at:

The House Committee on Education and Labor

2181 Rayburn House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515

202-225-3725

Two important child nutrition advocacy initiatives that we ask our members to support are currently in progress.  The first of these would improve the current proposed legislation.  The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is calling on citizens to support inclusion of The Healthy School Meals Act, H.R. 4870 into The Improving Nutrition for America's Children Act.

The Healthy School Meals Act would bring forward the introduction of more plant-based meal options in accordance with recommendations made by the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association.  According to the PCRM: "The bill, in its current form, does little to encourage the substitution of high fat content foods (such as meat and cheese) with low-fat fruit and vegetables. Such substitutions are crucial in fighting childhood obesity." To support this important dietary and health initiative please see the statement on the PCRM website and take the action recommended by calling your member of Congress as described on the website.

Another very important opportunity to effect positive change in the child nutrition legislative process is through ensuring that changes to the Farm Bill that support child nutrition are made in 2012.  Until July 28, 2010 the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture is accepting public suggestions as to how to improve the Farm Bill.  If Congress were to change even a small amount of the World War II era subsidy funding which is currently given to large commodity crops such as corn, wheat and soy and instead put that funding into smaller scale, organic and local agricultural endeavors, the positive effect on child nutrition would be enormous.

While these subsidies of so called "staple" crops may have made sense at the time they were first suggested in the early 20th century, the Farm Bill subsidy program as it is currently carried out actually contribute to declining child health due to its support for agribusiness such as the corn syrup producers and industrial meat and dairy production.

Increased federal support for local, organic diversified agricultural would go a long way to ensuring that the local school districts have the ability to purchase and use healthier, organic fresh fruits and vegetables and meats in school nutrition programs.  To make suggestions regarding the reallocation of the subsidy programs in the 2012 Farm Bill please fill out this form by July 28, 2010.  Additionally food nutrition advocate Jill Richardson reported Saturday on many of the above issues on her blog.

Two Angry Moms thanks it members and supporters for following up on the above action items.  Together we can make important changes to the federal child nutrition program assuring the increased health and well being of our children.
 
Amy Kalafa
Two Angry Moms
 
John Lippmann
Advocacy and New Media Coordinator
Two Angry Moms

angrymoms.org
angrymoms.groupsite.com

Commercials released each year around Father’s Day often show eager children rushing into their parents’ room early in the morning with homemade gifts for dad’s special day. Like many things on TV, these notions often do not to meet reality as an increasing number of children wake up in homes in which their fathers do not live. Instead of rushing into their parents’ room, they will give dad a call, send him a card, or get picked up for a scheduled visit. Some kids may have no contact with their fathers at all.

These realities of the modern family exist in every region of the country, every socioeconomic class, and each racial grouping. Relationships between fathers and their children have shifted over the last couple of decades as more dads than ever now live apart from their kids. On average, 1 in 3 children do not live in a traditional nuclear family—generally defined as two married parents plus children living under one roof. Among low-income children that figure is 2 in 3.

Some conservative policymakers during the George W. Bush administration tried to address the large numbers of low-income children living without two parents at home through legislation focused on encouraging healthy marriages and responsible fatherhood as a solution to poverty. These policymakers believed that because low-income women are less likely to be married to the fathers of their children, if they could only get women to marry these men, their families would be a lot better off financially.

And maybe, they thought, we should pay a little attention to making sure those fathers become more responsible, too. This approach is inherently faulty. It fails to recognize that there are factors associated with being poor in America that make it difficult for some parents to make their relationships work, or for some fathers to have the best possible relationships with their children.

Now it’s Obama’s turn. As the Bush programs expire, the Obama administration has proposed a Fatherhood, Marriage, and Families Innovation Fund that could provide an opportunity to better serve families. Effectively addressing the needs of fathers and fostering healthy connections with their children brings multiple benefits that include: greater financial support for children’s needs, help for mothers with childrearing, and, according to some researchers, positive impacts on academic achievement and behavior.

This next generation of fatherhood and family programming should deviate from the Bush era approach by being more cognizant of the pressures poverty places on individuals, parent-child relationships, and intimate partner relationships. This would involve a more comprehensive approach to fatherhood that imbeds relationship supports, such as parenting skills, relationship and family counseling, or classes within these services that more effectively address the underlying issues putting stress on families. This includes issues related to employment, housing affordability, incarceration and lack of legal assistance or dispute resolution services for family law matters.

For some families, these new supports may lead to the Father’s Day where kids are rushing into mom and dad’s room in the morning. For others, it will mean maintaining healthy connections with a dad who lives outside the home and is financially able to help support his children. Both are good, and both are based on the realities and the needs of the families involved.

Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream
words and music by Ed McCurdy

Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war

I dreamed I saw a mighty room
Filled with women and men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again

And when the paper was all signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads
And grateful pray'rs were prayed

And the people in the streets below
Were dancing 'round and 'round
While swords and guns and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground

Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war.

More remarkable than this large intact forest in an area, where farming has stripped surrounding hillsides, are the people who have dedicated themselves to protecting this environment. The twenty-eight communities that steward these forests are Quiche Maya, descendants of royalty who settled in this valley centuries ago. A healthy forest signifies clean water for them, and they continue a long-held tradition of protecting and tending to their trees.

Each year these communities appoint a select few as 'forest guards' to protect and steward their precious surroundings. It's a full-time, unpaid job, and a daily sacrifice spent patrolling, planting, tending to springs, and countless other tasks needed to maintain the forest. Yet, the charge is a compelling duty to their community, and while they safe-guard local water sources, their neighbors share the responsibility of providing food for their families. With the added support of a Greengrants grantee, these guardians and their communities have united their commitment to protect local forests and waters into a remarkable and sustainable tradition.

The organization Ulew Che' Ja' is made up of water council representatives from of each of the surrounding twenty-eight communities. For more than fifteen years, Ulew Che' Ja' has been building awareness and capacity for co-management of the forests in the watershed. Greengrants has supported them with a several small grants over the last four years, which have enabled the organization to conduct impressive reforestation efforts, educate communities and children about the connection between forests and water, and protect the endangered Guatemalan Fir.

As we walk through a dense field of 15-year-old trees, I'm told that visiting foresters have criticized the close placement of the trees, a practice that makes for lousy timber. But that's never been the point for these communities. Ulew Che' Ja' has mobilized thousands of people, of all ages, to reforest this land, and to keep it that way. They've also mapped out over 1,200 water sources in the forest and painstakingly built small cement boxes around each of them - all numbered and locked - in order to protect the pristine waters. Downstream, this water is carried through pipes to communities as far as 13km away using an impressive distribution system built entirely by local communities and without the help of government or private utilities.

As we talk about the water, a woman and her children lead a small flock of sheep up through the clearing. The sheep have screen muzzles over their mouths, a safeguard that the community requires when sheep are led through the forest to their pastures in order to prevent them from eating tree seedlings. The communities also have their own systems of justice to penalize members who cut down trees: offenders and their families are denied access to water for a period of time, erasing any doubt about the direct consequences of forest loss. More than 30,000 people rely on the water from these forests. In one way or another, just about every one of them is involved in their protection.

This region is testament to the power of traditional, community-based forest management, and the value in placing the future of forests in the hands of those who have the most commitment to their conservation. And there are many more examples like this one, all around the world. I hope this glimpse has given you the hope that it inspired in me.

• Only about one third of the students who enter ninth grade each fall graduate four years later prepared for college or the contemporary workplace.

• Another third will leave high school with a diploma but without the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in college or the contemporary workplace.

• Another third will not graduate from high school within four years, if at all.

For minority and low-income students, the situation is even worse:

• High school students living in low-income families drop out of school at six times the rate of their peers from high-income families.

• Only 50 percent of American Indian students, 51 percent of African American students and about 55 percent of Hispanic students graduate on time from high school with a regular diploma, compared to 76 percent of white students.

• Only 16 percent of Latino students and 23 percent of African American students graduate  and are prepared for college, compared to 40 percent of white students.

There are about two thousand high schools that produce the majority of dropouts. The good news is that effective reforms exist that can transform high schools with low student achievement and low graduation rates, and keep students (who are highest at risk of dropping out) on the path to graduation. We know that we can improve our high schools and our graduation rates; we just need the commitment and the resources to get it done. GPA is designed to establish an appropriate federal role in secondary school reform by:

1) Creating a federal-state-local school reform partnership focused on transforming the nation’s lowest-performing high schools.

2) Providing funds to build capacity for secondary school improvement and, at the same time, providing states and local school districts with the resources to ensure that high schools with the greatest challenges receive the support they need to implement research-based interventions.

3) Strengthening state improvement systems to identify, differentiate among, and target the level of reform and resources necessary to improve low-performing high schools, while ensuring transparency and accountability.

4) Advancing the research and development needed to ensure a robust supply of highly effective secondary school models for students most at risk of being left behind.

Title I of GPA authorizes a $2.4 billion High School Improvement and Dropout Reduction Fund to support the development, in every state of statewide systems, of differentiated high school improvement. Such systems would focus on building the capacity of secondary schools to reduce dropout rates and increase student achievement, and would target resources to help the lowest-performing high schools implement evidence-based interventions.

Title II authorizes $60 million in competitive grants to strengthen the supply of quality education options available to schools and districts through the development, implementation, and replication of effective secondary school models for the large number of off-track students in low-performing high schools and for youth who have dropped out of high school.

Many others, blessed with good soil, adequate water, lots of sun and a little bit of luck end up growing an abundance that is far in excess of what they can personally use, preserve or give away.  I can tell you from own experience that there are only so many cucumbers you can give to friends and still have them call you a friend.

According to 2009 statistics from the US Department of Agriculture, 49 million Americans are food insecure – a fancy way of saying people either do not have enough food or they are at real risk of not having enough food for their families.  After hearing numbers like billions and trillions thrown about by government officials, it is somewhat easy to start to think that 49 million is not all *that* big after all. 

To put it in perspective, if you took the combined populations of 23 of our 50 states: Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia and added together, you’d have around 49 million hungry or nearly hungry people.  Some of those people live in your town.  Some may be your neighbors.  Or you may be one of them yourself.

In late 2008, when the members of the Sustainable West Milford (NJ) Community Garden told me that were unhappy with the fact that the excess food they grew in past years was often left to rot in the garden while people in the community were going hungry, we created a program called Ample Harvest West Milford.  This program gathered the excess garden bounty, sorted and then distributed it to several food pantries in West Milford. 

The gardeners reported a great deal of personal satisfaction knowing that they were making an important contribution to the welfare of the community while also pursuing the sustainability goal of zero waste.  At the same time, food pantries, which typically only have canned fruit and vegetables available, reported that clients were taking this garden fresh produce almost as fast as it became available.

While this program was coming into creation, I created a nationwide Internet version called AmpleHarvest.org as a program of Sustainable West Milford (a North Jersey non-profit sustainability organization) and rolled it out in seven weeks on May 18, 2009.  The web site educates, encourages and enables gardeners who grow fruit, vegetables or herbs to enjoy, preserve and share their harvest with friends and neighbors, and then donate the excess with a local food pantry – easily found at AmpleHarvest.org or using the free AmpleHarvest iPhone app.

Providing fresh produce to local food pantries offers a number of benefits to both the recipient as well as the community.  Not only is fresh produce healthier than canned (no excess salt or sugar in the diet) goods, it tastes a lot better, has a much smaller carbon footprint and has eye appeal too.  Children, given the opportunity to enjoy fresh veggies are more likely to eat a healthier diet, as they get older. 

According to an article about AmpleHarvest.org in the Huffington Post, the more fresh produce people have access to, the lower our national long-term health care costs will be.  Furthermore, gardeners who simply throw away their excess produce contribute to global warming as each pound of decomposing produce in a trash dump creates a pound of methane – a global warming gas 20 times worse than CO2.  Lastly, by helping to nourish neighbors in a community with this excess bounty, we both reduce the waste stream and we reduce the out of pocket costs needed to keep people from going hungry; all this without spending a dime because an ample harvest was given to a pantry and not wasted.

In April 2010, the AmpleHarvest.org Campaign separated from Sustainable West Milford and started functioning under AmpleHarvest.org, Inc. as its own non-profit.  In May 2010, only two days after AmpleHarvest.org celebrated its first birthday, I was introduced on the Larry King show as a CNN Hero.

Backed and supported by the US Department of Agriculture, Google.com, National Gardening Association, and many faith and service organizations, AmpleHarvest.org helps more than 2,000 (and increasing daily) food pantries across all 50 states receive garden fresh produce from local backyard gardeners.  Please visit AmpleHarvest.org to learn more about the campaign. 

You can help diminish hunger in your community and throughout America in a number of ways:

1. Share this information with your network of friends and family across the country - especially backyard, patio and kitchen gardeners - as well as CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) members who may occasionally receive more produce than they can personally use.

 

2. Share ampleharvest.org/downloads/pantry.pdf with a food pantry in your community.  As 70% of all food pantries are in houses of worship, reach out to your friends in the faith community to ask them to help get a pantry registered.

 

3. Ask your local garden shop/nursery to help their customers learn about AmpleHarvest.org by posting the flier at ampleharvest.org/InformingTheGardener.php .

 

4. Let the local media (print and electronic) know about the AmpleHarvest.org Campaign.  Press/media information is available at ampleharvest.org/press.php.

 

5. Join the growing network of AmpleHarvest.org volunteers nationwide who help spread the word about AmpleHarvest.org (both to food pantries and gardeners) in their own communities.  Please email info@AmpleHarvest.org for additional information.

 

6. Most importantly, if you are a home gardener, please be generous with your excess harvest.  You are one of 43 million gardeners in America who, garden by garden, can diminish hunger in your community.

 

7. Lastly, you can help AmpleHarvest.org help your community.  If you work for or are familiar with foundations or other organization providing funding for small anti-hunger and/or sustainability endeavors with creative solutions, please let us know.  Like many non-profits, AmpleHarvest.org needs funding to function, but unlike most non-profits, its model flattens the funding needs relatively early – enabling AmpleHarvest.org to remain focused on diminishing hunger in America and not long term fund raising campaigns.

Times are tough.  The AmpleHarvest.org Campaign enables people to help their neighbors in need by reaching into their backyards instead of their back pockets.

One out of every six Americans are hungry.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Crossing Qalandiya is a compelling book, which has already been widely praised. In the book, political and historical analysis is juxtaposed with family news and personal anecdotes. The friends ask each other very challenging questions, making the reader turn the pages eagerly to find out how the other will respond. Both women are honest and, indeed, critical in their letters, yet self-critical too. Each wants the other to understand her point of view, and both try to appreciate the other side's perspective.

Their families were at the book launch too.  Partly because they had children of similar ages, the two women succeeded in becoming friends despite being on different sides of the conflict. Reflecting their particular concern that the next generation should be able to enjoy a more peaceful future, Shireen and Daniela have very kindly offered to donate part of the book's proceeds to Children of Peace.

Operation Hope, a solution combating one of the major causes of climate change, has been named the winner of the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. At its core the winning strategy transforms parched and degraded Zimbabwe grasslands and savannahs into lush pastures with ponds and flowing streams, even during periods of drought. Operation Hope was awarded $100,000 to further develop its work at a ceremony today at the National Press Club in Washington DC.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is the premier international competition recognizing initiatives which take a comprehensive, anticipatory, design approach to radically advance human well being and the health of our planet's ecosystems. The 2010 finalists are providing workable solutions to some of the world's most significant challenges including water scarcity, food supply, and energy consumption. The Challenge is sponsored by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, which is accelerating the development and deployment of whole-systems solutions that demonstrate the potential to solve some of the world's most significant challenges.

Operation Hope is a project of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe and its sister organization the Savory Institute in Albuquerque, NM. Its successful approach to land management contradicts accepted practice and theories of resting land from animal grazing. Instead, Savory's holistic management process re-establishes the symbiotic balance between plant growth and the behavior of herding animals, returning unusable desert back into thriving grasslands, restoring biodiversity, bringing water sources back to life; combating global climate change, and increasing crop yields to ensure food security for people. The approach is currently being practiced and producing results on over 30 million acres worldwide.

"Our work proves that we do have the ability to simultaneously better mankind's experience while bettering the Earth," said Allan Savory, founder of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management and the Savory Institute. "We are thrilled that the Buckminster Fuller Challenge exists to recognize and support work such as ours, and thank the jurors for this honor."

Berlin-based Watergy was named runner up of the Challenge. Watergy has developed and implemented a closed system greenhouse that provides extremely efficient farming capabilities in water-scarce communities. The approach, being demonstrated in Almeria Spain, allows a dramatic shift in resource efficiency for the supply of water, food and renewable material, and can be deployed across urban and rural conditions.

The other four finalists were:

Barefoot Women Solar Engineers of Africa, Asia and Latin America (Tilonia, Rajasthan, India), which teaches illiterate, rural women in India and Africa to be solar engineers within their communities, providing energy to their communities, catalyzing their local economies and improving their quality of life;

BK Farmyards, (Brooklyn, NY, US) a leading model in the urban agricultural movement, which is creating a web-based crowd-sourcing platform to advance urban farming as a viable business and food source for local communities;

UrbanLab (Chicago, IL, US)
which has re-conceived the Chicago street-grid as a holistic Bio-System that captures, cleans and returns 100% of the city's wastewater and storm-water to the Lakes, ensuring constant regeneration of that natural resource while producing added economic, energy, social, and environmental benefits; and

Living Building Challenge (Seattle, WA, US) which has developed the most advanced green building rating system in the world. Living Buildings are virtually self-sustaining, generating their own power, using renewable sources, and capturing and treating all their own water.

"My grandfather believed that we have the ability to apply transformative strategies based on whole systems thinking, Nature's fundamental principles, and an ethically driven worldview to better the world and our own experiences. He called this approach comprehensive anticipatory design science," said Jaime Snyder, Buckminster Fuller's grandson and co-founder of the Buckminster Fuller Institute with his mother, Allegra Fuller Snyder. "I'm proud that the Institute is supporting the creative pioneers who are bringing this vision to light, and thankful to our partners who sponsor the Challenge and work with us to fulfill our mission."

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge originated in 2007 and awards $100,000 annually. Support for the program has been provided by the Atwater Kent Foundation, The Civil Society Institute, The James Dyson Foundation, The Highfield Foundation; The Jewish Communal Fund, and the members of The Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Founded in 1983 and headquartered in New York, The Buckminster Fuller Institute is dedicated to accelerating the development and deployment of solutions which radically advance human well-being and the health of our planet's ecosystems. BFI's programs combine unique insight into global trends and local needs with a comprehensive approach to design. BFI encourages participants to conceive and apply transformative strategies based on a crucial synthesis of whole systems thinking, Nature's fundamental principles, and an ethically driven worldview. By facilitating convergence across the disciplines of art, science, design and technology, BFI's work extends the profoundly relevant legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller. For further information visit bfi.org

How much responsibility can we expect oil companies to take when they cause major disasters? Why do we provide them with such large tax subsidies? How can we hold oil companies more accountable?

"A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything” documents in detail the many transformational changes in our economy and our society today because of the massive influx of women into the American workforce over the past few decades. But how do Americans overall feel about these changes? What effect, if any, do all these changes have on the beliefs and behavior of men and women? Is discord rising between the sexes or are men and women finding ways to co-exist and even reach consensus on important matters? How are modern families adjusting to the changes at home and in the workplace? Do men and women agree or disagree in their understandings of how families, work environments, and public policy should be structured?

The Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with Time magazine, set out to answer these and other questions about women and society in a landmark study of public opinion that was completed less than a month before the publication of this report. The research team, led by the authors of this chapter, set out to determine just how men and women view one another in this new era and how changes in the economy are influencing attitudes about gender relations, the family, and the workplace. Working with public opinion research firm Abt SRBI to design and execute our study, we interviewed more than 3,400 adults across the country to get a clearer picture of the state of gender relations today.

The results are striking. Contrary to much of the conventional wisdom about the battle of the sexes, our research finds basic alignment between men and women in terms of what they want in life and what they believe about one another. First and foremost, both men and women overwhelmingly agree that the rise of women in the workforce is a positive development for society—a viewpoint that crosses generational, ideological, partisan, and racial and ethnic lines.

Compared to earlier generations, men say they are perfectly comfortable with women working outside the home, women earning more money than men, and more men being stay-at-home dads. In turn, women say they are less dependent on men for financial security than women were in their mothers’ generation and that many of the tensions between working and having a family life can be bridged.

Tellingly, these new attitudes are apparent in conversations across kitchen tables throughout our country. Both men and women say they are negotiating more than earlier generations about the rules of relationships, work, and family—a clear sign that the battle of the sexes has given way to a new era of gender diplomacy and mutual discussion about their increasingly harried and stressful lives. Both sexes disagree that men no longer know their role in work and life or that men and women are confused about how to interact with one another in this new era.

Yet our public opinion research also shows that mutual understanding doesn’t mean changes in behavior have been equally forthcoming. Both sexes agree that women continue to bear a disproportionate burden in taking care of children and elderly parents, even when both partners in a relationship have jobs. Women overwhelmingly report that they are solely responsible for the care of their children and many say that they alone are responsible for the care of aging parents.

Given the ongoing difficulties many people face in balancing work and family life, it is not surprising that large numbers of Americans—men and women alike—view the decline in the percentage of children growing up in a family with a stay-at-home parent as a negative development for society. A majority of men—and even a bare majority of women—agree that it is still best for a family if the father works outside the home and the mother takes care of the children.

But rather than pining for family structures of an earlier generation, we heard loud and clear from Americans in this study that government and businesses have failed to adapt to the needs of modern families. Men and women are ready and willing to work out the details of their stressful lives. Many Americans will choose more traditional arrangements, and many may not. But regardless of family structure, Americans across the board desire more flexibility in work schedules, paid family leave, and increased child care support. Ever practical and pragmatic, our survey demonstrates that Americans understand that everything has changed in their work and lives today and that consequently they are working things out as best they can while looking to their government and their employers to catch up.

Survey Methodology

The Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with Time magazine, contacted 3,413 adults nationwide by telephone from August 31 to September 15, 2009, including 1,599 men and 1,814 women. Telephone numbers were chosen randomly in separate samples of land-line and cell phone exchanges across the nation, allowing listed and unlisted numbers to be contacted, and multiple attempts were made to contact each number. Cell phone exchanges and ported numbers were hand-dialed. The survey includes “over samples” (polling parlance for measures to ensure all subsets of a population are captured in the poll) of African Americans and Hispanics selected from census tracts with higher than 8 percent concentration of each respective group. The sample includes a total of 446 African Americans and 383 Hispanics. The resulting interviews were weighted into proportion by probability of selection. The sample was adjusted to census proportions of sex, ethnicity, age, education, and national region.

The margin of sampling error for adults is plus or minus two percentage points. For both men and women, it is three points; for African Americans, it is five points; and for Hispanics, it is six points. For smaller subgroups, the margin of error may be higher. Survey results may also be affected by factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are asked. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Questionnaire design and interviewing was conducted by Abt SRBI of New York. Center for American Progress senior fellows John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira coordinated the polling and analyzed the poll results.

Americans Strongly Accept Increasing Role of Women in Our Economy

In our survey, we asked Americans to evaluate the ramifications of the central premise of this report—everything changes in work and life because women today make up nearly one-half of the U.S. workforce. As Figure 1 highlights, more than three-quarters of Americans (77 percent) view this change positively, with more than 4 in 10 (42 percent) saying that it has been a “very positive” change for American society. Less than one-fifth of Americans (19 percent) say the rise of women in the economy has had a negative impact on society.

Positive views cut across the demographic and ideological spectrum, with strong majorities of men (75 percent), women (77 percent), whites (76 percent), African Americans (81 percent), Latinos (84 percent), liberals (87 percent), and moderates (86 percent) viewing women’s increased role in the economy positively. Even more traditional elderly and conservative audiences believe women working equally alongside men in the workforce is a net positive for society, albeit at lower overall levels than other groups.

Although every age and gender group thinks that more women going to work is a positive change for society, women under 45 are most enthusiastic about this development (55 percent very positive) followed by younger men (44 percent very positive). Less than 4 in 10 (38 percent) women over the age of 45 say they have very positive feelings about this, but three-quarters of them (75 percent) hold at least a somewhat positive view of more women working in the economy.

One might think the movement of millions of women into the economy would cause friction between the sexes, particularly for men who might feel wrongly displaced from employment or left out altogether from the modern economy. To the contrary, the demonstrated lack of discord over this profound social shift in American life more likely signals convergence between the sexes due to the alignment of their views about major life goals and family desires.

As Figure 2 shows, both men and women today agree almost down the line with one another about what is most important to them in their own lives. More than 9 in 10 men (92 percent) and women (96 percent) place being healthy at the top of their list in terms of what is very important to them, followed by being self-sufficient, being financially secure, and having a fulfilling job. Although women place a slightly higher premium on faith than do men (68 percent very important for women; 58 percent for men) and less of an emphasis on marriage (58 percent very important for men; 53 percent for women), the sexes are generally aligned on major life goals.

Similarly, men and women appear to look for the same traits and attributes in their mates. As seen in Figure 3, 82 percent of men and 75 percent of women told us that it is very important to them for their romantic partners to give them love and affection, and nearly 7 in 10 men (68 percent) and more than 6 in 10 women (62 percent) want their partners to have a family. And to whom will they turn in order to make family decisions and provide for the family? Our survey shows that both men and women are looking less to their partners to make major household decisions or to support them financially, though women are still twice as likely as men to look to their partners for financial support (30 percent very important versus 15 percent very important, respectively).

This last finding may be partially explained by the continued desire among both mothers and fathers for their daughters to have a traditional family structure over more individualistic measures of financial and career success. Looking at Figure 4, we find that 63 percent of fathers and 56 percent of mothers rank “a happy marriage and kids” as their chief desire for their daughters, compared to less than one-third of men and less than half of women who rank “financial success” and “an interesting career” as top goals for their daughters.

Although every age and gender group expresses a desire for their daughters to have a happy marriage with children above other goals, 30 percent of women under the age of 45 say they want their daughters to have an interesting career compared to 16 percent of men under 45. Only 18 percent of men and 19 percent of women ages 45 or older rank an interesting career as their top desire for their daughters. Intriguingly, looking below the surface we find that less than half of single men with kids (48 percent) and single women with kids (47 percent) rank a happy marriage and children as their top desire for the daughters.

The ongoing importance of marriage for married parents is not that surprising, given what they told us about their own life experiences—roughly two-thirds of married men and women (67 percent and 65 percent, respectively) describe their own marriages as very happy, clearly a condition they would like for their own offspring.

Perhaps the strongest alignment between men and women in terms of their day-to-day lives involves the level of anxiety they are experiencing and the constant negotiations that must go on between partners to bring some order to their daily schedules. As Figure 6 shows, 75 percent of Americans report experiencing stress in their daily lives, with nearly equal percentages of men and women (39 percent and 40 percent, respectively) saying this stress occurs frequently. Given the hectic nature of modern life, no wonder two-thirds of Americans say they are coordinating their duties and responsibilities with their spouses or partners at least two to three times per week. Forty percent of Americans say they are negotiating these details daily.

The battle of the sexes is over

What can we conclude from these data? First, the profound shift in women’s role in the U.S. economy has not led to massive conflict between men and women. In fact, the opposite happened—men and women view this change in quite favorable terms. Second, the lack of acrimony over this shift is partially a result of men and women largely sharing the same life ambitions, goals, and realities. Third, both sexes appear to be converging in their beliefs about gender relations and the role of women in society and the workplace rather than fragmenting along gender lines.

Although some divisions remain between genders and across ideological lines, the real story emerging from this study is the consistent and strong agreement of the sexes on many attitudinal measures of modern life. The bulk of our study asked people whether they agreed or disagreed with a range of statements about the status of men and women in society. Strikingly, we learned that strong majorities of both men and women agreed with one another on 24 of 31 measures—an agreement rate of more than 75 percent. In many cases, the attitudes of women were stronger than those of men, but the overall agreement rate is astounding—further highlighting the convergence of opinion between men and women.

Table 1 presents a comprehensive overview of the many areas of consensus between the sexes, ranked by the total level of agreement (or disagreement) among women. To get a sense of the areas where men and women are in greatest alignment these days, consider the following measures where the sexes are separated by only five percentage points or less:

• You are comfortable with women in households earning more money than men. (89 percent of men and women agree)
• Husbands and wives today are negotiating more than earlier generations about the rules on relationships, work, and family. (83 percent of men and 84 percent of women agree)
• Mothers cannot be as productive at work as fathers. (82 percent of men and 81 percent of women disagree)
• The realities of family life today are not adequately represented in news and entertainment media. (77 percent of men and 78 percent of women agree)
• Mothers cannot be as productive at work as people without children.
  (82 percent of men and 81 percent of women disagree)
• You are confused about the way men and women are supposed to interact these days. (72 percent of men and 71 percent of women disagree)
• Women need to behave more like men to be taken seriously in the workplace. (74 percent of men and 71 percent of women disagree)
• Compared to past generations, men are becoming more financially dependent on women. (61 percent of men and 65 percent of women agree)
• Women who work outside the home have less time and attention for their marriage or relationship. (65 percent of men and 63 percent of women agree)
• Men today are less interested in playing the macho role than they were in years past. (63 percent of men and 60 percent of women agree)
• Men have lost the battle of the sexes. (62 percent of men and 58 percent of women disagree)

On several other measures, we find that majorities of both men and women agreed with a certain statement but women were much stronger in their beliefs than were men. This is particularly true for matters related to the distribution of labor within households.

Fifty-two percent of women, for example, strongly agree (86 percent total agree) with the statement: “Despite changes in the modern family, women today still bear the primary responsibility for taking care of sick or elderly parents.” Only 27 percent of men strongly agree (66 percent total agree) with this statement. Similarly, 55 percent of women strongly agree (85 percent total agree) that “In households where both partners have jobs, women take on more responsibilities for the home and family than their male partners,” versus 28 percent of men who strongly agree (67 percent total agree).

Balancing family life and the workplace seems to spark less disagreement. Fifty-seven percent of women, for example, strongly agree (83 percent total agree) that working mothers are just as committed to their jobs as women without children, with 44 percent of men strongly agreeing (73 percent total agree). Despite the more intense opinions of women on some issues, it is notable and important that majorities of men are at least somewhat in alignment with the attitudes of women on many measures of gender relations and the workplace.

Furthermore, as Figures 7 and 8 highlight, men and women are basically aligned in their attitudes about one of the more contentious issues between the sexes—the traditional family structure. Fifty-six percent of men agree (39 percent disagree) that “it is better for a family if the father works outside the home and the mother takes care of the children.” At the same time, a bare majority of women agree with this notion—51 percent versus 44 percent disagreeing. Generational differences are clear on this measure. Women under age 45 are less inclined to agree that it is better for a family if the father works outside the home and the mother takes care of the family—less than one in five younger women strongly agree with this idea.

Perhaps more telling, we presented respondents with the fact that today less than 30 percent of children grow up in a family with a stay-at-home parent compared to a majority of kids who grew up in this family environment in the mid-1970s. A full 65 percent of Americans—including 70 percent of men and 61 percent of women—believe this change has had a negative effect on American society compared to only 28 percent who view this change positively. Although concerns are widespread about the demise of the proportion of children growing up in a family with at least one parent at home, lower percentages of single and full-time working women, African Americans, and Latinos view this development as a negative change for society.

The battle is over, but differences
remain to be negotiated

Despite general agreement among Americans on many measures involving women’s changing role in society, lingering differences still exist. Most of the differences are small and stem from divergent attitudes between men and women, and between liberals and conservatives, about the overall status of women and the relationship of working women to their children.

As Figure 9 highlights, there are four statements that produced noticeable gender gaps. In the first of these, 54 percent of men agree that it is “harder for a mother who works outside the home to establish as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work outside the home.” A roughly similar percentage of women, 56 percent, disagree with this sentiment. Women of all ages disagree with this notion while younger men (52 percent agree, under 45) and older men (55 percent agree, 45 or older) feel the opposite way.

Similarly, a majority of men (60 percent) believes that “there are no longer any barriers to how far women can advance in the workplace,” compared to only 50 percent of women who believe this is the case. On the flip side of the gender coin, a strong majority of women (68 percent) agrees that “men resent women who have more power than they do” versus only 48 percent of men. And 52 percent of women agree that “all things considered, men continue to have it better in life than women do,” while 53 percent of men disagree they occupy an elevated position in life.

Ideological differences are even more pronounced than gender ones on many of these same measures. As Table 2 shows, there is a 27-point gap between conservatives and liberals on whether it is better for a family if the father works outside the home and the mother takes care of the children. And there is a 14-point gap between conservatives and liberals on the notion that it is harder for a working mother to establish as warm and secure a relationship with her children as one who does not work.

In contrast, there is an 11-point gap between liberals and conservatives on the idea that men still have it better in life. Fifty-three percent of liberals believe this is the case but only 42 percent of conservatives agree with them.

There is one final and somewhat counterintuitive difference between the sexes that is worth noting, given many stereotypes about the workplace. Figure 10 shows that only 29 percent of men agree that female bosses are harder to work for than are male bosses, compared to 45 percent of women. The tension between female employees and their female bosses appears to be more concentrated among white-collar workers and management professionals—49 percent of white-collar women and 47 of women professionals agree with this notion versus 38 percent of blue-collar women.

Behavior hasn’t caught up with attitudes

The attitudes we have documented so far paint a picture of a more consensual and mutually respectful relationship between men and women. Men and women both accept the increasing role of women in the economy and do not view this change as a threat to the status of either gender. They are negotiating more about the details of their lives and understand that women are still bearing a larger share of child care and elder care. Both sexes also believe that it is okay for women to earn more than men and to contribute more to household income.

But we also find that the self-reported reality of men’s and women’s lives does not match the more progressive attitudes expressed in other areas of the study. Case in point: Figure 11 highlights a full 69 percent of women—including 64 percent of married women with kids and 86 percent of single women with kids—say they are mostly responsible for taking care of their children. In contrast, only 13 percent of men report a similar set-up. Forty-one percent of women also say that they are mostly responsible for taking care of their elderly parents compared to less than one-quarter of men who do so.

Even with these greater family responsibilities, women report greater difficulties than men in getting time off from work to care for their children and elderly parents. Forty-two percent of women say they face difficulties getting time off to care for kids compared to 36 percent of men, and 27 percent of women find similar hurdles getting time to take care for parents compared to 18 percent of men (see Figure 12).

In terms of household earnings, 70 percent of men overall say they are the primary breadwinners in their households compared to 40 percent of women overall. This broadly reflects the analysis in other parts of this report, which demonstrates that workplace practices and expectations among employers that men are the primary breadwinners in households result in workplace behaviors that are often detrimental to women. Even more striking, 65 percent of men report that they bring home more than half or almost all of their household income compared to only 19 percent of women. There are definite class differences in terms of the primary breadwinner status, with trends inverted for blue-collar and white-collar women: 57 percent of blue-collar women say they are the primary breadwinners compared to 44 percent of women professionals.

Despite more enlightened attitudes and greater negotiations between the sexes, American women clearly have yet to reach parity with men on many in terms of household duties and earnings.

Americans overwhelmingly want
better balance between work and life

Americans understand that they are unlikely to return to the traditional arrangements of an earlier generation given the changing nature of work and family, but they are not yet convinced that the modern workplace has adapted to the new reality and the needs of modern families.

For starters, both men and women desperately want changes to their work structures. Presented with a list of possible things that would need to change in order to improve work and family life, 54 percent of women and 49 percent of men say that more flexible work hours and schedules would be their top choice. This is well above other options, such as more paid time off, better child care options or longer school hours.

In addition, we found broad and deep support among men and women for significant changes in governmental and business policies to better address the needs of modern families. As Figure 13 highlights, 53 percent of Americans strongly agree (84 percent totally agree) with the statement “businesses that fail to adapt to the needs of modern families risk losing good workers.” Seventy-six percent of Americans agree that businesses should be required to provide paid family and medical leave, and 73 percent of Americans say businesses should provide their employees with more child care benefits. A similar proportion of Americans—74 percent—says that employers should be required to give workers more flexibility in their work schedules.

With the exception of increased government funding for child care, support for new measures to improve work-life balance cuts across partisan and ideological lines. For example, 73 percent of conservatives and 61 percent of Republicans agree with the statement that businesses should be required to provide paid family and medical leave, with 88 percent of liberals and 90 percent of Democrats similarly agreeing. Likewise, more than 6 in 10 conservatives (64 percent) and Republicans (63 percent) agree that employers should be required to give workers more flexibility in the workplace, with agreement topping 80 percent among liberals and Democrats.

Indeed, if there is one clear message emerging from this survey, it is that the lives of Americans have changed significantly in recent years, yet the parameters of their jobs have yet to change to meet new demands. Political and business leaders who fail to take steps to address the needs of modern families risk losing good workers and the support of men and women who are riding the crest of major social change in America with little or no support.

The battle of the sexes is over. A new era of negotiation between the sexes is upon us. It is time for our major government, business, and social institutions to enter the dialogue.

Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change Policy Carol Browner observed Sunday that the BP oil disaster is “probably the biggest environmental disaster we’ve ever faced in this country.”  Americans watch helplessly as millions of gallons of oil gush from the ocean floor every day, causing a growing stain that now covers an unconfirmed 9,100 square mile area and is contaminating our shores. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on May 31 extended the fishing ban to one third of the Gulf of Mexico.

Americans are intently focused on the BP disaster and overwhelmingly favor solutions to reduce oil use. A May 20-23 survey by the Pew Research Center found that “Americans stayed focused on the unfolding oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last week, while the effort to cap the underwater well and limit the damage was one of two stories that dominated media coverage.” Nearly half of the respondents named it as the “story as most closely followed,” with the economy next at 15 percent.

Americans understand that this unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is but one symptom of our oil dependence and the need for an aggressive transition to cleaner energy. Recent polling by USA Today/Gallup shows that “Americans’ support for increased offshore drilling has declined significantly since April.” A May 4-5 Benenson poll at the same time found that 61 percent of 2010 voters support a comprehensive clean energy bill “that will limit pollution, invest in domestic energy sources and encourage companies to use and develop clean energy.”

The public is hungry for a direct, bold response to the oil disaster—one that clearly reduces American dependence on all oil, regardless of origin. President Barack Obama and Congress should dramatically cut our oil dependence by adopting administrative and legislation measures that increase vehicle efficiency, raise revenue to invest in cleaner alternative fuels and transit, provide additional environmental safeguards for oil and gas production, and enforce real accountability for bad actors.

President Obama has already taken some steps to reduce oil use. The administration recently finalized a one-third improvement in fuel economy for cars and light trucks. This will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the life of cars built from 2012-2016. The president also signed an executive memorandum on May 21 that directs the Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency to further improve efficiency standards for these vehicles and establishes the first-ever fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy trucks.

These efforts are an important start, but an oil reform agenda must make additional progress. It could include the following measures, many of which the administration has the authority to adopt or have already been already introduced as separate bills in Congress.

• Eliminate the liability limit for offshore oil disasters—current law caps oil spill liability at $75 million
• Require BP to put $5 billion—its first quarter 2010 profits—into an escrow fund to ensure prompt payments for clean up and compensation
• Adopt the recommendations for offshore oil well safety in the Interior Department’s “Increased Safety Measures for Energy Development on the Outer Continental Shelf” report, including better back-up systems and more complete inspections
• Implement fuel economy and alternatively fueled vehicle measures that will produce a 7 million barrel per day reduction in oil use by 2030 with interim reductions, and empower the president to implement these measures to reach that goal
• Significantly reduce oil use from vehicles by establishing 40 mile per gallon fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks by 2020, and establish the first fuel economy standards for trucks
• Power trucks and buses with natural gas by enacting the NAT GAS Act
• Power cars with electricity by enacting the Electric Vehicle Deployment Act
• Eliminate taxpayer subsides that benefit big oil companies
• Invoke the Trade Expansion Act to levy a fee on imported oil, and use revenue from this fee to invest in public transit, high-speed rail, and infrastructure for electric and natural gas vehicles

The transition to a clean energy economy and reduction in oil use will benefit all Americans. It would save families money, enhance national security, create jobs, and protect public health by making pollution reductions.

The horrible BP oil disaster has reminded Americans that we must reduce our oil use. We share the view that this presents an unprecedented opportunity to take bold action to achieve this goal.

John Podesta is President and CEO and Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow at American Progress.

Read also: Powering an Oil Reform Agenda by Daniel J. Weiss and Susan Lyon

More on the oil spill from CAP:

• Making Money on Oil Disasters
• Learning from Tragedy: BP Disaster Investigation Must Be Free, Clear, and Complete
• The Oil Disaster Is a Health Disaster, Too: How to Protect Public Health in the Aftermath of Major Disasters
• The High Costs of Offshore Drilling: Deepwater Horizon Underscores Need to Find Sustainable Energy Solutions
• Oil Spills by the Numbers: The Devastating Consequences of Exxon Valdez and BP Gulf

Read also: Powering an Oil Reform Agenda by Daniel J. Weiss and Susan Lyon

The main objectives of The PhD Project are:

• To inform and educate minorities about all aspects of a business doctoral program, and encourage them to follow their dream of becoming a professor;


• To provide a nurturing support network for minorities as they navigate their doctoral program;


• To increase the number of minority business professors who can function as role models and mentors;


• To influence more minorities to pursue business degrees/careers;


• To increase the number of qualified minority applicants to fill critical positions in the business disciplines;


• To improve the preparation of all students by allowing them to experience the richness of learning from a faculty with diverse backgrounds; and


• To reach the goal of a better prepared and more diversified workforce to service a diversified customer base.

ORGANIZATION METHODOLOGY

The PhD Project uses a three-pronged approach to increasing the population of minority business professors:

• The first component of The PhD Project is a marketing campaign to identify a population of the best and brightest potential PhD candidates of color – via an extensive direct mail, print advertising and public relations campaign. Qualified candidates are invited to visit The Project web site and apply to The PhD Project annual conference.


• The second component of The PhD Project is its annual conference. Qualified candidates are invited to this two-day annual conference where they hear from deans, professors and current minority doctoral students about the benefits of pursuing a business PhD.  At this time, candidates are exposed to more than 80 doctoral-granting universities that are represented during a four-hour exhibit show at the conference. Many of these candidates are recruited before they even enter a program.


• The third component of the program is the Minority Doctoral Student Associations, formed by The PhD Project as a means of combating the high (25 percent) attrition rate inherent among all business doctoral students. Through these professional peer associations (in accounting, finance, information systems, management and marketing) minority doctoral students establish peer support relationships with others who are facing similar challenges on the way to becoming business school professors. Every minority business doctoral student in a full-time, AACSB-accredited program is a member of one of these associations. Each association has an annual conference held in conjunction with the relevant professional academic association.  There, the Ph.D. students receive guidance and information concerning every step of the process of earning the doctorate and obtaining employment. The retention rate of doctoral students who are members of these associations exceeds 90 percent.

FULFILLING NEEDS

The PhD Project fulfills a societal need by providing underrepresented minorities with information about and access to, a career they might otherwise be unaware of. Likewise, The PhD Project fulfills an educational need by providing students with the opportunity to enrich their education through a diverse faculty. And furthermore, The PhD Project fulfills a workplace need by providing organizations with a larger pool of diverse applicants, while better preparing all applicants.

STATISTICS

Recently, The PhD Project surveyed undergraduate and graduate students taking classes from minority professors and/or minority doctoral students to gauge the impact those instructors are having on minority and non-minority students’ education. The survey revealed that minority professors are having an astonishing impact on the career decisions of both minority and non-minority students. When asked, 83% of respondents said minority professors are positively impacting minority students’ employment or internship decisions. Almost 70% of respondents believe that they are impacting non-minority students’ employment or internship decisions, as well.

Further evidence of The PhD Project’s success can be found in the full survey results at: phdproject.org/inthenews.html.
 
SPONSORSHIP
The PhD Project is sponsored by a coalition of corporations and academic institutions.
They are: KPMG Foundation, Graduate Management Admission Council, AACSB International, Citi Foundation, 217 Participating Universities, AICPA Foundation, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, The Goldman Sachs Group, Diversity Inc, The Merck Company Foundation, Dow Chemical Company, Dixon Hughes PLLC, John Deere Foundation, Rockwell Collins,  California State University System, ACT-1 Group, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, CIGNA, American Marketing Association, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, , Western Union Foundation, American Express.

LINKS
Official site: phdproject.org

The couple wasn’t selling detergent or cars, but taking part in the "I Am Here" campaign, created by the PR firm T3 and Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a homeless mission based in Austin, Texas.

The purpose of the "I Am Here" campaign was (and still is) to raise awareness and help an invisible population of nearly 3 million in the United States: the homeless. Danny and Maggie had been living on the streets of Austin for 15 years, but it wasn’t until they took up residence on the billboard that they finally got their home. 

The billboard featured an “I Am Here” graphic pointing down to Danny and Maggie, as well as a number that people could text on their cell phones in order to donate. 1200 text message/donations ($10 each) were needed to get Danny and Maggie off the streets and into their own mobile home; that number was exceeded.

 “I Am Here” was the idea of Mobile Loaves & Fishes founder Alan Graham and Ben Gaddis, T3’s director of mobile and emerging technology. The concept occurred when the two men met and discussed how cell phone giving could help Mobile Loaves & Fishes.

“We realized right away the powerful impact that mobile giving could have on the Mobile Loaves & Fishes organization,” said Gaddis. “The partnership is a perfect match, allowing us to leverage our expertise in marketing and the mobile sector to benefit a cause we deeply believe in.”

Alan and Ben wanted to do something dramatic that would grab the attention of the masses. “We kept saying, ‘It needs to be something like putting someone up on billboard. Nobody would miss that.’ And once we said it enough times, the idea seemed less and less crazy. We decided, why not?” said Gaddis.

T3 set up Mobile Loaves & Fishes for text donations through the Mobile Giving Foundation, but the more daunting task was finding a billboard company that would agree to such a stunt, even for a good cause.  They approached the Reagan Outdoor, a local billboard company.

“Our first reaction was ‘You’re kidding me,’” said Bill Reagan, president. “But given the unique nature of this project, we elected to take part because we’re a local company, and we care deeply about the strength and well-being of Austin. We were able to offer something no one else could.

“For Reagan to be willing to put someone on a billboard for a reason they believe in is something that I think takes an extraordinary amount of courage,” Mobile Loaves & Fishes founder Alan Graham said.

What about those who might say that placing a homeless couple on a billboard was “exploitive?’

Alan Graham answers, “Letting him sleep on the street is okay, but raising him up to be seen on a billboard is not? I’m the P.T. Barnum of the homeless. I feel like I’m their manager. Like any great manager, how do I position them to get the resources they need to affect change in their life? I’d do anything to help bring attention to this cause.”

The “I Am Here” campaign had the PR planning and execution of a Hollywood blockbuster: billboard, print, public service announcements, website, video and mobile elements. It was cleverly geared to draw attention and direct help to those in need in the easiest way possible.

“Our mission is about empowering people to help,” said Graham. “So what if all those people who were afraid to acknowledge a homeless person, or just didn’t know how to help, could send a text donation? They’d be empowered to act, right there in the moment. That’s pretty powerful stuff.”

According to The National Foundation Advisory Group for Ending Homelessness, historically, donations to organizations focused on homelessness represent only 1% of the total philanthropic dollars each year. Despite the prevalence of homelessness, it’s an issue many people look away from every day.

“The notion that we don’t see homeless people or that we constantly turn away from them: how could we reverse that? How could start a cycle of acknowledgement that would humanize a homeless person and compel someone to help?” said Kate Donaho, group creative director at T3. “It was as simple as allowing a homeless person to say, ‘You see me. I am here.’”

ExxonMobil will convene its annual shareholders meeting in Dallas this morning as the magnitude of the ongoing BP oil disaster grows. This is a reminder that oil companies need to be held accountable for their actions—both while the oil gushes from the ocean floor and 20 years after the spill. The Exxon Valdez oil accident that slimed Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989 is a chilling reminder of the need for government oversight and corporate accountability.

Exxon and BP’s broken record

Many would assume that BP—the company responsible for the Gulf Coast disaster—will cover the entire cost of cleanup. But we learned from the Exxon Valdez spill that the reality is very different:

The Exxon Valdez tanker spilled more than 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, which eventually contaminated approximately 1,300 miles of shoreline. The total costs of Exxon Valdez, including both cleanup and also “fines, penalties and claims settlements,” ran as much as $7 billion. Cleanup of the affected region alone cost at least $2.5 billion, and much oil remains.

Yet Exxon made high profits even in the aftermath of the most expensive oil spill in history. They made $3.8 billion profit in 1989 and $5 billion in 1990. And this occurred while Exxon disputed cleanup costs nearly every step of the way.

Exxon fought paying damages and appealed court decisions multiple times, and they have still not paid in full. Years of fighting and court appeals on Exxon’s part finally concluded with a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2008 that found that Exxon only had to pay $507.5 million of the original 1994 court decree for $5 billion in punitive damages. And as of 2009, Exxon had paid only $383 million of this $507.5 million to those who sued, stalling on the rest and fighting the $500 million in interest owed to fishermen and other small businesses from more than 12 years of litigation.

Twenty years later, some of the original plaintiffs are no longer alive to receive, or continue fighting for, their damages. An estimated 8,000 of the original Exxon Valdez plaintiffs have died since the spill while waiting for their compensation as Exxon fought them in court.

Coastal regions and coastlines of the Prince William Sound are still contaminated. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council’s 2009 status report finds that as much as 16,000 gallons of oil remains in the sound’s intertidal zones today. A 2001 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study surveyed 96 sites along 8,000 miles of coastline and found that “a total area of approximately 20 acres of shoreline in Prince William Sound is still contaminated with oil. Oil was found at 58 percent of the 91 sites assessed and is estimated to have the linear equivalent of 5.8 km of contaminated shoreline.”

Animals and ecosystems suffered immediately after the spill and still do today. Scientific American reported that, “some 2,000 sea otters, 302 harbor seals and about 250,000 seabirds died in the days immediately following the spill.” The researchers estimate that long term, “shoreline habitats such as mussel beds affected by the spill will take up to 30 years to recover fully.”

Most of the oil cannot be mopped up, In fact, only about 8 percent was ever recovered. Dr. Jeffrey Short of Oceana testified at a hearing on the 20th anniversary of Exxon Valdez that, “Despite heroic efforts involving more than 11,000 people, 2 billion dollars, and aggressive application of the most advanced technology available, only about 8 percent of the oil was ever recovered. This recovery rate is fairly typical rate for a large oil spill. About 20 percent evaporated, 50 percent contaminated beaches, and the rest floated out to the North Pacific Ocean, where it formed tar balls that eventually stranded elsewhere or sank to the seafloor.”

Exxon fought the courts, while BP botched the cleanup

Exxon didn’t fail in its response efforts 20 years ago alone. BP actually joined Exxon in its response efforts—officially BP PLC, the same firm working to stop the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico now.

The Associated Press reports: “BP owned a controlling interest in the Alaska oil industry consortium that was required to write a cleanup plan and respond to the spill two decades ago…investigations that followed the Valdez disaster blamed both Exxon and Alyeska for a response that was bungled on many levels.”

The same lack of preparation persists today, as BP workers and trained local employees and officials scramble to contain the gushing oil.

BP profits while disaster unfolds

BP has made huge profits over the last 10 years. In fact, during the early days of the Gulf of Mexico disaster, BP was making “enough profit in four days to cover the costs of the spill cleanup” so far.

BP made $163 billion in profits from 2001 to 2009 and $5.6 billion in the first quarter of 2010. And The Washington Post found that, “BP said it spent $350 million in the first 20 days of the spill response, about $17.5 million a day. It has paid 295 of the 4,700 claims received, for a total of $3.5 million. By contrast, in the first quarter of the year, the London-based oil giant’s profits averaged $93 million a day.”

Meanwhile, contamination in the gulf continues to worsen. BP CEO Tony Hayward bet there would be a “very, very modest” environmental impact on the region, but the gulf’s fisheries and shorelines will likely follow in the tragic path of the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill—ruined for decades after. Add thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants used for cleanup to this mix, along with their unknown but potentially toxic effects, and this only compounds the damage to public health, tourism, and the region’s greater economy.

NOAA has already shut down “nearly 20 percent of the commercial and recreational fisheries in the area because of the spill.” And U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke declared a fishery disaster in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday; the affected area includes Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

There is only more devastation to come to the communities in the region as their local populations and tourism industries suffer a blow not easily nursed back to health.

Holding BP accountable for the aftermath

BP cannot be let off the hook like Exxon was. No matter what anyone does, most of the gushing oil cannot be recovered; this is why BP must be responsible for regional restoration and cleanup—as well as plugging the hole.

BP needs to be held accountable for stopping the oil gusher and for shouldering the safety, health, restoration, and cleanup costs for years to come. President Obama created an independent commission to investigate causes and cleanup options for the disaster, and Congress is attempting to raise oil spill liability caps. But more steps need to be taken to hold BP fully accountable for the aftermath of the disaster.

BP should be required to place its 2010 first quarter profit of $5.6 billion in an escrow account to provide compensation to the fishermen, those in the tourist industry, and others whose livelihoods are threatened. These funds should also be used for cleaning up the soon to be blighted shores.

We are reminded as one of the largest environmental disasters in history continues to unfold in the gulf that we are putting our economy, national security, and environment at greater risk every day that the Senate fails to pass comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. Yet ExxonMobil and BP both bragged that 2009 was a year of safety and environmental improvements for them; BP even claimed that, “2009 was an outstanding year” for their exploration and production efforts.

The BP Gulf Coast disaster reminds us that the offshore oil industry as a whole carries extreme risks that the American people cannot bear. We must act now to dramatically reduce our oil use, and President Obama and leaders in both parties of Congress must provide the leadership necessary to develop a clean energy and climate solution that becomes law this year.

As the recent findings from The Nation's Report Card in reading demonstrate, nearly 70 percent of the nation's eighth graders fail to read at a proficient level. Poor reading and writing skills not only threaten the well-being of individual Americans, but the country as a whole. Ensuring that adolescents become skilled readers and writers is not merely an option for America; it is an absolute necessity. As Writing to Read demonstrates, instruction in writing not only improves how well students write, but also enhances students' ability to read a text accurately, fluently, and comprehensively.

Writing to Read is part of a series of Carnegie Corporation of New York-funded reports intended to re-engineer literacy instruction across the curriculum to drive student achievement. The initial report, Time to Act: An Agenda for Advancing Adolescent Literacy for College and Career Readiness, and corresponding reports were published in September 2009. Writing to Read is an extension of this work and provides practitioners with research-supported information about how writing improves reading, while making the case for researchers and policymakers to place greater emphasis on writing instruction as an integral part of school curriculum.

"In an age overwhelmed by information, the ability to read, comprehend, and write-in other words, to organize information into knowledge-must be viewed as tantamount to a survival skill," said Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York. "As Americans, we must keep our democracy and our society from being divided not only between rich and poor, but also between those who have access to information and knowledge, and thus, to power-the power of enlightenment, the power of self-improvement and self-assertion, the power to achieve upward mobility, and the power over their own lives and their families' ability to thrive and succeed-and those who do not."

The three closely related instructional practices that Writing to Read identifies as being effective in improving students reading are:

* Have students write about the texts they read. Writing about a text enhances comprehension because it provides students with a tool to visibly and permanently record, connect, analyze, personalize, and manipulate key ideas in text. Students' comprehension of science, social studies, and language arts is improved specifically when they respond to a text in writing, write summaries of a text, write notes about a text, answer questions about a text in writing, or create and answer written questions about a text.

* Teach students the writing skills and processes that go into creating text. Students' reading skills and comprehension are improved by learning the skills and processes that go into creating text specifically when teachers teach the process of writing, text structures for writing, paragraph or sentence construction skills, spelling and sentence construction skills and spelling skills.

* Increase how much students write. Students' reading comprehension is improved by having them increase how often they produce their own text. The process of creating a text prompts students to be more thoughtful and engaged when reading text produced by others. The act of writing also teaches students about the importance of stating assumptions and premises clearly, and observing the rules of logic. Students also benefit from using experience and knowledge to create a text as well as building relationships among words, sentences, and paragraphs.

Writing to Read explains how building and strengthening writing skills can form a pathway to successful reading practices. When students are required to write about what they learn, they are challenged to digest and organize the information in meaningful ways that enables them to successfully communicate the information to a second party. By forming these connections, students are better equipped to comprehend material as well as approach reading with a higher level of understanding and appreciation.

The report carefully notes that writing practices cannot take the place of effective reading practices and calls for writing to complement reading instruction, stating that each type of practice supports and strengthens the other. With lower-achieving students, an important key to success is providing ongoing practice and explicit instruction.

Writing to Read, commissioned by Carnegie Corporation of New York and authored by Steve Graham and Michael Hebert (both from Vanderbilt University), builds on the ideas presented in a 2006 Alliance report, Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High School Literacy. In both publications, a form of research called meta-analysis is used to collect, categorize, and examine experimental and quasi-experimental data. Writing to Read marks the first meta-analysis examining the effects of different writing practices on students' reading performance.

Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading is available at WritingToRead.pdf and carnegie.org/literacy.

Our production partners on the bottled water film include five leading sustainability groups:

Join our team: Please consider a tax-deductible gift to support the distribution of the Story of Bottled Water. You can make a secure contribution HERE.

Today, we are facing a global food, nutrition and climate crisis. Over the past few years, nearly 100 million people have been added to the global count of chronically hungry worldwide. Food prices have jumped almost 80%, pushing thousands of families on the brink into poverty and hunger. Environmentally damaging agricultural practices such as deforestation compound the CO₂ emissions that are causing greenhouse effects. Chemically enhanced fertilizers contaminate the ground and strip the Earth of necessary nutrients.

We cannot build sustainable democracies, economies, or solutions for climate change and food shortages if we do not fully incorporate women in policy responses. There isn’t a better story to illustrate the disconnect between the reality of women and the theory of policy than this food crisis and the agricultural strategies that aim to address it.

In our agricultural policy, we fail to consider issues like nutrition and food security, climate change, and the significant, but often unrecognized, fact that 70% of the world’s farmers are women. Women produce 90% of the staple food crops, such as rice and maize—the crops that feed the world. Women also prepare these crops for household and community consumption, eating last or not at all when food is scarce. And women do the majority of tasks that involve close proximity to the environment, such as farming and fetching water, and, hence, shoulder a disproportionate amount of the danger associated with pollution and climate change.

Women’s agricultural empowerment is the next frontier for the global women’s movement. When women produce the majority of the world’s food, but own less than 2% of the land, it becomes an issue of economic as well as gender justice. Women have the right to enjoy the profits of their labor and the peace of mind of knowing that their daughters can inherit the land they farm. Women have the right to eat a full and balanced meal, and to work in an environment not poisoned by toxic chemicals. And we have the ability to realize this vision.

There are several programs underway that can jump-start the revolution. For example, at Women for Women, we’re teaching women sustainable farming techniques that maximize profit and nutritional value while supporting environmental preservation, community agricultural and economic development. Women learn to farm a diversity of crops for household consumption and higher profits, at the same time, they are equipped with techniques that enhance the ecological balance of natural ecosystems.

In Rwanda, where land is at a premium, and in land-rich Sudan, in partnership with the local government, we have secured a long-term land lease that enables women to control the land they farm and access the highest returns on their labor. Women in South Sudan are on track to earn double the per-capita GDP after only six months. Also in Rwanda, women learn to construct vertical kitchen gardens, which maximize soil efficiency and make a significant impact on household nutritional security. Women farmers turn grain bags, tires, and other household items into vertical planters and use their livestock’s natural animal waste for fertilizer.

In my work with women farmers, I have seen that, as in so many other sectors, women are the key to our success in agriculture and environmental policy. Women are integrating environmentally friendly practices into agriculture production. They are cultivating the crops that will combat food and nutrition crises, and stimulate local markets in a time of economic crisis. I’ve heard much talk about a green revolution, but rarely are women’s voices taken into account in our conceptions of it. The time has come to make those voices heard, to make agricultural and environmental policy reflective of those who are most impacted by it. The green revolution is a women’s revolution.

Dear Member of Congress:

As retired officers of the U.S. military across all branches of the armed services, we are writing to express our support for the President‟s FY 2011 International Affairs Budget request, a fundamental pillar of U.S. national security and foreign policy. The critical programs in the International Affairs Budget invest in the non-military tools of development and diplomacy, foster economic and political stability on a global scale, strengthen our allies, and fight the spread of poverty, disease, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

Continuing the bipartisan precedent set by the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration views the International Affairs Budget as part of the national security funding alongside Defense, Homeland Security, Intelligence, and Veterans programs. However, the International Affairs Budget remains under-funded, representing 1.4 percent of the entire federal budget and less than 7% of our total national security funding.

Our view is shared by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has stated that “America's civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long – relative to what we traditionally spend on the military, and more important, relative to the responsibilities and challenges our nation has around the world.”

Secretary Gates and other military leaders believe, as we do, that our national security is dependent not only on a strong military force but also on increased investments in the full range of diplomatic, development and humanitarian tools funded through the International Affairs Budget.

The United States must combine its strong military with robust, effective civilian tools of international development and diplomacy to secure its national interests in an era when many of the challenges of the 21st century recognize no borders. While our military power can provide the logistics and organizational support to help those in need in times of humanitarian crisis, as demonstrated by our current efforts in Haiti, it can only help create the conditions necessary to allow the other tools of statecraft – our diplomatic, development and humanitarian programs – to effectively address these issues.

Balancing our military power with the range of International Affairs programs funded by the International Affairs Budget is critical to stabilizing fragile states, combating terrorism, and deterring threats before they reach America's shores. Therefore, we urge you to support no less than the Administration‟s request of $58.5 billion for the International Affairs Budget.

Sincerely,

General Michael W. Hagee, USMC (Ret.)
Co-Chair, National Security Advisory Council

Admiral James M. Loy, USCG (Ret.)
Co-Chair National Security Advisory Council

 

(This letter included a signatory list of 51 other military leaders)

As Eleanor Roosevelt asked, "When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"

Make your voice heard in the US Senate. Click this link where you will find information assisting you in making a call to your senator. We must insist on full funding for the International Affairs Budget.

BP’s disastrous uncontrolled oil eruption continues beneath the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the health and livelihood of fishermen, ecosystems, and communities from the Mexican coast to the Florida Keys. It’s more important than ever for U.S. voters to have a serious debate about fixing our unsustainable energy path.

Rebuilding our economy on the foundation of energy efficiency and clean renewable energy is essential to protect against further environmental catastrophe, and it is the best way forward for workers, industry, and strong communities.

Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) released a draft of their American Power Act climate bill on Wednesday. It places a firm limit on carbon emissions and puts a price on pollution so the economy recognizes the true cost of poor energy choices. This is an important, but still incomplete, step in the climate and energy debate.

Capping and pricing carbon emissions is key to well-crafted policy to rein in greenhouse gases. But there are five key policy areas to build a low-carbon economy that will drive investment in high-paying jobs, clean technology, and new industries. The American Power Act includes some of these investment-driving policies, and others exist within energy bills that have been passed in the House and Senate. It is essential that these five pieces be moved together as components of a single comprehensive strategy to build a low-carbon economy in the United States.

First, we must focus efforts to reduce oil dependence on vehicles and transportation infrastructure since 70 percent of oil is used in this sector and two-thirds of this is for passenger vehicles. Making vehicles more fuel efficient, commercializing electric vehicles, developing cleaner alternative fuels, and investing in public transportation infrastructure would be the fastest ways to reduce oil use while promoting innovation in the auto industry.

Second, we must place a high priority on establishing a strong national renewable energy standard that would require at least 25 percent of energy to be produced from renewable sources by 2025. A national RES would foster the long-term market stability essential to our competitiveness in renewable energy manufacturing—since 30 countries already have a robust RES—and would ensure that investment capital flows into developing new projects.

Firm market demand for renewable energy would also create jobs in every region of the country. Colorado’s 30 percent RES by 2020 has made Colorado home to more than 1,500 clean energy companies—up 18 percent since 2004 to make it the state’s fastest-growing economic sector—and the fourth-highest concentration of clean energy workers in the country. This is a model for the nation.

Third, we must make buildings more energy efficient. Energy efficiency is the cheapest, cleanest, and most abundant source of energy we have. Buildings account for 70 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption and 40 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. Retrofitting buildings to be more efficient is an effective way to reduce global warming pollution and put construction workers back on the job at a time when we have 25 percent unemployment in the building and construction trades.

Fourth, the federal government must play a role in ensuring that financing is available for new clean energy investments. Programs established in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—such as the grant program to aid wind farm developers, loan guarantee programs to support renewable energy projects, and advanced manufacturing tax credits—can jump start the production of clean energy in the short term. But we must supplement these measures with stable, long-term financing mechanisms for the development and commercialization of clean energy technology. One way to provide low-cost financing for the commercialization of clean energy is through a public “Green Bank” that works in partnership with the private sector to open credit markets and motivate businesses and entrepreneurs to invest in energy innovation.

Finally, we must make sure to do no harm. The federal government lagged behind the rest of the world on clean energy during the last decade, and states and local governments from New Mexico to Texas to Pennsylvania led the way in demonstrating that clean energy creates more jobs, better public health, and more vibrant economies. National policy must not roll back state and local innovators’ ability to continue to lead. But it is also important to allow federal authorities like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate in the public interest in light of the BP oil spill disaster. The American Power Act limits states’ and the EPA’s authority in key ways, and these measures should be reconsidered.

The recent legislation introduced by Sens. Kerry and Lieberman may be imperfect, but it is an important step in the right direction. We must rein in carbon emissions for the health of the planet. But we will do this best if we use these policy mechanisms to build vibrant new industries and create new jobs from the efficient use of renewable energy. A comprehensive climate strategy will revitalize America’s economic engine.

From the GEMS webpage:

Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS) is the only organization in New York State specifically designed to serve girls and young women who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking. GEMS was founded in 1999 by Rachel Lloyd, a young woman who had been sexually exploited as a teenager. GEMS has helped hundreds of young women and girls, ages 12-21, who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking to exit the commercial sex industry and to develop to their full potential. GEMS provides young women with empathetic, consistent support and viable opportunities for positive change.

Mission

Girls Educational and Mentoring Services’ (GEMS) mission is to empower young women, ages12-21, who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking to exit the commercial sex industry and develop to their full potential.  GEMS is committed to ending commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking of children by changing individual lives, transforming public perception, and revolutionizing the systems and policies that impact sexually exploited youth.

Vision

GEMS’ vision is to end the commercial exploitation and trafficking of children.

Philosophy

We believe that all young women have great beauty and worth, and the potential for future success. The voices and experiences of youth survivors are integral to the development and implementation of all GEMS’ programming.

History

GEMS, was founded in 1999 by Rachel Lloyd, a young woman who had been sexually exploited as a teenager. Ms. Lloyd came to the U.S in 1997 as a missionary to work with adult women exiting prostitution. While working with adult women in correctional facilities and on the streets, Ms. Lloyd observed the overwhelming need for services for young women at risk for sexual exploitation who were being ignored by traditional social service agencies. It became clear that specialized services were essential for this disenfranchised population.

From a one-woman kitchen table project, GEMS has grown to a nationally recognized and acclaimed organization and now is one of the largest providers of services to commercially sexually exploited and domestically trafficked youth in the US. GEMS advocates at the local, state and national level to promote policies that support young women who have been commercially sexually exploited and domestically trafficked.

gems-girls.org/media-center

My paternal grandmother, Maryanne, dreamed of becoming a writer. For a short spell in the 1950s, she edited manuscripts for a literary agent—male, of course. Hunched over stacks of paper at a Formica-topped kitchen table while dinner got a little burnt nearby, she was blissfully happy. It was the closest she would ever come to realizing her dream. For the majority of her life, she worked exclusively in the home exclusively as a “homemaker.”

My maternal grandmother, Joan, boldly went where few 18-year-old girls from Kearney, Nebraska, dared to go in the early 1940s—Chicago, Illinois. She attended a teachers college while volunteering at Jane Addams’ Hull House, the progressive community house founded by the Nobel Prize-winning social activist in the late 1880s. My grandma Joan would ring her own heavy school bell for just a few years, as a kindergarten teacher, before starting a family and staying home forevermore.

My own mother thought that the perfect job for her, circa 1965, would be secretarial work. She heard that if you finished your work early enough, you could read novels all day at your desk. Then the late 1960s turned everything upside down, and suddenly my mom was protesting the Vietnam War right alongside my dad, earning top grades as an undergraduate at Colorado State University, and applying to social work graduate school.

She worked throughout my childhood—mostly a juggling act of consulting, part-time, and unpaid community work. She was often sick with an autoimmune disorder, but deeply fulfilled nevertheless. My parents’ commitment to shared parenting proved noble, but ultimately unrealized—with my dad logging long hours at his inflexible law firm.

My partner’s mother, a Caribbean immigrant, worked nights as a nurse while raising four kids on her own in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She would sew suits from scratch for the doctors at the hospital for extra money and occasionally make elaborate weddings dresses for their daughters. She didn’t fret over failed promises or her own unfulfilled dreams; she worked tirelessly so that her children could thrive. And they did. They became a blues singer, a nurse, a technology expert, and—my partner—a film editor.

The majority of Americans know that women, in most cases, must earn a living, and that, just like men, we find fulfillment in an honest day’s work.

On the precipice of my 30s, I look back at my matrilineal history and that of my partner’s family—and more broadly at the historical shifts described in this book—and I feel profoundly grateful. There is no longer any real debate over whether women should work. Perhaps some on the fringes still wonder, but the majority of Americans know that women, in most cases, must earn a living, and that, just like men, we find fulfillment in an honest day’s work—whether we fix plumbing, care for the elderly, or design websites. If we are lucky, we even find a vocation where, as theologian and novelist Frederick Buechner puts it, our “deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

There have been such significant gains in so many of the areas examined in these pages—government, business, education, health, religion, and, yes, even the still-frustrating arenas of pop culture and mainstream media. You’ve just read many of the exciting headlines:

• Women are indeed half of all U.S. workers
• Workplaces are beginning to change to allow workers to be able to earn an income
  for their family and still meet their family responsibilities
• Studies prove that women-led businesses have an improved bottom line
• Women are more educated than ever before
• Religious institutions are being compelled to evolve to accommodate the working woman
• Women’s access to contraception has put them in a position to design
  their lives as never before
• Men want to be present fathers!

For all of this and so much more, I raise a glass and toast those who have spoken up, stood out, and refused to settle for indignity or injustice.

I thank the icons, such as Anita Hill and Lilly Ledbetter, who took great personal risk to expose large-scale injustice. I thank the lesser-known, but no less courageous, fighters, among them Bernice Sandler, the architect of Title IX, and Sarah Claree White, a union organizer at the Delta Pride catfish plant,1 who led one of the largest strikes of African American workers in Mississippi. I thank the women all across the country who have dreamed despite their deferment and worked tirelessly so that the next generation could live less restrictive lives.

The women (and men) of my generation have come of age at a time when feminist values are simply in the water. On “Free to Be… You and Me,” the early 1970s children’s record album, Harry Belafonte and Marlo Thomas sang to a new generation, “Some mommies are ranchers, or poetry makers/Or doctors or teachers, or cleaners or bakers/Some mommies drive taxis, or sing on TV/Yeah, mommies can be almost anything they want to be.”2 Immigrant mothers have served as courageous models—caring for their families while working double shifts, all with an eye on their children’s education and upward mobility; their daughters watch them and learn that femaleness is about dynamism and determination. Even if our parents didn’t call themselves feminists, we—the daughters of the 1980s and 1990s—were raised with a new and improved edict of equality: You can do anything you want to do, just like your brothers.

It’s a good thing we’ve been so pumped up on post-gender idealism, because there are some big battles ahead. As the authors of these pages attest, we need comprehensive policy reform that reflects an accurate picture of the American worker—not Mr. Cleaver putting in his eight hours and then wandering home for dinner on the table at 5:30 p.m., but men and women customizing their 15-plus hour days out of a unique mix of work (both in office and remotely), caretaking (for both children and aging parents), community activism, religious and spiritual practices, entertainment, and exercise.

Even if our parents didn’t call themselves feminists, we—the daughters of the 1980s and 1990s—were raised with a new and improved edict of equality: You can do anything you want to do, just like your brothers.

It will take a truly diverse and cohesive coalition to make sure these reforms are not seen as “women’s issues,” but critical quality-of-life concerns for all. Likewise, we must work across class, ethnicity, religion, and political party if we want to shape policy that benefits all Americans, not just the privileged few who sit in the hallowed halls of power or have the resources to lobby. From the federal level on down, we need policies that honor Americans’ ideals for their own lives and support their human right to have safe working conditions, economic stability, access to education, quality health care, and time with their loved ones and communities.

Men need to own their responsibility in championing these causes alongside women. For too long, women have taken on a disproportionate amount of the burden of shifting government and workplace policies to be more family friendly—causing the unintended side effect of having these efforts framed as niche issues. Labor unions—a great force throughout American history—have helped, pushing for the passage of family and medical leave and state-paid family leave laws, and we’ll continue to need their collective voices on our side. More gender-balanced leadership and widening the fairly narrow rights framework to a more broad-based quality of life framework would be exciting.

Of course, the notion that motherhood could somehow be niche is so preposterous as to be comical. After all, we all have a mother! And beyond that, there is nothing niche about wanting to have a well-rounded life, about needing flexibility and support, about wanting to be there when your 2-year-old says her first word or your father his last. Thanks to the feminist movement, young men are increasingly seeing these issues as directly related to their own lives. Recent studies confirm that men, just like women, have an optimum fertility window,3 and even those who don’t want children are waking up to the precious gift of having a rich life outside of work. The challenge ahead is for men to grapple for the language and the framing that inspires them to join the fight. Women, for our part, must make room for our male partners and colleagues to own their share.

Men need to own their responsibility in championing these causes alongside women. For too long, women have taken on a disproportionate amount of the burden of shifting government and workplace policies to be more family friendly.

There are also some battles ahead that are far less direct—the stuff of self-examination, social and cultural shape-shifting, open interpersonal communication, experimentation, and scariest of all, bold and unapologetic dreaming. Women must face the ways in which they take on too much of the burden of housework and then resent their partners for it. Men must grow comfortable leaving work meetings early for family obligations and being transparent with colleagues about it. Supervisors must try out policies that acknowledge their workers as whole human beings and neighbors must collaborate on child care, meal preparation, and extracurricular opportunities to ease the burden of raising children in isolation.

We must all envision the more equitable, humane, and balanced America we want to live in and then fight like mad to make it a reality. I see all of these less definitive shifts buzzing beneath the surface of so much of this comprehensive report—the not-so-subtle subtext to all the analysis about workplace structure, government policy, and health care reform.

We must all envision the more equitable, humane, and balanced America we want to live in and then fight like mad to make it a reality.

You see, we can reform our government, social, and workplace institutions, but until we re-imagine our own lives, we will forever be caught in the crossfire of thwarted personal expectations. My generation must carry on our backs the burden of so many unresolved interpersonal and social issues and so many unanswered questions about the best way to shape a life, a family, a nation.

Take my own history as an example. I have never had a role model of a marriage where two partners truly shared caregiving responsibilities. I’ve had tremendous mentors in the daily effort to maintain a committed partnership and a messy, loving family, and the humble search for work that is both satisfying and economically secure. But I also come from a long line of women with physical and mental health issues, unrealized potential, and unspoken regrets. I feel as if I carry this complex mix—the enlightened mentoring and the swallowed failures—around with me as I try to envision my own life as a working woman and, some day, mother.

Of course, those institutional reforms will enable me and my generation to make decisions within a healthier, more just context. The women of my generation will face far fewer double-binds than our mothers or grandmothers. The men of my generation will enjoy a far broader, though still not universal, cultural assumption that they are not only workers but also nurturers and partners. But I still believe that it is incumbent upon all of us to reinvent the most intimate of spheres in order to fully realize the potential afforded by these institutional reforms.

What does this new future look like?

It is my friend Charlton, staying home with his newborn baby boy while his wife works, reveling in all the new discoveries that both of them—father and son—enjoy in that precious time. It is my friend Megan, walking into her boss’s office and negotiating the salary she deserves without apology. It is my dad, retired and learning to cook for the first time, smiling from ear to ear when my mom tells him how delicious his stir-fry tastes. It is my friends Rachel and Yvette, sustaining a loving partnership via Skype and a thousand beautiful emails despite the U.S. government’s refusal to recognize their union and grant Yvette a visa. It is partners across the country, sitting down with one another and having honest conversations about what they need in order to be fulfilled individuals and happy families—and most important, honoring their commitments even when it bucks cultural conventions. It is—and this is hard to admit—women letting go of some of the unhealthy expectations that we’ve had of ourselves and giving men more room to contribute, fail, learn, and own their part in the domestic sphere.

As men remake the role of father—from antiquated “big daddy” protector to emotionally attuned, involved mentor—and as women remake the role of mother—from martyred queen of the home to full human being with a capacity to lead in many areas—our country’s ideas about leadership will also continue to evolve.

Just as policy reform can create a more comfortable climate within which individuals can make courageous choices, those courageous choices can then influence a more enlightened politics at large. As men remake the role of father—from antiquated “big daddy” protector to emotionally attuned, involved mentor—and as women remake the role of mother—from martyred queen of the home to full human being with a capacity to lead in many areas—our country’s ideas about leadership will also continue to evolve.

It’s such an exciting moment. We are balanced on the precipice of a whole new way of working and living, not just for women, but for everyone. If we can hold tight to our vision of what a more humane, healthy, and just America looks like, pull up our sleeves and do the hard work—side by side—that manifesting this vision will require, then the rewards could be breathtaking.

We could birth differently. No longer forced to have a baby and then rush back to work, women and men together could share the first, sacred months of life and head back to work with their bonds secured. We could learn differently, finally honoring our rhetoric in this country about providing equal education for all and supporting more diversity within every field. We could work differently, expecting dignity and fair wages in our workplaces and using the best technology has to offer to be more efficient within our truly customizable work schedules.

We could govern differently. Lawmakers could craft policies that support individuals and families, not just the bottom line. We could care differently, coordinating not just with our equally harried partners but also with federally subsidized child care centers, more cohesive neighborhood groups, and religious and spiritual communities.

We have leaders at the highest levels who—both symbolically and fundamentally—support Americans, men and women,
in their quest for fulfilling work and personal lives. We have momentum.

We could worship differently.“Bowling alone” no more, we could depend on our religious and neighborhood communities to feed our spirits while starving our sense of alienation. We could even die differently, surrounded by those who love us, those who are supported to be present during the moments that matter most in our lives.

My grandmothers, and my mother especially, lived amazing, courageous lives, but they were limited by the times in which they were born—the economic constraints, the fearful clinging to joyless gender norms, the lack of a collective analysis and an inspired vision. My generation faces its own challenges today—the Great Recession, a dangerous and insecure world, the threat of environmental ruin, the residue of decades of gender disparity—but the world today also boasts ripe conditions for thoroughgoing change.

We have the opportunity that comes from crisis—the battered economy has shaken up just about everything. Our environmental crisis points toward our undeniable interconnection. We have leaders at the highest levels who—both symbolically and fundamentally—support Americans, men and women, in their quest for fulfilling work and personal lives. We have momentum.

Alice Walker once wrote, “And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see—or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.”4 In these pages, I have read the sealed letter. It is a call to action to my entire generation to agitate for the world that our mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, didn’t get to live in, but dreamed of—for us.

Courtney E. Martin is the award-winning author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women.

THE ARTS AND LEARNING IN THE 21^ST CENTURY

The fine arts, defined as dance, drama/theatre, music, and visual arts, are identified as CORE SUBJECTS in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001, and enjoy strong support from the public, current and former presidential administrations, and from a variety of national business, parent, and education organizations. Even though the public, policy makers, and the education community support arts education, the arts have generally been marginalized in our public schools. This situation has led advocates for arts education to find research-based and data driven ways to promote arts education.

As states, including Ohio, anxiously await information about the status of their Race to the Top applications, scientists are conducting research and finding evidence showing the benefits of music and arts education programs related to student achievement, school improvement, and 21^st Century skills. 

But, how is this information being communicated to policy makers, education leaders, and those who will be implementing the Race to the Top strategies in Ohio’s schools? 

And, what can music and arts educators in Ohio do to disseminate this information?  How can this research become part of Ohio’s plan for increasing student achievement and closing achievement gaps among groups of students, and be used to prepare students with 21^st Century skills?

AN EDUCATION IN THE ARTS PREPARES STUDENTS FOR CAREERS AND CITIZENSHIP

Over the past years music and arts education advocates have focused advocacy efforts on the “value added” dimensions of an education in the arts, such as how an education in the arts prepares students for careers in the arts, citizenship, and the role of the arts in the economic development of communities.

For example, educational opportunities in the arts first and foremost prepare students for competitive careers in the $316 billion communication, entertainment, and technology industries.  Students trained in the arts pursue careers as musicians, visual artists, dancers, actors, directors, choreographers, videographers, graphic designers, architects, photographers, designers, filmmakers, arts administrators, educators, and other professions. Recently there has been a tremendous growth in the visual/audio technologies industries (IT, software, computer graphics, digital, etc.), which has allowed artists to use a variety of media to create art, and has spurred growth in other technology industries.

According to “The Creative Industries Report” (2008), published by Americans for the Arts, more than 612,095 businesses nationwide are related to the arts and employ 2.98 million people.  In Ohio there are 17,917 arts-related industries that employ 88,063 people. Many of these arts-related jobs require employees to apply higher order thinking skills and concepts in math, science, and technology in addition to their knowledge and skills in the arts. 

These well-educated and creative individuals contribute to their communities in many ways.  According to a study published by the National Endowment for the Arts called The Arts and Civic Engagement: Involved in Arts, Involved in Life, people who value the arts also support civic activities, volunteer more often, attend community events, and promote a positive quality of life through individual and group activities. The Ohio Arts Council (OAC) reported a similar finding in its report, State of the Arts Report in 2001. The OAC study also found that the role that the arts plays in the life of a child directly correlates to the likelihood that the child will be involved in the arts as an adult.

AN EDUCATION IN THE ARTS STIMULATES CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

New brain imagining techniques have opened a new research area focused on how the arts affect brain development and learning. Scientists in this area of research are showing how an education in the arts helps students to think creatively and use their imaginations to solve problems.  These are the skills that the business community and policy makers believe all students should develop in order for the U.S. to become more competitive in the world economy. In fact, leaders in Great Britain launched in 2007 an initiative called “The Children’s Plan” which elevates the status of arts education and the arts in the holistic development of children, and makes artistic expression a key part of a child’s education. “The Children’s Plan” calls for every child in Britain to experience five hours of cultural learning every week as part of their school curriculum, and include participation in organized music, dance, theatre, and visual arts.

In December 2009 the Ohio Department of Education joined the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a public/private organization that advocates for policies at the local, state, and national levels to support an educational system that prepares students for careers and citizenship.  The Partnership, which includes education, policy, and business organizations, along with the Conference Board, and other business organizations have identified arts education programs as a way for students to develop and demonstrate 21^st Century skills.  Business leaders are recognizing how individuals trained in the arts find unique ways to solve business problems, because they are not hindered by conventional business practices and rules. (February 25, 2007 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by Kate Pielemeier called “Human resource experts say workers could benefit more from art than from math and science”) In Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, the author writes that the 21^st century will belong to self-actualizing citizens who can conceptualize important ideas that will lead to innovations to solve the problems of the day.

Participants in a national poll entitled “The Imagine Nation: Findings from a Nationwide Survey of 1000 Likely Voters” (January 15, 2008) conducted by Lake Research Partners, identified an education in the arts as a way for students to develop creativity and their imaginations.  According to the poll there is a specific group of voters (coined in the survey as the “imagine nation”) who believe that opportunities for students to be creative and use their imaginations are missing from schools today.  They believe that an education in the arts would strengthen creativity and 21^st Century skills.

Here in Ohio the General Assembly approved a provision included in Am. Sub. HB 1, the state’s FY10-11 budget, to establish a Center for Creativity and Innovation within the Ohio Department of Education.  In November 2009 Superintendent of Public Instruction Deb Delisle and First Lady Frances Strickland hosted a meeting with interested stakeholders to discuss the goals, purpose, and vision for the Center for Creativity and Innovation.  The Superintendent is permitted to establish the Center, which is required to monitor, develop, and disseminate information about creative and innovative educational practices, including practices in arts education and creativity. (ORC 3301.82). A second meeting is being planned for spring 2010, and stakeholders, including advocates for arts education, are looking forward to a statewide effort to expand and support creativity in our state.

Music and arts educators are very familiar with 21^st Century skills, because learning in the arts provides students with so many opportunities to apply critical thinking, creativity, imagination, innovation, collaboration, and more in arts courses.  Ohio’s five academic content standards in the arts align well with the 21^st Century skills.

LATEST RESEARCH SUPPORTS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ARTS LEARNING AND 21^st CENTURY SKILLS

Researchers have found that an education in and through the arts actually affects student learning in four critical areas:  cognition, creativity, communication, and culture.

More than 65 distinct relationships between the arts and academic and social outcomes have been documented in a compendium called Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, R. Deasy, Editor. This compendium was published by the Arts Education Partnership (AEP) in June 2002, and includes 62 research studies on arts education in all arts disciplines: dance, drama/ theatre, music, and visual art. All of the studies selected for inclusion in Critical Links demonstrate how the study of the arts enables all students to reach high levels of academic achievement; improves overall school performance; and creates the context and climate that are most conducive to learning in schools.

Since the publication of Critical Links in 2002 new research studies have been published that have expanded knowledge about the effects of arts training and brain development.

The Neuro-Education Initiative of The Johns Hopkins University School of Education with the support of the Dana Foundation hosted a national summit on “Learning, Arts, and the Brain” on May 6, 2009.  More than 300 educators, scientists, school administrators, and policy makers attended the summit to explore “the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, the arts, and learning.”

On November 19, 2009 a report on the summit was released.  The report is called “Neuroeducation:  Learning, Arts, and the Brain.  Findings and Challenges for Educators and Researchers from the 2009 Johns Hopkins University Summit” by Mariale Hardiman, Susan Magsamen, Guy McKhann, and Janet Eilber, and Barbara Rich Editor, and Johanna Goldberg, Associate Editor.

According to the report, the emerging field of neuroeducation includes researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and education.  These scientists study “how children learn and what practices promote and sustain the learning process.” They use brain-imagining techniques to study how learning, including learning in music and the arts, affects brain development.  These scientists are also conducting research to determine if the changes in the brain that happen as a result of learning the arts can transfer (near transfer and far transfer) and help students learn other disciplines.

The 2009 Summit expanded on a report published by the Dana Foundation in March 2008.  The Dana report, entitled “Learning Arts and the Brain” (Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium Report), included the results of a three year study conducted by researchers at seven universities on how early training in the arts changes the brain and enhances other aspects of cognition.  The researchers found a correlation between arts training and improvements in student creativity, cognition, attention, and learning. 

The 2009 Summit provided updates from those who participated in the original Dana study and others, and proposed future research priorities and opportunities.  Participants at the 2009 Summit were asked to think about how the new research could help teachers improve instruction; how studying an art form helps overall students learning; and how the process of learning the arts improves academic performance. 

The following are highlights from the 2009 Summit presentations.  The page numbers cited refer to the report:

•Ellen Galinsky, president of the Family and Work Institute, reviewed her research on students who are not engaged and not learning skills in school.  She has found that the arts can be a “jump-starter” for these disengaged students.  But, in order for the arts to expand in schools, she believes that school district policy makers need to see a “substantive body of work affirming the benefits of arts training…” p.5.

•Michael Gazzaniga, Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara, was one of the participants in the Dana study and summarized for Summit participants the following eight findings of the 2008 Dana report:

-“An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition.”

-”Genetic studies have begun to yield candidate genes that may help explain individual differences in interest in the arts.”

-”Specific links exist between high levels of music training and the ability to manipulate information in both working and long-term memory; these links extend beyond the domain of music training.”

-”In children, there appear to be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical representation, though not in other forms of numerical representation.”

-“Correlations exist between music training and both reading acquisition and sequence learning. One of the central predictors of early literacy, phonological awareness, is correlated with both music training and the development of a specific brain pathway.”

-“Training in acting appears to lead to memory improvement through the learning of general skills for manipulating semantic information.”

-“Adult self-reported interest in aesthetics is related to a temperamental factor of openness, which in turn is influenced by dopamine-related genes.”

-“Learning to dance by effective observation is closely related to learning by physical practice, both in the level of achievement and also the neural substrates that support the organization of complex actions. Effective observational learning may transfer to other cognitive skills.” p. 13.

•Michael Posner, Ph.D. University of Oregon, spoke about how neuro-images of the brain provide a way to analyze the executive attention network, which is involved in self-control. This research has identified distinct brain circuits for dance, music, visual arts, and drama/theatre, and has found that controlled training on attention-related tasks by young children “…increased the efficiency of the executive attention network and also improved other learning domains.”  p. 5.

According to his presentation, “Research suggests that each art form involves some neural network, although this assertion is not without dispute and requires further study. But it’s more or less generally agreed that performance or practice of any art form strengthens the network involved in that art form. So on the question of whether the brain is plastic—can it change with experience—yes, it certainly can.” p. 15.

This work is leading to a “plausible mechanism by which arts training could now influence cognition and IQ.” p. 5 

Posner is also studying candidate genes that might explain why different people have different interests in the arts.

•Elizabeth Spelke, Ph.D. Harvard University, shared the results of three different studies that were conducted to examine whether or not children who received music training also showed any associated advantage on certain mathematics abilities.  The research showed that mild amounts of arts training had no effect on certain cognitive functions. But, children who received “….moderate or intensive music training showed significantly higher performance on tasks that tapped into just one of the three core abilities: there was a reliable difference in their representations of geometrical properties and relations.” p.  20.

•Brian Wandell, Ph.D. Stanford University, presented his research showing the tight correlation between music training and phonological awareness “.the ability to differentiate and manipulate speech sounds – which is a major predictor of reading fluency.” P. 6.

To understand the connection Wandell studied the fibers connecting parts of the brain and the role that they play in carrying signals between the two hemispheres of the brain.  According to his research, “One of the things that we found—that others have found also but that was quite striking in our study—was that in the children who had music training, the amount of this training they had in the first year of our study and over the three years of the study, was correlated with their reading skills. Music training explained 16 percent of the variance in the children’s reading abilities compared to those who did not have music training.”  P. 15.

•Ellen Winner, Ph.D. Boston University and Gottfried Schlaug, MD, Ph.D., Harvard University, reported about the research that they have been conducting on the cognitive and brain consequences of music training in early childhood, and near and far transfer of learning to other disciplines. They are conducting a five-year longitudinal study comparing students with instrumental training and a control of students without instrumental training.  Based on 15 months of data, these researches have found that the corpus callosum of the students with instrumental training differentially changed with the intensity of musical training and motor skill development. Changes also occurred in the brain’s auditory regions for students with instrumental training compared to the control group.  “This is the first study to show brain plasticity in young children as a function of musical instruction.” p. 5  Although some near transfer of skills has been observed, far transfer of learning to other disciplines has not been observed so far.

WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE 2009 SUMMIT FOR MUSIC AND ARTS EDUCATION ADVOCATES?

The 2009 Learning, Arts, and the Brain Summit provides valuable research on the effects of arts education on student learning and brain development.  The scientific method and peer-review process that the researchers used to conduct their studies strengthens the quality of the results.  According to the teachers and administrators who attended the conference, the high quality research can be used to strengthen support for arts education programs in schools and justify cost; change instructional practices and support more arts integration in schools; and change pre-service education programs for all teachers.

Participants of the 2009 Summit also identified a number of issues related to research, policy, and practices.  For example, teachers voiced concern about the accessibility of scientific information on the benefits of arts education and arts integration.  They recommended that a multi-subject area pedagogical model for arts integration be developed to facilitate arts integration in schools; that a model be developed for the creation of schools in which scientists and teachers can conduct scientific research together; and recommended that more longitudinal studies be conducted on the achievement of students in schools with arts integration programs.

WHAT CAN MUSIC AND ARTS EDUCATION ADVOCATES DO HERE IN OHIO?

1)Share the scientific research on arts learning and brain development in “Neuroeducation:  Learning, Arts, and the Brain” with colleagues in your school, members of your board of education, parents and members of your community, and lawmakers. For example, include a sample of the findings of the 2009 Summit in newsletters, concert programs, and in information for parents during Parent-Teacher Conference meetings. 

2) Participate in reform efforts in your school district by joining school improvement committees, especially those that will be implementing Race to the Top (RttT) strategies in your school district.

Arts education should be included in all of the RttT assurances:  1)  Standards and Assessments; 2)  Statewide Longitudinal Data System; 3)  Great Teachers and Leaders; and 4)  Turning Around the Lowest Achieving Schools.  For example, research shows how arts education programs contribute to school improvement efforts; student achievement; help keep students in school to graduate; and provide students with opportunities to learn and hone 21^st Century skills. (Assurance #4). 

In addition, as Ohio implements a Statewide Longitudinal Data System, the Ohio Department of Education should consider reporting data about the achievement of students who participate in arts education programs. (Assurance #2).

3) Gather information about how your own arts education program prepares students to be successful in the 21st Century.  Share this information with parents, administrators, members of your board of education, and the public.  For example, identify students who have won awards and recognitions, and ask them to write an article or essay about how music has contributed to their success.  Include these essays on performance programs and in newsletters.

4)  Present an annual report about music and arts education in your school district to your board of education, and show how your program supports creativity, imagination, innovation, and cultural understanding, etc., and prepares students with 21^st Century Skills.

5)  Attend forums and meetings, and respond to surveys about preparing students for the 21st Century, and give examples about how students can be better prepared through the arts.

6) Find your comfort level for advocacy, and engage in activities that support music and arts education that fit your personality, schedule, and circumstances.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This bibliography also includes a number of related articles published in “Critical Links” that relate to brain research and 21^st Century Skills.

American Association of School Administrators, The School Administrator, “The Arts at K-12’s Center Stage, Finding Ways to Increase Student Access to Creative Learning.” March 2008. 

American Association for Curriculum and Development, Educational Leadership, September 2009.  Several articles address 21^st century skills.  “Why Creativity Now”, by Sir Ken Robinson, p. 22, explores how creativity can be taught.

Americans for the Arts, 2008 The Creative Industries Report.  Web site: www.artsusa.org.

Ariniello, Leah. Brain Briefing. “Music Training and the Brain”, Society for Neuroscience, March 15, 2006.

ArtsEdge, the National Arts and Education Network. Web site: http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/teach/les.cfm

Arts Education Partnership, Arts Integration Frameworks, Research & Practice: A Literature Review. 2007.

Web site: http://www.aep-arts.org/resources/integration.htm

Arts Education Partnership, Champions of Change, The Impact of the Arts on Learning, Washington, D.C. 1999.

Arts Education Partnership, Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, Washington, D.C., June 2002.

Arts Education Partnership, Gaining the Arts Advantage: Lessons From School Districts that Value Arts Education, President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and Arts Education Partnership, 1999.

Atkinson, Robert D., and Janet Hugo, Dennis Lundgren, Martin J. Shapiro, and Jerald Thomas, “Addressing the STEM Challenge by Expanding Specialty Math and Science High Schools”, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, March 2007. Web site: http://www.ncsssmst.org/CMFiles/Docs/STEM%20Final_03_20_07.pdf

Bridges Corporation, Bridges: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science. Web site: http://www.bridgesmathart.org.

Catteral, James S. “Involvement in the Arts and Success in Secondary School”. In R. Deasy (Ed.), Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, Arts Education Partnership, Washington, D.C., June 2002.

Catteral, James S. “The Arts and the Transfer of Learning”. In R. Deasy (Ed.), Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, Arts Education Partnership, Washington, D.C., June 2002.

Center for Arts Education, “Staying in School:  Arts Education and New York City High School Graduation Rates”, October 19, 2009.  http://www.cae-nyc.org/.

CollegeBoard, SAT, “Academic Information” Students who complete courses in the arts. Web site: http://www.collegeboard.com.

Conference Board,  Ready to Innovate, March 2008.

Dana Foundation,  Learning, Arts, and the Brain, March 2008, Web site at http://www.dana.org.

Danko-McGhee, Kathy, and Ruslan Slutsky, The Impact of Early Art Experiences on Literacy Development, The National Art Education Association (NAEA). Web site:  http://www.naea-reston.org/literacy.html.

Envision Schools Web site:  http://www.envisionschools.org/page.php?page_id=14

Graziano, Amy B, Matthew Peterson, and Gordon L Shaw, “Enhanced Learning of Proportional Math Through Music Training and Spatial-Temporal Training”, Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, R. Deasy (Ed.), Arts Education Partnership, Washington, D.C., June 2002.

Hardiman, Mariale,  and Susan Magsamen, Guy McKhann, and Janet Eilber, and Barbara Rich Editor, and Johanna Goldberg Associate Editor, “Neuroeducation:  Learning, Arts, and the Brain.  Findings and Challenges for Educators and Researchers from the 2009 Johns Hopkins University Summit”, November 19, 2009.

Harris Poll, June 13, 2005.  http://ww3.artsusa.org/information_resources/press/2005/2005_06_13b.asp

Hennessy, John L. “The Role of the Creativity and the Arts in a 21st Century Education.” The Stanford Report, April 26, 2006. Web site: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2006/april26/hentext-042606.html

Kennedy Center Alliance for Arts Education Network, The Arts Beyond the School Day: Extending the Power, 2000.

Lake Research Partners, The Imagine Nation: Findings from a Nationwide Survey of 1000 Likely Voters, January 15, 2008.  Web site:  http://www.namm.org/press-room/news/news-releases/2008January24/view.

McMurrer, Jennifer.  Instructional Time in Elementary Schools: A Closer Look at Changes for Specific Subjects, Center on Education Policy, February 20, 2008.   Web site: http://www.cepdc.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=document.showDocumentByID&nodeID=1&DocumentID=234

Minton, Sandra, “Assessment of High School Students Creative Thinking Skills: A Comparison of the Effects of Dance and Non Dance Class.” In R. Deasy (Ed.), Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, Arts Education Partnership, Washington, D.C., June 2002.

National Association of Schools of Math and Science

Web sites: http://www.ncsssmst.org/ and http://www.ncsssmst.org/CMFiles/Docs/STEM%20Final_03_20_07.pdf)

North Central Regional Education Laboratory, EnGauge 21st Century Skills: Literacy in the Digital Age - Creativity, 2003.  Web site: http://www.ncrel.org/engauge/skills/invent4.htm

Ohio’s Instructional Management System

Web site: http://ims.ode.state.oh.us/ode/ims/Default.asp?bhcp=1

Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Overview of Framework.

Web site: http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/

Phi Delta Kappan, Annual Poll and The 2005 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll, September 2005

Pielemeier, Kate, “Human resource experts say workers could benefit more from art than from math and science”. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 25, 2007.

Web site: http://www.postgazette.com/pg07038/759915-28.stm)

Pink, Daniel, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Riverhead Books, 2006.

Society for Neuroscience News Release, “New studies show factors responsible for enhanced response to music; effects of growing up in a musical environment; and how music may be used as therapy.” November 9, 2005.

Sturrock, Carrie. “Playing Music Can be Good for Your Brain”, SF Chronicle, November 17, 2005.

The Art Institute, Science Art and Technology.

Web site: http://www.artic.edu/aic/education/sciarttech/index/html

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “An Unfinished Canvas: Allocating Funding and Instructional Time for Elementary Arts Education” and “An Unfinished Canvas: Teacher Preparation, Instructional Delivery, and Professional Development in the Arts”, Center for Education Policy at SRI International, May 7, 2008. 

Thorpe, Vanessa, and Nicholas Watt, “Schools are told to make artistic experience ‘a key part of childhood”,  The Observer,  December 9, 2007.

Web site:  http://politics.guardian.co.uk/publicservices/story/0,,2224780,00.html.

Tishman, Shari, Dorothy MacGillivray, and Patricia Palmer. “Investigating the Educational Impact and Potential of the Museum of Modern Art’s Visual Thinking Curriculum: Final Report’. In R. Deasy (Ed.), Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, Arts Education Partnership, Washington, D.C., June 2002.

Vaughn, Kathryn “Music and Mathematics: Modest Support for the Oft-Claimed Relationship.” In R. Deasy (Ed.), Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, Arts Education Partnership, Washington, D.C., June 2002.

The history of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) spans the better part of the last 65 years, certainly not “ancient” in relation to our nation’s centuries since independence or the 145 years since Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, but many nonetheless.

The NSLP’s early beginnings came from an idea fomented by Ellen Richards as a way to feed hungry children and help them learn.  This model was pushed forward by many states and cities including New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. The idea, going back over 100 years, was that hungry children can’t think and malnourished children can’t learn.

In her 2000 treatise on the history of School Lunch in America, Antonia Demas wrote the following:

In 1904, in a book entitled Poverty, Robert Hunter made the claim that in New York City alone between 60,000 and 70,000 children arrive at school each day hungry.

It is utter folly, from the point of view of learning, to have a compulsory school law which compels children, in that weak physical and mental state which results from poverty, to drag themselves to school and to sit at their desks, day in and day out, for several years, learning little or nothing. . . learning is difficult because hungry stomachs and languid bodies and thin blood are not able to feed the brain.  The lack of learning among so many poor children is certainly due, to an important extent, to this cause (Hunter: 216-17). 

Fast forward 100 years and we see an unprecedented national discussion of school lunch.  From Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, to Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Mrs Q’s Fed Up, Ed Bruske’s Tales From a DC Kitchen, Farm to School, Healthy Schools Campaign, Slow Food’s Time for Lunch, Marion Nestle,  Kate Adamick, The Orfalea Foundation’s S’cool Food and F3’s Lunch Box; everyone seems to be talking about school lunch.  And not just talking, but agreeing that most school food is not as healthy as it could/should be and that we need more stringent guidelines and money to fix it.

In fact the USDA (who oversees the NSLP) “hired” the Institutes of Medicine (IOM) to evaluate the program and their report stated that we need better food and its going to cost more money.  Great – so we all agree, right?

Well wrong, everyone is in agreement, except perhaps Sen. Blanche Lincoln and her committee’s Healthy Kids Act, which Tom Philpott from Grist called dismal.

The bottom line, The Healthy Kids Act suggests that the reimbursement rate that the USDA gives to schools for children who qualify for free lunch be increased by 6 – yes 6 cents.

And what do we think that Mr. Lincoln, who graces those 6 pennies, would say about our government caring so little about the health of America’s children that we would propose to keep them healthy by allocating 6 pennies to their lives?

Let’s count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 pennies; hmmm and what can we buy for that in the store?  Let’s ask Blanche, the next time she goes shopping, what those 6 pennies will buy.

In the past I have attacked President Obama’s budget that would have allocated approximately 10 – 12 cents per child for lunch and now I find myself defending it.  It never occurred to me that we might end up with less.

As a lunch lady who spends all of her days trying to put the best possible food on kids’ plates, it is unconscionable to me that as a nation we would accept 6 pennies for the health of our children.

If you feel as I do that this is just totally unacceptable, then stand up and be counted.  Join us by writing your elected officials and letting them know that our children and their future are worth far more than six paltry Lincoln pennies.

Julia Ward Howe, author of "Battle Hymn of the Republic," witnessed first hand the ravaging effects of war and was determined to nurture the awareness that peace was not only possible, but our only blessed solution. In 1870, she proclaimed a "Mother's Day of Peace" to remind women of their divine calling as the ultimate peacemakers.

Please read (below) and be inspired by this powerful call to peaceful action on the part of women.

By Julia Ward Howe

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace. 

More on Julia Ward Howe: womenshistory.about.com

Dear Jim,

We met about 18 months ago via video-conference and, at that time, I shared with you a story of an 11-year-old girl that I was working with. I'm not sure if you remember her, but I'd like to share this story with you again.

"Bethany" had been in foster care since she was 2 years old and had bounced from foster home to foster home, until at 11 she was introduced to a friend of her 14-year-old sister. This friend was a 32-year-old man who lured her in with promises of a stable home and love, everything she'd been craving her whole short life. He took Bethany from New York down to a hotel in DC, bought her some ‘sexy' clothes, and took pictures of her and then posted those pictures on your site, Craigslist. Bethany didn't really think there was anything unusual about this, after all her 14 and 16-year-old sisters were both being sold on Craigslist too.

For nine months, almost until she turned 12-years-old, Bethany's pictures were posted on Craigslist. Sometimes she was "NEW IN TOWN" when her pimp/trafficker would bring her to cities up and down the East Coast, posting her pictures in different regions. Sometimes she was "HOT N SEXXY FOR U" with her price listed as 150 roses. Night after night, adult men clicked on her ads, dialed a number and ordered her as easily as they would've ordered a pizza.

Night after night, adult men came to the hotel room she was being kept in and had sex with her, or rather raped her; at 11-years-old she was too young to consent. Night after night, her pimp collected the money that he made from her and if it wasn't enough he beat or whipped her, badly enough that she has permanent scars.

No one who saw Bethany's pictures ever clicked on the link on your site and reported "suspected exploitation of minors and/or human trafficking to the appropriate authorities." No law enforcement ever found the ads that her trafficker posted in the midst of the hundreds and hundreds of other ads of girls for sale.

Bethany, and her two sisters, was sold on your site, just like hundreds of other girls I've worked with have been. Just like thousands of other girls and young women across America are sold every night. It's hard to imagine that as a businessman with a sense of social responsibility that this wouldn't sicken and horrify you. The thought that you could profit even one dollar, let alone millions of dollars, in any way from the sale of children has to deeply sadden and make you outraged to the point where you would want to ensure that this can't happen - at least not on your site. I would've hoped that would be your automatic response anyway.

Unfortunately that hasn't been the case. Your responses to the criticism though raise some interesting points.  Yes, while there may be a few people who are concerned about "casual sex" on your site, the vast majority of people who are signing petitions and raising their voices about this issue are doing so on behalf of girls like Bethany who don't have a voice.

Yes, while there are of course other sites, magazines and Yellow Page ads where girls and women can be bought, very few of them have the brand-name recognition that Craigslist does, and besides, the "other people are doing it too" argument seems to be one that our mothers taught us when we were in kindergarten didn't hold much water (kudos, by the way, to New York Magazine for dropping all their sex for sale ads last year).

And yes, while Craigslist has been cooperative with law enforcement on this issue, the sheer volume of postings of girls for sale on each night, in each city makes truly targeting traffickers and pimps a Sisphyean task.

This campaign isn't about a "cynical misuse of a cause as important as human trafficking as a pretense for imposing one's own flavor of religious morality." In fact, for those of us on the ground who work with girls like Bethany every day, it's saddening to have our work and our advocacy efforts framed as such. While we recognize that Craigslist taking a stand on this issue won't end commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking in our country, it will send a powerful message to the adult male buyers that Craigslist will have no part in, nor take any profit from, the sale of 11 (or 14, or 16) year old girls.

Rachel Lloyd

Rachel Lloyd is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

Rachel Lloyd, founder of GEMS, and Shaquanna, a GEMS youth outreach worker, testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law on the commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking of children.

Inevitably, during times of disaster or war, there will be individuals and groups who attempt child rescues without the appropriate paperwork or clearance. Foreigners put local children at risk through child abduction, trafficking and adoption fraud after the Asian Tsunami of 2004 and during the Darfur conflict in Sudan.

The Haiti incident recalls a similar episode in Chad when a French group called Zoe’s Ark attempted to airlift children out of a war zone. Bergquist finds the French government’s response inadequate. Since France did not hold its citizens accountable for attempted child trafficking, the illegal behaviors were ultimately dismissed, leaving no clear answer on how the actions of “humanitarians” engaged in private and illegal airlifts of children will be treated by law enforcement in the future.

Such cruel, or simply ignorant, acts will continue to occur in Haiti unless protective policies are put into place quickly.

The humanitarian response to the thousands of Haitian children who have been displaced from their families or even “orphaned” must proceed with caution. Medical evacuations from Haiti to the United States have resumed, and children are being flown in on humanitarian visas for medical care. The Shriners Hospital of Springfield, MA, is one facility receiving a small number of Haitian children. “Once these children enter into a phase of rehabilitation, they will need temporary care with families in the U.S., and we are already beginning to work on that issue,” said social worker DeGuerre Blackburn, executive director of Voices for International Development and Adoption (VIDA) and a consultant in this process. But Blackburn emphasizes that conducting DNA tests and creating a DNA databank are also necessary because eventually reuniting children with their families in Haiti is the number one priority. The DNA will help to reunite children with uncertain identities, a challenge in most post-disasters environments.

As research on adoption fraud in Guatemala has shown, a process that ensures DNA test reliability and validity will be essential to protect Haitian children. While VIDA’s ethical approach will work for a small group of children, a large-scale effort is needed for all Haitian children now arriving in the United States for medical care.

The first priority should be to identify and task an organization with a strong information management system—and no financial interest in intercountry adoption—to manage DNA matching. This could be a government organization, or even better, a reputable nongovernmental organization that can quickly and efficiently develop and implement the process. Collaborating with the private sector, which can donate the tests as a form of humanitarian disaster assistance, is also a good option.

Besides compiling a DNA database, coding the Haitian children’s visas is another protective policy that should be implemented. Currently, the number of Haitian children who will legally enter the United States under humanitarian visas for medical purposes is not being officially reported; these children could be tracked by simply marking their visas, and then using the DNA database to identify them when it is time for a visa renewal.

Regardless of how policymakers handle the early stages of a child rescue, social workers must continue to caution anyone hoping to adopt a Haitian “orphan.” Already, there are reports of scams, with families in the United States being offered the opportunity to “adopt,” and unscrupulous individuals requiring up-front fees and payments for adoption services.

Aside from the adoptions that were already being processed when the earthquake struck Haiti, there have been no new legal adoptions since. This will change in time, but in these early days social workers must caution hopeful families and, when called to assist with adoptions, only coordinate with reputable organizations. It is important to remember that not all those who call themselves “adoption professionals” have credentials and experience in child welfare placement, especially in the context of disaster.

From a psychological perspective, Saint Louis University Professor Judith Gibbons warns against further disrupting the lives of children in crisis zones. “The research literature on helping children get through crises, including war and natural disasters, suggests that they need normalization,” she said. “So, even the best intentioned shift in their environment—to different language, culture, food, or caretakers—carries with it additional stress, and a delay in psychological recovery.”

Because many Haitian children are being airlifted in this crisis, they must be treated in a culturally competent manner. Haitian social workers, who can work in the child’s language and attend to the needs that Haitians understand best from their cultural lens, should be included in the process whenever possible.

The U.S. government is now tasked with developing short-and long-term child welfare policies. Because Haiti is not a Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (HCIA) signatory nation, U.S. commitment to that international standard does not apply. And as Bergquist points out in an earlier article, even if the standard did apply, the HCIA has inadequate guidance for adoption in the context of natural disasters.

The Haitian disaster has forever changed the lives of an entire nation. To help its children stay together with family after receiving medical care, policies must be put in place that combine DNA tests, database management and ethical and culturally competent social work. That is how to protect Haiti’s children.

For more information about the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, see the author’s website: www.HagueEvaluation.com

Learn more about Haiti Rewired, Wired.com's new online community geared to keep Haiti in the news long after the immediate crisis ends.

Journal of Global Social Work Practice, Volume 2, Number 2, November/December 2009

Open Letter to Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton

Dear Secretary Clinton:

On February 2, 2010, there were very good opinion pieces in the New York Times about the Haitian Orphan crisis ( http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/haitis-children-and-the-adoption-question/ ). We, as professional social workers/human service providers and social work scholars support this discourse, however in the immediate situation we want to underscore a pressing concern. Many of the children who are coming to the USA for emergency medical care are arriving on humanitarian visas and in crisis. We ask that you consider the following:

Some of these children have uncertain identities and in time, determining their family connections will be difficult therefore DNA should be a part of the procedures so that they may be returned to their parents or extended family, when possible.

The USA medical facilities where these children are being treated have the capacity to take tests and, in addition a centralized DNA database must be developed and managed by a party that has no financial interest in intercountry adoption.

The visas that are being issued by the Department of State can be coded as to identify such a child (example: humanitarian/medical/minor Haitian). Coding in this manner would be a second data point for the aforementioned database, insuring that the whereabouts of these children are clear so that they may be returned to their families if and when that is possible.

It is our position that such management of information is necessary so that the best interests of the child are honored and the prevention of child abduction is assured.

All of the above points are explained in greater detail at Americas Quarterly http://www.americasquarterly.org/haiti-orphans

As social workers, we further support the position statement of International Social Services which is found at: http://www.iss-ssi.org/2009/assets/files/news/haiti_position%20CIR_ENG.pdf

Finally, the news reports indicate that a US-based faith group has been arrested in the Dominican Republic for an illegal airlift of children. We implore the US government to cooperate with international law enforcement to clarify this incident—determine if it was indeed child trafficking and act accordingly. Our nation’s commitment to the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, set forth to prevent abduction and trafficking of children, requires that we act responsibly in law enforcement related to such alleged activities. Even if the Convention does not apply to Haiti , it is our opinion that we must act according to these values to insure the best interests of the child .

If and when adoption of Haitian children re-opens as an option, managing this system ethically will be essential to insure human rights of peoples who have already been so devastated.

Sincerely,

Karen Smith Rotabi, PhD, MSW, MPH
Assistant Professor, School of Social Work
Virginia Commonwealth University
ksrotabi@vcu.edu

Kathleen Bergquist, LCSW, JD, PhD Associate Professor, School of Social Work
University of Nevada at Las Vegas

DeGuerre Blackburn, ACSW
Executive Drector Voices for International Development and Adoption
Hudson,NY

Mary Katherine O'Connor, PhD
Professor, School of Social Work
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond , VA

Jini L. Roby, JD, MSW , MS
International Child Welfare Consultant
Associate Professor
Brigham Young University
Provo , UT

Denise Gammonley, PhD, LCSW
Associate Professor
Hartford Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholar
School of Social Work
University of Central Florida

Carmen Monico, MSc, MSW/PhD student
School of Social Work
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond , VA

Rosemary J. Link, PhD
Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs
Simpson College
Indianola , Iowa

John Cosgrove PhD, Professor Emeritus
Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service
Chair International Special Interest Group, New Jersey Chapter
National Association of Social Workers

Jenny Jones, PhD, MSW
Associate Professor, School of Social Work
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond , VA

Humberto Fabelo, PhD, MSW
BSW Program Director
Associate Professor, School of Social Work
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond , VA

Ruth McRoy, PhD
Research Professor and Ruby Lee Piester Centennial Professor Emerita
School of Social Work
University of Texas Austin , TX

Etta Lappen Davis, MA.Ed.
Principal & Child Welfare Consultant
Etsky Consulting, Bolton , MA

Karen Smith Rotabi, PhD, LMSW, MPH
Assistant Professor
Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work
1001 West Franklin Street
Richmond, VA 23284-2027
(804) 828-5411 (office)
(804) 828-0716 (fax)

The biggest mystery lurking in the depths of the nonprofit sector these days is the murky question of measurement: how do we know if charities have an impact? Frankly, with $1 trillion at stake in the nonprofit sector, measurement is a Loch Ness monster that must be slayed.  And lately, there seem to be a cavalcade of white knights reporting for duty.  Journalists, bloggers, armchair evaluators, foundation CEOs and self-styled philanthropic "analysts" pontificate solipsistically about logic models, theories of change, "Morningstar-like" rating services, sector-wide taxonomies, Zagat-guides and philanthropic "data management systems."

It's all so audacious... Unfortunately, everyone seems to be blindly whacking away at the piñata of measurement without even knowing what's inside.   And that's the bigger problem: it's not that we can't figure out the answer - it's that we can't seem to ask the right questions.  Solving this problem requires a clearer understanding of what we are trying to accomplish with measurement.

First, we need to stop acting like social scientists.  It is the job of social scientists to obsess over causation: "how can we prove that this program works?"  But that's the wrong question for anyone other than social scientists to ask.  Formal program evaluation is a research-based inquiry designed to isolate exogenous variables through a randomized control study in order to demonstrate a statistically significant correlation to the desired outcome.  Sound complicated?  It is.  Most nonprofits are not in the business of proving theory; they are in the business of improving outcomes. For example, social science has proven that students who are more interested in school have higher attendance.  A nonprofit doesn't need to re-prove that theory: it just needs to implement it effectively and measure the increase in student interest.

Second, we need to stop acting like lawyers.  Lawyers worry about risk: "how do we know that our money isn't being wasted?"  In pursuit of effectiveness, many donors, journalists and analysts ask lawyer-type questions.  For example, the BBB Wise Giving Alliance rates nonprofits on four "accountability standards": how they govern; how they spend money; truthfulness; and transparency.  The answers to these questions may help a donor weed out bad apples, but it's not going to provide much information about an organization's positive results.  Take any one of the 700 breast cancer research organizations in this country.  Is one inefficient if it spends more than 50% of its funds on overhead?  Maybe.  But what if that's because the organization has a team of medical researchers working in-house to develop new testing protocols that are brought to market faster and cheaper than outsourcing to academics?  Hmmmm.  Now maybe not so much.

By asking the wrong questions about nonprofit effectiveness, we continue to focus on the wrong data.  Most people interested in measurement aren't really trying to prove a theory or control for risk; what they really want to determine is value. Which organizations will deliver the best results for outcomes that we care about? If we want to prevent breast cancer, is our $25,000 better off with Susan G. Komen, Y-Me or Race for the Cure?  Accountability and evaluation data won't answer that question.  Most often, the real measurement inquiry is not about effectiveness (what works) or accountability (what doesn't), but about performance (what works best).

So how do we generate performance data? We need to accept that we operate within a market: a $1 trillion social capital market that consists of donors, foundations, corporations, governments and consumers who allocate resources to social outcomes.  Measurement is the currency of the social capital market.  Measurement is the proxy for value created: positive social outcomes.  Social investors need to start asking better questions - not about downside risks or efficacy (those should be a given) - but about performance and results.  Second, funders must shift their thinking from financing charitable activities to "purchasing results."  Nonprofits must also change their thinking: from fundraising to "selling outcomes."  To figure out what to measure, nonprofits must engage their stakeholders, research meaningful metrics and experiment with trial and error.  Over time, these measures will norm to what the market finds most compelling.  It's that simple.  There is no Excalibur waiting to be pulled out of a rock.

Take the example of Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC).  RMHC used to measure the number of houses, the number of families served and the number of dollars raised.  These seemed logical, and no one really questioned them.  But when RMHC engaged some of its key stakeholders (e.g. hospitals and McDonald's franchisees) they found that the hospitals most valued the impact that RMHC had on patient satisfaction, bed turnover and children's adherence to treatment.  Franchisees valued the impact RMHC had on consumer "trust" and employee turnover.  When RMHC began measuring and communicating these outcomes, higher revenues followed almost immediately.

The time to start is now.  Here are some practical steps that both nonprofits and funders can take to shift from social science to social capital market.

Nonprofits:

• Directly engage your stakeholders and clarify the outcomes they value most
• Align your programs to produce outcomes that the "market" values
• Do some quick research and then start tracking the best "proxy" measures you can; refine as you go
• When funders ask whether your programs are "effective" clarify what they're really looking for
• Build outcomes into your fundraising plans and get your development director into the conversation early

Funders:

• Think through what "success" means and translate your program goals into clear outcomes
• Make your outcomes visible and transparent to peer funders and to nonprofits
• Work with nonprofits to refine their metrics to be as compelling and credible as possible
• Use formal evaluations only when you are testing a new theory or program strategy
• Analyze your grants and investments on a "cost per outcome" basis to determine value

At the end of the day, we must all agree on one thing: we cannot research our way to a better world, and we certainly cannot comply our way there.  We can only perform our way to achieving the outcomes we cherish for society.

Technology has taken over our classrooms here at Bishop Dwenger! Ten years ago, many people had heard about the world wide web but did not have a clue what it was. Today, teachers and staff at Bishop Dwenger have not only been exposed to the internet, but also have access at home and school on a regular basis.

Our student information system, PowerSchool, can be accessed at home or at school, and teachers, students, staff, and parents are able to access “real time” grades. Technology has become as common as reading a book here at Dwenger. According to EdTech Action Network, there is significant data that suggests technology has become a fundamental aspect in our educational system.

The Good

With overhead LCD projectors in all classrooms but two, most of our teachers use these projectors with PowerPoint as a teaching tool. They also use them to access teaching videos on the internet, show movies, go on virtual field trips (a favorite is to view an autopsy for anatomy class) and, of course, do lots of research.

We now have two computing labs in the Business Department, five labs in the English Department, two mobile labs that can travel from room to room, one static lab, and a graphics art room with 26 computers. We have computers for the newspaper staff, yearbook staff, Saints Alive!, cafeteria (to keep track of the lunches served), and even a computer in the boiler room to monitor the heat levels of the boiler. Dwenger has well over 400 computers to help serve the students, teachers and the support staff.

Our technology has also expanded this year with the addition of an alert system. First and foremost, this system is designed to notify parents if we have an emergency at Bishop Dwenger High School. It can also be used to get information out to our parents in a timely fashion via email, phone, and text messaging, if the need arises.

The Bad

There are two major issues we have to overcome here at Bishop Dwenger that concern technology. One is cost and the other is internet safety. I believe we have internet safety well in hand. We have a firewall in place that is designed for school internet safety. Don’t get me wrong, we do have quite a few computer savvy students who are always trying to “break through” to Facebook, or some other site that they should not get to, but with very little success.

In addition, our spam filter blocked over a million emails last week, of which 98% were flagged as inappropriate. Sometimes, however, our firewall is too safe and a parent’s email is blocked.

When using our parent alert system, we have some parents who do not want to be texted except for emergencies, and others who do not want to receive “basic information” via the phone or texting. Examples of these alerts would be a two hour delay or a reminder about an upcoming event. This year we tried to make sure that we met everyone’s needs, but occasionally we failed.

We are working on a plan to improve our parent alert system for next year, so you would be able to receive all the information sent out or just the emergency information. We would like to be able to send a voice message reminding parents of an all-school Mass or a plea for help with Saints Alive! raffle tickets without offending anyone. We would also like to be able to “please all of the people all of the time.”

The cost of technology is very high. Trying to keep up with the maintenance alone is expensive. Yearly contract fees, electrical needs to keep everything running to code, and keeping up with the latest and greatest in technology causes our department to have one of the largest budgets here at Dwenger, so when budget cuts happen, our department gets hit hard. I can still hear Mr. Tone saying to me again last year, “OK, Mary, you’re going to have to make those computers last just one more year,” and somehow, we always do.

I believe Bishop Dwenger is on the cutting edge when it comes to technology, but we still have a way to go. We are always trying to make things better for our students and future students. This can only be accomplished with your support. We thank you for the opportunity to make this happen.

Non-profit GrowingGreat makes it easy to join the movement with their free  community Healthy Living Festival, a fun-filled family event where visitors will learn to make healthier choices in food, fitness, and eco-friendly lifestyle.  Come spend the day nourishing the mind, body, and soul with wellness experts, great food, interactive booths, and live entertainment. 

GrowingGreat will host its fourth annual Healthing Living Festival (HLF) Sunday, May 16  from 12-4 p.m. at the 13^th St. Plaza (Metlox) near Manhattan Beach Blvd. in downtown Manhattan Beach where attendees will learn how to live a balanced eco-friendly lifestyle, eat nourishing foods, and get healthy. For 10 years GrowingGreat has been inspiring healthy eating through school garden and nutrition education programs throughout Los Angeles. 

“Whether it’s food, fitness, environment or lifestyle, the Healthy Living Festival will have something for all ages,” says GrowingGreat founder and event organizer Peggy Curry.  “If you’re curious about greening your home, integrating therapies for your body, or learning new ways to relax you’re going to get inspired from our experts.”

At this free community event, attendees of all ages will get tips from wellness experts, participate in interactive fitness challenges, sample high-quality foods, and view the latest green products while enjoying live entertainment from band Leftover Cuties.  There will be over 65 inspiring exhibits including nutrition and fitness experts,food samples, holistic practitioners,  cooking and garden demonstrations. 

HLF features something for everyone: play soccer with Chivas USA, climb a Fulcrum rock wall, rebound with  Kagoo Jumps  and experience yoga, pilates, and meditation.  GrowingGreat’s (GG) chef’s showcase features local and celebrity chefs  demonstrating how to make GG inspired dish with seasonal, local and close-to-the-source foods.  Explore Raw with Rod Rotondi, Founder, Leaf Organics Executive Chef Author, Raw Food For Real People. Food exhibitors include Whole Foods Market, Mucho, Farm Stand, Veggie Grill, Sashi, and La Sirena Grill. For those seeking green options for the home and garden, attend a mini-eco session with water conservation and landscape experts Surfrider and Enviroscape.  

Over the past 30 years childhood obesity has more than tripled. The generation of children growing up today is the first expected to have shorter life spans than that of their parents. Now more than ever a push for an increase in both knowledge of nutrition as well as healthy eating habits is needed.     Prior to First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign (letsmove.gov), GrowingGreat’s proven, one-of-a-kind program has provided education in classrooms and training to teachers, community leaders and families - including interactive classroom nutrition lessons, school garden and farm-to-school harvest of the month programs and more. As the most experienced program of its kind in the United States, it serves more than 8000 students and their families annually.

GrowingGreat (growinggreat.org) has been leading the national trend as a nutrition education and school garden organization, dedicated to inspiring children and adults to adopt healthy eating habits. Its charge is to provide comprehensive nutrition education to school students, their families and community partners. They also implement a garden program, which gives students the opportunity to plant and harvest foods. Children are then able to taste fresh and nutritious foods and discover that they can be enjoyable to eat. Since 1999, GrowingGreat has reached over 30,000 students and families in the Los Angeles area by implementing programs in 20 schools and six school districts.

GrowingGreat’s Healthy Living Festival is sponsored in part by Whole Foods Market, Applegate Farms, Earthbound Farms, Nature’s Path, Clifbar and the Manhattan Beach Farmer’s Market. 

Event parking is available at the metered city lot under Metlox Plaza (entrances on both Morningside Drive and along Valley Drive outside Shade Hotel) and on Manhattan Beach Blvd.  Free parking is also available at within walking distance at American Martyrs Church and off Valley Drive between 13^th and 19^th streets near City Hall and Live Oak Park.  Look for signs on Manhattan Beach Blvd. for alternative parking options.

For more information or to get a complete list of HLF participants, please visit growinggreat.org, contact Sarah Gelb at (310) 939-9216 or sarah@growinggreat.org.

President Barack Obama’s bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform meets for the first time tomorrow, its 18 members tasked with addressing the knotty issue of the federal government’s middle- and long-term budget deficits. The immediate premise for the commission is an accounting problem: how to make the government’s books start to add up. But what is truly at stake is the economic prosperity and security of our nation and its people, as well as the quality and breadth of important public services on which we all rely.

Our country’s success in achieving our national goals is, in no small measure, determined by how we spend and tax—by key investments ranging from national defense to higher education, from scientific research to retirement security. In the end, the exercise the commission is undertaking is as much about the opportunities and security that America offers all of us as it is about dollars and cents.

As an accounting problem the commission’s task is substantial. Even after we get past the current very large deficits caused by the fiscal policies of the 2000s and magnified since 2007 by the Great Recession, the total federal budget deficit is currently projected to top $1 trillion in 2018 and never get any lower. That means sustained deficits at the unsustainable level of over 5 percent of our national gross domestic product. It means the government’s publicly held debt obligations will top 90 percent of GDP by the end of the decade—the highest level as a share of the economy since 1948.

The presidential order creating the new commission divides the problem into one very specific instruction to the commissioners and one less specific one. The more specific charge is to propose recommendations that by 2015 would bring the federal budget to primary balance, which means that total tax revenues must match total spending except for interest payments on the national debt. Congressional Budget Office analyses suggest this would require closing a 2015 budget gap of about $250 billion. Beyond 2015, the commission has a less specific goal: to “propose recommendations that meaningfully improve the long-run fiscal outlook.”

The ultimate test for the commission will, however, be whether it can make the tax and spending numbers add up in a way that best serves our country’s future while garnering the support of the commission’s diverse membership. To achieve this, we believe the core questions for the commission can be distilled to six:

• How do we make government more efficient and productive to achieve savings and better serve the American public?


• How do we spur economic growth?


• How can we bring the defense budget into alignment with fiscal realities while meeting our 21st century national security needs?


• How can we achieve critical savings in the health care arena?


• Can changes to Social Security be a part of the solution?


• Can we increase tax revenues?

Let’s address each of these in turn.

How do we make government more efficient and productive to achieve savings and better serve the American public?

The first step in addressing our fiscal problems must be to ensure we are getting our money’s worth for every dollar spent by the federal government. If we can improve government productivity, then we will make important progress toward the commission’s fiscal goals while improving the quality of our public investments and services and increasing the public’s confidence in its government. There are three parts to making the federal government work better.

First, government programs that are ineffective or duplicative should be eliminated or consolidated. The government should be doing what works and getting rid of what doesn’t. The commission should step up and identify specific cuts, combing every corner of the budget from the Department of Defense to the Department of Education, from agricultural subsidies to the huge range of subsidies administered through the tax system. The commission should also recommend changes in government processes so that, going forward, ineffective or duplicative programs aren’t adopted in the first place or are quickly recognized and eliminated.

Second, managers in government agencies should have the authority and incentives to make their programs operate effectively and efficiently. Government reform isn’t a new idea, but the fiscal imperative means we must be open to far more dramatic steps to motivate and empower those best situated to drive change—public servants charged with and accountable for getting results.

Third, a range of government practices in procurement, contracting, and technology should be reformed. The Obama administration already anticipates $40 billion in savings from reforms to the contracting process. Improvements to federal information technology systems could additionally reduce costs by another $16 billion a year.

Together, these three steps would ensure that the absolutely necessary things federal government does—from the large government programs discussed below to the relatively small amounts spent on federal services for low-income families and vulnerable children, air traffic control, consumer protection, law enforcement, and myriad other programs—are done well. In an era of scarcity, to have successful programs address our national needs requires that each dollar is spent efficiently and effectively—both to make our tax dollars go farther and to ensure that there is public support for necessarily public solutions to public problems.

How do we spur economic growth?

The best way bring down budget deficits is through a growing economy that naturally generates more tax revenue, reduces the strain on government safety net programs, and enables the government to more affordably service our national debt.

Slashing government spending in ways that hurts economic growth would be decidedly unhelpful. Conversely, public investments that catalyze growth in the private sector can help the fiscal outlook greatly. Key public policies that can underpin private innovation, investment, and competitiveness, and thus economic growth, include:

• Improving education


• Public investments in basic scientific research


• Jumpstarting new technologies in low carbon energy and health


• Ensuring availability of credit


• A fair, responsible tax system for individuals and corporations

We cannot afford to do everything we might like, but, in making tough decisions, the commission’s proposals need to be constructed with an eye on medium- to long-term economic growth as much as on medium- to long-term fiscal deficit reduction. Without the former it will be impossible to have the latter.

How can we bring the defense budget into alignment with fiscal realities while meeting our 21st century national security needs?

When President Obama announced a new U.S. strategy for Afghanistan in December 2009 he spoke of the need for a confined set of objectives that could be achieved in a specified time frame, citing in part the need to limit the mission to one that could be achieved at “reasonable cost.” The president took some criticism for citing cost as a basis for constraining security objectives. Yet, it is evident that at some point more defense spending can make a country weaker—if “strength” is rightly understood to be about more than just short-term military power.

A country that becomes economically weakened because it has shortchanged necessary domestic investments and carries excessive levels of debt will also eventually be a weaker country across the board. An overall defense strategy that is fiscally unsustainable will fail every bit as much as a strategy that shortchanges the military.

Even with a built-in assumption that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be concluded before 2015, U.S. defense spending in that year is still projected to be at a higher level, adjusted for inflation, than in any year in the entire post-World War II period prior to 2005. The United States spends almost as much on defense as every other country in the world combined. In 2015 spending on defense and other “security” activities will take up close to 20 percent of the federal budget.

And, of course, if the projected savings from the end of the two current wars we are fighting don’t materialize, or another war we cannot now foresee becomes necessary, then the budget deficit will be worse than anticipated. The upshot: The commission must address defense spending. Just some selected examples of acquisition savings include:

• Producing only one Virginia-class attack submarine per year instead of two, saving $2 billion


• Cutting the purchase of F-35 joint strike fighters in half, saving $4 billion


• Keeping missile defense systems in the research phase and delaying deployment until they work, saving $6 billion

The commission should also examine the larger strategic question of whether our country must maintain its post-9/11 ground force strength as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come to a close, and whether the current military pay structure and health benefits are necessary and sustainable going forward.

Finally, the commission should consider a unified security budget that includes all our instruments of national security, military and nonmilitary, as a way to ensure that our tax dollars are paying for what is most effective to ensure our national defense. Sometimes a dollar of foreign civilian assistance can advance our security more than a dollar of weaponry.

The bottom line is that without addressing defense spending, expected to be close to $700 billion in 2015, it will be difficult to reverse the growth of unsustainable deficits. The commission needs to consider whether this level of investment in the Pentagon is the best way to keep our nation secure.

How can we achieve critical savings in the health care arena?

Recently enacted health reform legislation contained a number of measures to reform the health care payment system to ensure greater efficiency while improving the quality of care. These reforms include:

• The bundling of payments to doctors for episodes of care, not the number of visits to doctors


• Accountable care organizations that reward health care providers for their quality of care


• Primary care medical homes to ensure effective preventative care


• An independent payment advisory board to ensure the government gets what it pays for in Medicare and Medicaid

These innovations are all designed to change the incentives in the health care system toward rewarding quality over use and prevention over expensive care. Conservatives allege there will be no savings associated with these steps, and CBO assigned minimal savings to these reforms in part because there is not sufficient track record around them. Yet many health care experts argue that such steps can have dramatic savings.

Harvard University Health Economist and CAP Senior Fellow David Cutler, for example, contends there are $600 billion in savings to be found over the long term through reforms like these. Indeed, heath care experts from across the political spectrum believe these initiatives hold significant promise for large-scale savings over the long term by moving a health care system plagued by fragmentation and overuse toward a more integrated, efficient system, with savings to the public and private sectors.

The potential for greater efficiency through payment reform across the whole health care system stands in sharp contrast with cost containment approaches that would limit spending by limiting public benefits. Such a misguided approach only shifts costs. It does not contain them. The key challenge, then, is to ensure that the Obama administration takes sufficiently aggressive action to realize the potential of these savings.

That’s why we suggest that as the administration moves to implementation, the commission should support steps to test, evaluate, and effectively adopt aggressive efforts around payment reform, and to promote partnership with the private sector to assure system-wide change in payment structures and incentives. Furthermore, as the recently enacted legislation moves forward in implementation, we will learn a great deal about the effectiveness of new methods of payment. As a result, we will be able to take additional steps in the legislative process.

The commission may want to identify additional action, such as triggers for reductions in expenditures, if health savings are not achieved to ensure more public and private sector savings as we learn from the initial steps of the legislation.

Can changes to Social Security be a part of the solution?

There is a projected long-term imbalance in Social Security that, while not a main driver of long-term federal deficits, will contribute to them and will eventually put benefit levels at risk. With private sector pensions becoming weaker, a strong Social Security system is especially important to economic security.

The commission has an opportunity to address the long-term imbalance and also strengthen the system for beneficiaries by putting in place a minimum benefit to ensure that no elderly person who has worked most of their life lives in poverty. Any reasonable reforms will have virtually no impact on the 2015 fiscal picture and a relatively modest effect on longer-term projections. But reforms could starkly demonstrate to skeptical debt markets that the United States is willing to take on a politically difficult fiscal issue—a demonstration that could put the United States in good stead with investors around the world.

Can we increase tax revenue?

Revenue increases will have to be part of any serious commission proposal. Doing it all through spending cuts is simply not realistic or advisable. Once one carves out the spending programs that realistically won’t be substantially cut in 2015 beyond current projections, such as Social Security, health care, veterans’ benefits, and several other programs, the level of cuts needed in the rest of government to close the $250 billion gap would be irresponsible and wildly unpopular once the consequences became apparent—entailing average cuts of about 16 percent across most programs, including defense spending.

To make meaningful progress in the fiscal outlook beyond 2015 requires revenue as well. Raising more tax revenues can, of course, have adverse consequences on economic growth. As of now, however, effective tax rates, especially on high-income earners, are at historically low levels. And the tax code today is riddled with loopholes. There is plenty of economic room for more revenue.

There is also precedent for this being a successful strategy. In 1993, taxes were raised under President Bill Clinton and the economy flourished. Economic performance in the post-1993 period was better than that seen during the two major tax-cutting eras of President George W. Bush. Average annual GDP growth after the 1993 tax increases was 3.9 percent, but after the Bush tax cuts was 2.5 percent. Investment growth after the Clinton tax increases was 10.2 percent annually, but only 2.7 percent after the Bush cuts. Similarly, income growth, wage growth, and employment growth were all higher following the tax hikes of 1993 than following the Bush era tax cuts.

By all these measures, performance was also better after 1993 than after President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts. And, of course, after the 1993 tax increases large federal deficits turned into surpluses in sharp contrast to the experience following the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, as detailed in the 2008 CAP report “Take a Walk on the Supply Side.” Additional revenues can and must be part of the solution, as they have been in the past.

Conclusion

These six central questions will largely govern the work of a successful commission and also the work of our nation as we try to reconcile our national priorities with our fiscal challenges. There is, however, a broader question for which the commission may also provide an answer: Can leaders of good will come together and reach across the divides between them to have honest discussions about our national challenges?

As the questions and commentary above suggest, there is simply no way to achieve the fiscal objective that we largely share without raising revenue and making hard choices on spending. That’s not something anyone wants to do, and there is much political hay to be made by digging heels in and playing tough. But it is precisely that short-term political instinct that stands in the way of achieving our shared medium- and long-term objectives. The commission will be a good test as to whether political leaders can get past such gamesmanship for the good of their country.

Back in the early 1960s, if a woman wanted a job she consulted the ads under the category “Help Wanted/Female.” There she would find openings for a “pretty-looking cheerful gal” to greet clients at an ad agency, or “an Ivy League grad with good typing skills,” or even an executive secretary, provided she met the main requirement: “You must be really beautiful.”  Being young and single was usually another job requirement.

Many employers then would not hire married women, and psychiatrists warned of the strain on marriages if a woman got used to earning her own money or making her own decisions. In fact, most Americans believed—in the words of one respondent to a Gallup survey in December 1962—that “being subordinate to men is a part of being feminine.” And these beliefs were codified in law. Many states had “head-and-master” laws affirming that wives were “subject” to their husbands. Only four states allowed a wife the right to a separate legal residence, and in no state was it illegal for a man to rape his wife. 

That was the context in which Betty Friedan published her shocking best seller, The Feminine Mystique, in February 1963, which urged women to seek work outside the home. In October of that year, President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women added to the controversy by issuing lengthy recommendations for more fully incorporating women into the public sphere.

By then, though, many housewives—and even more of their daughters—were already beginning to look beyond the home. Most Americans worried about what that might mean for the future of marriage, since conventional wisdom held that women who pursued higher education or a career were unlikely to marry, and if they did, their marriages were likely to end in divorce.

There was a kernel of truth to the idea that “female emancipation” undermined marital “solidarity.” The reason: When marriage was based on a woman’s lack of alternative options rather than on mutual respect or interdependence, then a woman who acquired educational and economic resources was indeed a threat to the stability of marriage. Economists called this the “independence effect.”

As more wives went to work in the 1980s, and as the women’s movement challenged old inequities at home and on the job, the divorce rate began to fall.

For the first 70 years of the 20th century, female college graduates were much less likely to marry than women with less education. And if a married woman took a job, the couple was more likely to ultimately divorce. In the late 1960s and 1970s as women poured into the labor force, divorce rates soared. By 1980 nearly half of American marriages were ending in divorce. The “independence effect” seemed inexorable.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. As more wives went to work in the 1980s, and as the women’s movement challenged old inequities at home and on the job, the divorce rate began to fall. From a peak of 22.8 divorces per 1,000 couples in 1979, the divorce rate dropped to 16.7 divorces per 1,000 married couples by 2005, and those more recently married seem to be following the same trend.  Today, divorce rates tend to be highest in states where fewer wives have paid jobs and lower in states where more than 70 percent of married women work outside the home. 

Education is now a plus for marriage, too. The difference in marriage rates between female college graduates and women with less education has almost entirely disappeared, and divorce rates for educated women have fallen more rapidly than for other groups. The result: educated women are now more likely to be married at age 35 than their less-educated counterparts. 

High-earning women—once considered the most divorce-prone of all females—have gained a similar advantage. Analyzing the 2000 and 2001 Current Population Surveys, Heather Boushey (then an economist as the Economic Policy Institute and now the co-editor of this report as senior economist for the Center for American Progress) found that women between the ages of 28 and 35 who worked full time and earned more than $55,000 a year, or who had graduate or professional degrees, were just as likely to be married as other working women of the same age.

Sociologist Christine Whelan reports that among women aged 30 to 44 earning more than $100,000 per year, 88 percent are married, compared to 82 percent of other women. And Whelan’s mate selection studies reveal that men now find career women and educated women much more attractive as marriage partners than in earlier decades. 

Today, the independence effect seems to increase marital quality and stability. When a woman is capable of making her own way in the world, she can be more selective in choosing a marriage partner and has more negotiating tools inside the marriage. This creates fairer marriages with improved marital quality for husbands as well as wives. Educated couples, especially those with egalitarian gender views, report the highest marital quality of all.

Stay-at-home wives also benefit from the independence effect. It was the women’s movement, not defenders of so-called traditional marriage, that convinced legislators to overturn the prevailing marriage laws in 1963—when 42 states and the District of Columbia all held that if a couple divorced and the wife had been a homemaker, she was not entitled to share the earnings her husband had accumulated during their marriage. 

Similarly, the pressure on husbands to take on more responsibilities at home was initiated by working wives, but these new expectations trickled down to male-breadwinner-only families as well, with the result that all men now do significantly more housework and child care than in the past. That’s good for children, who get more time with both their fathers and their mothers today than they did in 1963. And it’s good for couples, too, despite the stresses of trying to preserve quality couple time as expectations of parenting have expanded and wives spend more time at work.

Although there are many variations by racial and ethnic status, income, and occupation in the division of housework and the values that couples hold about both of them doing these chores, one of the biggest predictors of a wife’s marital satisfaction is whether she feels that the division of housework is fair. Meanwhile, one of the biggest predictors of a husband’s satisfaction is how often he has sex. And researchers report that women feel more sexual attraction to husbands who do more housework and child care. 

When a woman is capable of making her own way in the world, she can be more selective in choosing a marriage partner and has more negotiating tools inside the marriage.

Despite the group differences in men’s housework, the trend has almost universally been toward greater participation. Twenty-nine percent of wives reported in 1980 that their husbands did no housework at all. Twenty years later this had fallen to 16 percent. That makes for healthier and more stable marriages. Sadly proving the point is the new countertrend—marriages where the husband earns all the income and the wife does all the housework are now more likely to split up than marriages where husbands and wives share breadwinning and homemaking. 

The movement of wives into the workforce has been especially positive for well-educated couples with secure middle-class jobs, with husbands and wives both reporting increased marital satisfaction. Although highly work-committed, dual-earner couples experience more stress in juggling work and family obligations, couples where both husband and wife have challenging and rewarding jobs also report the highest sexual satisfaction. It helps, of course, that many of these dual-income parents can also afford to pay for outside—or sometimes live-in—child care and housekeeping. Nonetheless, employed wives earning all kinds of different incomes are less likely to suffer from depression than full-time homemakers with comparable household incomes. 

For couples with fewer resources to cope with the economic uncertainties of the last two decades, women’s growing economic roles have been more problematic, resulting in lower personal satisfaction and greater marital distress. This is especially true among lower-income couples and those with less education, who consequently have less access to secure, remunerative, or flexible jobs.

Balancing rigid work schedules with unpredictable family obligations—while also keeping up with everyday household cooking and chores—is difficult enough, but for most economically secure couples there have been enough enhancements from women’s work to generally raise the quality of most marriages. The couples who have experienced the most declines in marital satisfaction are those in which the wife would rather stay at home and works solely due to financial constraints, while the husband wants to be the sole provider and household authority but cannot achieve that goal, and yet does not help with housework when his wife has to go to work.

Trying to turn the clock back to a largely mythical Golden Age of marriage in the past will not solve these stresses. The threat to successful marriages today is not that women have changed too much but that other individuals and institutions have changed too little. We are no longer in the thrall of the feminine mystique, but two other mystiques continue to impede our progress.

Finding creative ways to allow men and women to integrate, combine, and sometimes alternate their responsibilities to work and to family could be the single most effective “pro-marriage” program of the 21st century.

One is the masculine mystique, which still leads some men to resist sharing household chores and to feel threatened by their wives’ work commitments or earnings successes. Pandering to this—as some politicians and pop psychologists advise—is not the answer.

The men most likely to experience psychological and health setbacks when they lose their job or when their wives earn equal or higher salaries are those who are more invested in their identity as breadwinners than as family members. And men or women in dual-earner couples who adopt less egalitarian ideas over time become more psychologically vulnerable in their marriages.

By contrast, men whose attitudes become more egalitarian during the course of their marriage report higher marital satisfaction, as do their wives.13 Perhaps that’s why the masculine mystique is on the defensive, and why more men are in fact beginning to accept and even embrace women’s equality.

A far more insidious mystique that has yet to be seriously challenged by any of our social institutions is what sociology professor Phyllis Moen and psychology professor Patricia Roehling call the “career mystique.” This postulates that a successful career requires people to devote “all their time, energy, and commitment throughout their ‘prime’ adult years” to their jobs and to delegate all care-giving responsibilities to someone else.

Finding creative ways to allow men and women to integrate, combine, and sometimes alternate their responsibilities to work and to family could be the single most effective “pro-marriage” program of the 21st century. Now that women have so many more options outside marriage and men have so much less arbitrary authority within it, our government, our employers, and our society need to:

• Recognize that the institution of marriage circa the 1960s will never again provide most employees with an unpaid second worker to free the first one up from all domestic responsibilities and care-giving obligations.
• Understand that despite the stresses and trade-offs associated with the multiplication of family diversity, today’s “independence effect” is good for the married and unmarried women and men alike. Enhancing gender equality will reduce—not increase—tensions between men and women.
• Structure our laws and institutions so that when marriages do break up, more couples are able to negotiate less conflicted partings. Encouraging fathers to take parental leave and use flex time from day one will engage fathers in more child care and develop strong family identities during their marriages, which means they will be far less likely to cut off contact with their children after divorce.
• Embrace flexible working hours, family leave, and child care and elder care time so that married couples and other individuals with care-giving obligations, no matter what their income status, can balance the demands of work and family equitably.

Family diversity is here to stay, and every kind of family has strengths that we can help them build upon. But the marriages that do last today—and more are lasting in each new generation of newlyweds since the baby boomers—are fairer, more intimate, and more respectful than couples from previous eras would have ever dared to dream. If only we could say the same about the work policies and social support systems that families need.

Endnotes

1. Advertising section, The New York Times, April 7, 1963.
2. George Gallup and Evan Hill, “The American Woman: Her Attitudes on Family, Sex, Religion and Society,” Saturday Evening Post, December 22, 1962. For more on the views and social status of women in 1963, see Stephanie Coontz, “’The Feminine Mystique’ and Women in the 1960s (New York, Basic Books, forthcoming 2010) and Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking Press, 2005).
3. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolders, “Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21 (2)(2007): 27–52.
4. Zvika Neeman, Andrew F. Newman, and Claudia Olivetti. “Are Career Women Good for Marriage?” Institute for Economic Development Discussion Paper 167, Boston University (April 2007.). Evidence from other countries also indicates that “the independence effect” tends to be strongest when the terms of marriage are unfair to women. One cross-cultural study finds that increases in women’s power and resources are a threat to marital stability only in societies where there is widespread gender inequality, with men dominating the realm of production and women responsible for most reproductive and nurturing activities. In societies where women and men share productive and reproductive labor, by contrast, especially when men are heavily involved with infants, divorce rates are lower, and increases in female resources do not have such destabilizing effects. Llewellyn Hendrix and Willie Pearson, “Spousal Interdependence, Female Power, and Divorce: A Cross-Cultural Examination,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 26 (1975) pp. 217–32. See also Burton Pasternak, Carol Ember, and Melvin Ember, Sex, Gender, and Kinship: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997), p. 199.
5. Adam Isen and Betsey Stevenson, “Women’s Education and Family Behavior: Trends in Marriage, Divorce and Fertility,” November 24, 2008, available at bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Marriage_divorce_education.pdf; Evelyn Lehrer, “Are Individuals Who Marry at an Older Age Too Set in Their Ways to Make Their Marriages Work?,” Council on Contemporary Families Fact Sheet, May 28, 2007, available at http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/subtemplate.php?t=briefingPapers&ext=marryolder; Paul Amato, Alan Booth, David Johnson, and Stacey Rogers, Alone Together: How Marriage in America is Changing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
6. Heather Boushey, “Baby Panic Book Skews Data,” Women’s eNews, July 3, 2002 (disputing evidence presented by Sylvia Hewlett, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children (New York: Hyperion, 2002)); Christine Whelan, Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 143; Boxer, Christie F. and Christine B. Whelan, 2008. “Changing mate preferences 1939–2008” Unpublished working paper, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA.
7. Coontz, “The Feminine Mystique.”
8. Oriel Sullivan and Scott Coltrane, “Men’s changing contribution to housework and child care,” Discussion Paper on Changing Family Roles, Briefing paper prepared for the 11th Annual Conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, April 25–26, 2008, available at http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/subtemplate.php?t=briefingPapers&ext=menshousework ; Suzanne Bianchi, John Robinson, and Melissa Milkie, Changing Rhythms of Family Life (New York: Russell Sage, 2006).
9. Amato and others, Alone Together, p. 150; Lynn Prince Cooke, ‘Traditional’ Marriages Now Less Stable Than Ones Where Couples Share Work and Household Chores, available at http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/subtemplate.php?t=briefingPapers&ext=LynnCooke, retrieved August 8, 2009.
10. Amato and others, Alone Together, p. 138; Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, She Works, He Works (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996); E. Wethington and R. Kessler, “Employment, Parental Responsibility, and Psychological Distress,” Journal of Family Issues 10 (1989), 527–46; Janet aHyde, John DeLamateur, and Erri Hewitt, “Sexuality and the Dual-Earner Couple: Multiple Roles and Sexual Functioning,” Journal of Family Psychology 12 (1998), 354–68.
11. Amato and others, Alone Together, pp. 172–3; Robert Brennan, Rosalind Barnett, and Karen Gareis, “When She Earns More Than He Does: A Longitudinal Study of Dual-Earner Couples,” Journal of Marriage and Family 63 (2001), pp. 178–81.
12. Jacquelyn James , R. Barnett, and R.T. Brennan, “The Psychological Effects of Work Experiences and Disagreements about Gender-Role Beliefs in Dual-Earner Couples: A Longitudinal Study,” Women’s Health Research on Gender, Behavior, and Policy 4 (1998), 341–48; Barnett, Gareis, and Brennan, “Reconsidering Work Time; A Longitudinal Within-Couple Analysis,” Community, Work & Family 12 (2009), 105–133: Barnett, personal communication, August 12, 2009; Kristen Springer, Kristen, “The Ups and Downs of Income in Marriage: Health Effects of Husbands’ Economic Dependence Across the Lifecourse,” Paper delivered at the Gerontological Society of America Annual Meeting, November 2008.
13. Ibid.
14. Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling, The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 5.

What I read was distressing, Arun Gupta founding editor of the Independent Newspaper wrote:

In short, the "Food Revolution" has flunked out. At Central City Elementary, where Jamie burst in with loads of fanfare, expense and energy, the school has reintroduced the regular school menu and flavored milk because the "Food Revolution" meals were so unpopular. In what looks like a face-saving gesture, Jamie's menu remains as a lunchtime option, but given the negative student response, don't be surprised if it's quietly phased out by next school year.

Then as I researched further I found Deb Eschmeyer, with Farm to School, who wrote:

Food service staff, like Diane, (lunch ladies as Jamie calls them) have an uphill battle that he doesn't even touch upon or hasn't yet. I wish he would bring to the surface the myriad obstacles to bring fresh local food to the lunch room, most of which can be overcome, but it can't necessarily be done in a couple weeks even with star-studded British flavor. Many food service staff are doing the best they can with what they receive. If we increase the reimbursement per meal, give the kids enough time to eat, give food service proper equipment to prepare meals, many 'lunch ladies' would do better than what Jamie cooks up. (hmmm, a challenge?)

On the other side we have Kate Adamick who blogs about Jamie’s show for the Atlantic monthly who wrote:

What finally prodded me to accept the offer were the surprisingly negative comments about Oliver's show made by my contemporaries in the food systems world. In the past two weeks, I have been shocked that so many of my colleagues have become preoccupied with who is getting—or who is taking—credit for waking the country up to the catastrophe that is school food. Those of us who are truly concerned about the welfare of America's children, health care system, and food supply should be grateful that long-awaited and much-needed attention to what has become at best a national embarrassment, and at worst a national crisis, has finally arrived. The revolution will be televised.

Marion Nestle, whose blog gives a “thumb’s up” to the show, discussed the anger of the many in the movement:

I’m kind of stunned by the hostility the programs have evoked among people I would have expected to support these goals. My teaching assistant, Maya Joseph, a doctoral student at the New School, categorized the criticisms for me:

• The wounded ego messages (how dare Jamie Oliver not mention MY work!!)

• The ugly foreigner message (how dare Jamie tell AMERICANS what to eat!)

• The outraged sensitivity messages (how dare Jamie Oliver not take account of X,Y, and Z when he so rudely ballooned into this town).

It seemed impossible to me that Kate, Deb, Marion and Arun were all watching the same show.

I needed to see it for myself.

Since coming home I’ve watched three of Jamie’s shows and I really enjoyed them.  I found myself both laughing and commiserating with him.  I’ve been working in school kitchens for over a decade and I’ve had my share of Alices in all the districts I’ve worked in.  I’ve certainly seen my share of food service directors smirking with arms crossed telling me all the reasons why we can’t do that and that our kids won’t eat that.  I’ve even had USDA program reviewers tell me we needed to serve more bread when they meant grain, not realizing that the brown rice I served with fresh made corn tortillas from real masa were both whole grains.

There are five major challenges for all of us in the trenches doing this work: Food – Finance – Facilities – Human Resources and Marketing.

• Food: we have to be able to procure high-quality, healthy REAL food, and, oh ,by the way, have guidelines that support cooking as opposed to reheating the likes of chicken nuggets and tater tots.
• Finances: we need more than the current reimbursement rate, $2.68 is just not enough and most districts spend less than $1.00 per day per child on lunch.
• Facilities: we have to have stoves, walk-ins, ovens and knives.
• Human resources: training, training, training (just like Kate says in her blog).
• Marketing/Education – just like Jamie says: we need to teach kids to cook, we need to educate them around good food choices and we need hands-on experiential learning in cooking and gardening classes.

So what’s the rub with Jamie’s show?  Well, it is TV and reality TV at that, but we all know what that is and should enjoy it if we like it, or, frankly, not watch and not criticize.

Perhaps many of my colleagues wished they’d been given accolades for all of their good work and others wished he’d focused on the success stories happening all around the country.  Many others are focusing on the fact that the kids don’t like the food.  Well my experience is that most kids don’t like change and that it takes months if not years (in fact two years in Berkeley) before the kids really start to “get” the new food.

In my opinion, we should all be “high-fiving” Jamie and thanking him – and why – because he’s doing what all of us put together and even Michele Obama haven’t been able to do – he’s bringing the discussion to the dinner table of homes all across the country!

 In fact, almost 300,000 people have signed his petition and he’s single-handedly doing what collectively we haven’t done: gotten people – not just the converted – but people from every demographic all across the country talking about kids, schools and food.

So this lunch lady says: High-Five Jamie and thanks for all you’re doing!!!

Using air monitors to create ecological transparency, BFI Challenge Semi-Finalist Aclima is educating children and adults alike in how our individual actions can affect and transform the world we live in. By bringing air quality statistics to life through social networking interfaces like facebook and twitter, they are connecting data, ideas and people. The creation of online "neighborhoods" makes it is easy for people to see how individual remedies can scale up to have a global impact. Through the creation of online connections and correlations across the globe, Aclima will encourage systems thinking and reinforce the interrelatedness of every person and place on "spaceship earth."

Recognizing that much of the information about global warming feels either too broad or too unbelievable to act upon, Aclima has found a way to empower individuals to create small, measurable instances of bottom-up change - as opposed to the current efforts of slow, top-down, governmental actions. Aclima operates on the idea that individuals have the ability to best perceive the changes that need to happen in their own lives, and that the aggregate benefits of many small targeted improvements can outweigh the benefits of bigger, broad-brush solutions.

For instance, in a project (embed link http://www.vimeo.com/7320103) at Manual Arts High School in south Los Angeles, students used Aclima's unique, affordable air pollution monitors called "pufftrons" to take air quality measurements of their classrooms and the community around them. By dispersing the monitors around their school and observing the recorded air quality data, the students noticed that carbon dioxide levels in their classroom were exceeding 4,000 ppm when standard levels should be around 300 ppm.

At that high of a level of carbon dioxide, students were feeling sleepy or getting headaches. The students took action by adding plants to the classroom and opening the windows at certain times of the day. This project showed that through the use of the monitors and understanding its data, students were educated and empowered to make changes for their own health in their day-to-day lives.

The air pollution monitors are designed by Aclima to be universally accessible. Aclima wants to make the monitors broadly compatible and easily affordable, and these attributes are reflected in the design of the monitors, as well as the overall system. Aclima’s proof-ofconcept monitors, called "pufftrons," were painted to look like a cloud-shaped cartoon character with 25 eyes, which indicate the levels of pollution in temperature, sound, Carbon Dioxide and VOCs.

The design relies on visuals, not words, so that it is easily understood and used by people of any age or language. Real time data that is relayed from the sensors to the website is recorded and displayed in
layers that increase in complexity and detail depending on how much information the user wants.
Aclima’s portfolio of patent pending technologies includes stationary, wireless, outdoor and mobile monitors.

The company is now working on next-generation designs of its monitors across all of these applications. As one example, all of Aclima’s devices can now sense an expanded range of variables, including NO2. And its mobile personal monitors, which can be handheld or wearable, are now also being developed for direct attachment to cell-phones. These personal monitors, which run on Aclima’s patent-pending “Squirrel
+Acorn” platform, can relay data directly to a users cell-phone where it is visualized. Aclima is also leveraging iPhone and Android apps, web-interfaces, and a variety of strategies to create communities around these devices. A number of beta-deployments are currently in progress around the world.

As part of its mission, Aclima is also working to bring its technologies and tools into the educational field. The company has launched the “Aclima Participatory Learning Lab” to focus exclusively on formal and informal learning applications. The goal of the Learning Lab is to make environmental quality meaningful to elementary, middle and high school students.

Based on its proof-of-concept project, Black Cloud, the Aclima Participatory Learning Lab is developing a kit which will be offered to middle and high schools. The kit helps advance the ecoliteracy skills that will prepare students to address the natural resource challenges of our era. Aclima exemplifies the power that can come from recognizing and changing our individual, designed actions.

As the team explained in their interview, "There are three things that go into our bodies: food, water and air. We take 26,000 breaths a day, but we don't have a conscious relationship with that aspect of existence. We're not always thinking about what we're doing to the environment and the collective health of the species. Through empowerment with air quality data, we are able to break that veil."

The recession has ravaged state and local budgets, most of which aren't allowed to run deficits. That's meant major cuts in public schools and universities, and a giant future deficit in the education of our people.

Across America, schools are laying off thousands of teachers. Classrooms that had contained 20 to 25 students are now crammed with 30 or more. School years have been shortened. Some school districts are moving to four-day school weeks. After-school programs have been canceled; music and art classes, terminated. Even history is being chucked.

Pre-K programs have been shut down. Community colleges are reducing their course offerings and admitting fewer students. Public universities, like the one I teach at, have raised tuition and fees. That means many qualified students won't be attending.

Last year the nation committed $700 billion to bail out Wall Street banks, the engines of America's financial capital, because we were told we'd face economic Armageddon if we didn't.

We've got our priorities backwards. Our schools are the engines of our human capital, and if we don't bail out public education we face a bigger economic Armageddon years from now.

Financial capital moves instantly around the globe to wherever it can earn the best return. Human capital -- the skills and insights of our people - is the one resource that's uniquely American, on which our future living standards uniquely depend.

Starting immediately, the federal government should give states and local governments interest-free loans to make up for all school and university budget shortfalls. The loans can be repaid when the recession is over and local and state tax revenues revive.

Over the longer term we must shift incentives away from financial capital toward human capital. A tiny one half of one percent tax on all financial transactions would generate about $200 billion a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That might put a crimp on Wall Street bonuses but it's enough to fund early childhood education, smaller K-12 classes, and lower tuition and fees for public higher education.

The Street's financial capital is important to the American economy, but over the long term the classroom's human capital is absolutely crucial.

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That's being in the flow.

It's a phenomenon that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor and former chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology, has spent over 20 years researching and views as the key to enhancing the quality of life and, ultimately, to finding happiness.

In his book Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi ( CHICK-sent-me-high-ee ) notes there are two main strategies for improving the quality of life:

1) try to make external conditions match our goals; or

2) change how we experience external conditions to make them better fit our goals.

If you've ever tried to board a train after the doors have closed, you know how frustrating any attempt to change external conditions is likely to be. The second option, however, because it lies wholly within our control and implies the possibility of creating a 'flow' experience, promises an infinitely more reliable way to experience greater life satisfaction.

Flow, as Csikszentmihalyi sees it, has eight identifiable components:

• Clear goals - with discernable expectations and rules for achieving them
  
  
• Concentrating and focusing - the opportunity to focus on a limited field of attention and to delve deeply into an activity.
  
  
• Lack of self-consciousness - we are too involved in what we are doing to care about protecting the ego.
  
  
• Distorted sense of time - our subjective experience of time is altered.
  
  
• Direct and immediate feedback - successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed.
  
  
• Balance between ability level and challenge - the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult.
  
  
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
  
  
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding, resulting in an effortlessness of action.

By these criteria, activities such as sports and music inspire flow states more naturally than others. Not all eight components, however, are required in order to experience flow and e ven mundane tasks can be designed to create a sense of focus and quiet accomplishment. The trick is to restructure those activities that are not intrinsically rewarding to create conditions conducive to flow - by creating goals and rules, for example.

Children intuitively understand this notion. Ferdinand, my three-year-old nephew, becomes completely absorbed with the simplest of tasks, trotting back and forth across the room with admirable concentration as he fills up a wagon with green Legos and blocks.

We can take the same approach throughout the day, calibrating a balance between the challenge of our tasks - neither too easy nor too difficult - and our skill. Cooking dinner? See how quickly and evenly you can chop the carrots, how efficiently you can fill the racks in loading the dishwasher.

Again, it's less the absolute nature of the tasks than the surrounding context, i.e. how we choose to experience external conditions. For you, chopping carrots is a chore, for the newly hired sous-chef in his first five-star restaurant gig, it's a chance to shine. (For specific ideas on how to integrate flow into your work, take a look at my article, Got Tedium?.)

That feeling of being totally immersed in what you are doing needn't be reserved for skiing moguls or singing karaoke. By consciously creating opportunities to get in the flow, we can infuse our daily lives with a heightened sense of engagement, achievement and satisfaction - in short, a higher quality of life.

When it comes to American women, men are a gender full of question marks. Ask 10 men to explain what women want or what is expected of men in a relationship today and in response you will get 10 more questions. Ask women what they want and be prepared for various questions, too. In my experience, women can or will do just about anything required, but just because a woman can or must do a thing does not mean she wants to.

My mother went to work and night school to become a nurse after she and my father split up. When I was 7 she decided to move to California to start over. She packed everything in her silver Ford Mustang and drove across the country to work as a nurse. I stayed with my father for six months and finished the school year in Detroit before following her out there. She made the choices that were best for her and her young child, but when asked what she wanted, she says now that she would have preferred to have a husband who made it possible for her to spend more time raising her children.

But it may be impossible for men to know what women want because the question presumes there is a uniform answer. Instead, it appears different women answer the question differently at various points in their lives. There are many women who start a career before their children are born, then choose to stay home for some time while their children are growing up and return to the workplace later.

Others choose a career or entrepreneurial endeavor that will allow them to work from home or nearby so they can spend more time with their children. And still other mothers work throughout the lives of their children, balancing work and child care as best they can alongside their husbands and often on their own—because they are single or divorced or because their husbands are unemployed.

This uncertainty is tough for many men to handle—even for those who rely on their women to take care of them and their children. Most men grew up in a world where there were rules to follow. Whether playing football, basketball, or Dungeons and Dragons, the rules were standard and your abilities were the variable. Life was supposed to be the same way. Go to school, do well, get a good job, meet a good woman, and make enough money to raise a family.

But relationships these days are different. The woman you commit to today may have the same name and Social Security number as the woman you are with tomorrow, but she may want completely different things in her life at different times in your life with her. The only remaining rule seems to be: Stay flexible.

Relationships these days are different. The woman you commit to may want completely different things in her life at different times in your life with her. The rule seems to be: Stay flexible.

In America today, flexibility is almost always an option for women. Technology has mostly liberated women from the constraints of biology. Medicine has reduced the risks of child birth and enabled women to return to active roles more quickly, and advances in birth control have enabled them to have more control over the timing of pregnancy.

Without the biological constraints of unplanned pregnancy, nursing, or more dangerous child birth, American women have been able to choose whether or not they want to leave the home and enter the workforce alongside men. Those who chose “yes” forced the doors of education open, enabling women to compete and collaborate with men in the workplace and stand out.

This is not to imply that the playing field is now level. Of course it is not. Women still make less money for the same work, face more harassment, and often have to work harder and be smarter to get the same rewards. The obstacles are important, but just like the situation for African Americans and other minorities, the obstacles have always been there. What is different about today is the greater number of opportunities that exist for women to excel.

Today many women face the question:
“Now that I know I can compete, do I want to?”

For so long the battle was to create this reality. Today many women face a different question. “Now that I know I can compete, do I want to?” It is this choice that has really thrown both genders for a loop. Many of my female friends have had to face questions their grandmothers had not, among them:

• Is my career worth not being there for my children full time?
• Is my career and lifestyle more important to me than having biological children at all?
• How do I respond when another mom from a play group comes up to my child at the grocery store and wonders who I am, because they have only ever seen her with the nanny?

Whew!

On the other hand, my male contemporaries face unexpected questions too. What is a husband who was attracted to the drive of a successful lawyer or businesswoman allowed to say or feel when that professional peer decides to get off the career track and channel her energy into the home front?

Conversely, how is he allowed to react when she suddenly decides to go back to work when the kids are still toddlers, expecting him to step it up with child care and home chores without sounding like a misogynist? Or how does he handle the blow to his conception of manhood when he loses his job and she becomes the main breadwinner, expecting him to raise the kids and take care of the house?

Men have been raised with our own expectations, many of them are traditional, but others quite different than our fathers and grandfathers. In addition to my mother, I was raised around very strong women. All of my aunts earned paychecks, as did both of my grandmothers, and each had a very strong influence over their husbands and families. As a child, it never occurred to me that women would not leave home to work.

My parents decided early in my childhood that I would do anything a girl was expected to do. My mother wanted me to be able to take care of myself. If I found a woman willing to take care of me, fine, she would say, but I would never need her to. So I learned to cook, clean, and do laundry. My father, with whom I spent every summer and lived with in high school, required each of his sons to cook dinner one night each week, and Saturday mornings were for thoroughly cleaning the house. Meanwhile, we were still expected to know how to change tires, paint, and do basic plumbing, yard work, and other “manly duties.”

Sometimes we get our ideas from popular culture. For some of my contemporaries, Marian Cunningham, the stay at home mom on “Happy Days” was the model, for others it was the tough-talking working class “Roseanne.” For me it was Claire Huxtable on “The Cosby Show.” Claire was beautiful and in great shape after five kids, without ever going to the gym, rolling her hair at night or putting on eye cream. She was a successful lawyer while making it home every night for dinner, often cooking it herself. Never too tired, Claire was always ready for a romantic evening, even though she worked a full day and had just solved a family crisis. What was there not to love?

If the image of Claire gave some of us unrealistic expectations, Bill Cosby’s Cliff helped prepare us to be partners much different from my grandfathers, who spent many hours in easy chairs watching sports, news, or old movies while my grandmothers, who worked outside the home, too, cooked and took care of the house. Cliff Huxtable loved to play with the kids and thoughtfully reprimanded them when needed. He kissed his wife in every episode and hugged his children—even the boy. And when Claire came in from work, Cliff always asked her about her day. He was a good dad, playful husband, and thoughtful friend.

The advances women have made are all around us. Hillary Clinton is the third female Secretary of State and almost nobody even raises an eyebrow about men not being alone on that list anymore. Women such as Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co., and her counterparts Meg Whitman at eBay Inc. and Ursula Burns at Xerox Corp. have led Fortune 500 companies.

Michele Rhee is chancellor of the Washington, D.C. schools and Shirley Franklin is mayor of Atlanta. Oprah Winfrey is the most successful woman in entertainment and Katie Couric is a network news anchor. Except for the White House, women have reached the pinnacle of nearly every field. There is more work to be done to reach parity, but women are making progress at breaking through the glass ceiling.

Despite these successes, society still has traditional expectations of women. Imagine the sight of an unruly child running alone through the grocery store or a father with a daughter whose hair is not combed neatly. Someone will inevitably ask: Where is her mother?

Despite the sight of all of the dads at the park with their kids on Saturday, pushing strollers down the street, or opening gifts at the now fashionable co-ed baby shower, men still have societal expectations, too. Imagine a family getting out of an old dented car, or five people living in a one-bedroom apartment. Someone will think: Why can’t he take better care of his family?

In the end, both genders are trying to figure out how to navigate this new world. We are on new terrain and it means men must be as flexible as the women in our lives. Women have a responsibility also to be clear about what they want and need and give us fair warning when or if that changes. Men are not mind readers and we have expectations of our own based upon the most recent data available. Just keep us posted.

With love and commitment, men and women can find the balance of work and family that makes sense for each couple, answering the questions we have and navigating the waters of this new terrain together.

While we celebrate the advances women are making and ponder the conflicts society’s changes pose, men and women cannot lose track of the things each of us truly seeks from our relationships—regardless of the division of labor and which partner is earning the most money. Ideally, most of us want:

• Someone who will be honest about their ideas, expectations, intentions,
  and frailties
• A safe place to be vulnerable and someone we can trust to be there to help
  take on the unexpected challenges of life
• A partner who will help raise children with the values that we share
• A faithful lover and friend to explore whatever part of the world we choose together

Recently I was invited to a recommitment ceremony for the grandparents of a friend. At the ceremony the pastor told the story of how they got engaged. A student at Howard University, the gentleman met a lovely young woman who he began to court. After six months he turned to her and asked, “What would you do if I offered you an engagement ring?” She responded, “I would wear it.”

A week later he bought her a ring and she put it on. Needless to say, the gentleman was not well known for his romantic side, but they went on to raise two children, enjoy the adoration of four granddaughters, and spend a fulfilling life together of friends and service to their community.

After 63 years together, the wife was coping with advancing Alzheimer’s disease and her husband was her primary caregiver, choosing her clothes, making her meals, and administering her medication. Knowing that his wife was feeling uncertain about her future and the strain her illness was putting on him, the husband decided to plan the recommitment ceremony. Long ago they had committed to be together in sickness and in health. This was the sickness part and while she was still able to appreciate it he wanted her to know that the love he felt for her 63 years ago was still strong.

In the end, that type of dedication is what most of us—men and women—really look for. With love and commitment, men and women can find the balance of work and family that makes sense for each couple, answering the questions we have and navigating the waters of this new terrain together.

Emergency shelter for up to 2,600 people is being sent to Mexico after an earthquake rocked the country last week.

A 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck the Baja California region on Sunday, April 4. An estimated 25,000 people have been affected by the earthquake; with the worse damage in rural areas south of Mexicali.

More than 5,000 families have reported that their homes have been either completely destroyed or severely damaged. ShelterBox Response Team (SRT) members John Mackie (US) and Jennifer Kormendy (CA) arrived in Mexicali on Saturday, April 10 and will soon receive the first consignment of ShelterBox tents.

Jennifer said: “We toured some of the worst hit areas on Saturday and there is definitely a need for ShelterBox aid.”

“People have stunned looks on their faces as they try to comprehend what lies ahead following the earthquake. There have been over 2,000 aftershocks since the earthquake struck and even if homes were not flooded or flattened, many structures remain too unstable to occupy and people are sleeping outdoors.”

“ShelterBox tents will allow them to gather their families and remaining possessions, and stay close to their homes until they are able to rebuild. The tents will likely be used for up to a year as many do not possess the resources to rebuild immediately.”

‘We have been receiving invaluable logistical support from government agencies and enthusiastic Rotarians.’

ShelterBox Head of Operations, John Leach, added: “This is the fourth earthquake we’ve responded to this year and we’re working hard at HQ to make sure the team gets the tents they’ve requested as quickly as possible.”

“There are people in need and our job is to get them shelter and give them the security they need to begin the rebuilding process.”

Over 800 million people around the world do not have access to clean drinking water.  That is one in eight people! Each year, lack of clean drinking water causes more deaths (3.6 million/year) than all forms of violence, including war.

Yet when I hear statistics like this, my instinct is to assume that I can’t make much of a difference.  But then I found out that the cost of a clean water well that could serve an entire community (about 300 people) was only $3,000 US dollars. I couldn’t believe it. 

That is only $10 to give one person clean water for 20 years!  Are you kidding me?  I could give $10 every week of the year and never even realize it was gone.  But if I gave it to Generosity Water, I could save 52 lives each year by myself.   And what if I had 20 friends join me?  That’d be over 1,000 lives changed with the gift of clean water.

That is why I am now working with Generosity Water doing every thing in my power to help people see how their small sacrifices can literally change people’s lives.  At Generosity Water, we can turn $10 into clean drinking water for one person for 20 years.  You can donate online at GenerosityWater.com.

"This is a man’s world,” sang James Brown in 1964, with a voice both defiantly assertive and painfully anguished. He starts off proudly, with a litany of men’s accomplishments: men made the cars, the trains, the electric lights and the boats that carried the loads and took us out of the dark. Men even made the toys that children play with. But lest he encourage only smug self-satisfaction, Brown changes course at the end of the song. “But it wouldn’t be nothing…without a woman or a girl.” Without women, Brown ends, men are “lost in the wilderness…lost in bitterness…lost, lost,” his voice trailing off in confusion and despair.

This essay is about that wilderness 45 years later—a wilderness in which some men today are lost, others bitter, and still others searching for new forms of masculinity amid what they believe is the excessive feminization of American society and culture—not because of the absence of women in their lives that Brown noticed but rather, ironically, because of their increased presence. At work and at home, in private and in public, women’s increasing equality has been an issue to which men have had to respond.

If women’s entry into the labor force stirred up men’s ability to anchor their identity as family provider, women’s emergence as primary breadwinner is a seismic shift, shaking some men’s identities to their foundations. Coupled with the equally seismic shift in the structure of the workplace, we see a major reason why many contemporary observers see a “crisis” of masculinity—a general confusion and malaise about the meaning of manhood.

How have men responded? While some noisily and bitterly protest, and others continue to fight a rear-guard action to undo women’s gains, most American men simply continue to go about their lives, falling somewhere between eager embrace of women’s equality and resigned acceptance. And among this majority of American men, some interesting developments are now clear. These men by and large are closer to their wives and children and happier for the effort (as are their families), and they are healthier both physically and mentally. And yes, they have more sex.

Declaring America to be a woman’s nation, while deliberately provocative, does not mean we are, but just as surely it does mean we no longer live in a man’s world, underscoring a significant trend of the gradual, undeniable, and irreversible progress toward gender equality in every arena of American life—from the public sector (economic life, politics, the military) to private life (work-family balance, marital contracts, sexuality). Women have successfully entered every arena of public life, and today many women are as comfortable in the corporate boardroom, the athletic playing field, the legal and medical professions, and the theater of military operations as previous generations of women might have been in the kitchen.

Declaring America to be a woman’s nation, while deliberately provocative, does not mean we are, but it underscores a significant trend of the gradual, undeniable, and irreversible progress toward gender equality in every arena of American life.

And they’ve done it amazingly fast. It is within the last half-century that the workplace has been so dramatically transformed, that the working world depicted in the hit TV show “Mad Men” (about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s) looks so anachronistic as to be nearly unrecognizable. For both women and men, these dramatic changes have come at such a dizzying pace that many Americans are searching for the firmer footing of what they imagine was a simpler time, a bygone era in which everyone knew his or her place.

My father tells me that when he was in college, he and his friends would occasionally pose this question to each other: “Will you let your wife work?” And, he tells me, they all answered it in pretty much the same way. “She shouldn’t have to work. I should be able to support my family all by myself.”

Today, among my male students, the question itself is meaningless. They assume their wives will work, and certainly do not anticipate being asked to grant permission for their wives to do so. They expect to be part of a two-career couple, for financial, if not political, reasons.

The transformation of American public life prompted by these changes in women’s lives has of course had a profound impact on the lives of American men—whether or not they recognize it. Indeed, these changes have reverberated to the core of American manhood. Some of the responses receive disproportionate media coverage than their number might warrant. But a guy changing a diaper or drying a dish is far less mediagenic than a bunch of Wall Street bankers drumming as they bond around a bonfire, or some deranged divorced dad dressed up as Batman and scaling a state capitol building to promote “fathers’ rights.”

I’ll try to map a range of men’s responses, but the evidence is clear that most American men are quietly acquiescing to these changes, with sweeping implications for our economy and our nation.

Real Men Provide For Their Families

Since the country’s founding, American men have felt a need to prove their manhood. For well over a century, it’s been in the public sphere, and especially the workplace, that American men have been tested. A man may be physically strong, or not. He may be intellectually or athletically gifted, or not. But the one thing that has been non-negotiable has been that a real man provides for his family. He is a breadwinner. 

A man who is not a provider—well, he doesn’t feel like much of a man at all. Two general trends—structural and social—define the dramatic erosion of the foundation of that public arena for men, leading some men to their current malaise and confusion over the meaning of manhood. James Brown may have been right in 1964 that men made the boats, trains, cars, and electric lights. But the dramatic structural shifts that have accompanied globalization mean that there are very few cars, boats, trains—and even toys—being made domestically any longer.

In the past three decades, manufacturing jobs have been hardest hit as layoffs in the steel, automobile, and other brick-and-mortar industries downsized, outsourced, cut back, laid off, and closed. Add to that the gradual erosion of our social safety net (health insurance, medical benefits, retirement and pension accounts, Social Security) instituted by the New Deal and we are now living in a new era of “social insecurity.” As one 62-year-old machinist told a journalist, “we went to lunch and our jobs went to China.” 

If women’s entry into the labor force stirred up men’s ability to anchor their identity as family provider, women’s emergence
as primary breadwinner is a seismic shift, shaking some men’s identity to its foundation.

This decline in manufacturing has been precipitous—and permanent. “Foreman says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back,” sang Bruce Springsteen in “My Hometown”—a 1984 tune that resonates even more today as the Great Recession bleeds even more manufacturing jobs out of the U.S. workforce.

Heather Boushey, in her chapter in this report, also captures the anxiety experienced by blue-collar men of all races who are losing the majority of jobs in this recession and almost all men who are seeing their wages fall. These job losses and wage cuts narrow the gender gap in pay not because women are getting ahead but rather because traditional male-dominated industries are suffering.

Even in economic recovery, as President Obama observed, these jobs “will constitute a smaller percentage of the overall economy,” so that, as a result, “women are just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than men are today.” So the very foundations on which masculinity has historically rested have eroded; the entire edifice seems capable of collapse at any moment. Or so it seems to a variety of different types of men who rail against our changing society.

Lost in the Bitterness

To some men, women’s entry into the public arena is experienced not as “entry” but as “invasion.” The men who today oppose women’s entry into firehouses and police stations, military combat units, and corporate boardrooms echo those who opposed their entry into the Citadel and Virginia Military Institute, the Augusta Country Club, and the locker room a decade ago—men who themselves echoed those who opposed women’s right to vote, join a union, serve on a jury, drive a car, or enter the workforce a century ago.

Demographically, they range from younger working-class guys—firefighters and factory workers who sense greater competition for jobs—to middle-class, middle-aged corporate types who believe that the politics of women’s entry (affirmative action, an end to wage discrimination, comparable worth) hurt them. Both groups mourn the loss of the casual locker-room frivolity that marked the all-male workplace, and are afraid of, and angry about, sexual harassment guidelines, which they regard as the Politically Correct police. Most are white, and offer the same dire predictions—loss of camaraderie and casual cohesiveness—that whites feared 40 years ago about integration.

To some men, women’s entry into the public arena is experienced not as “entry” but as “invasion.”

Men who oppose women’s equality today often express a defensive resistance. They’re interested in preserving certain arenas as all-male havens. Women, we might be told, are not qualified for the positions they seek; they are not strong enough, not tough enough, not [fill in the blank] enough to make the grade. This defensive resistance lies close to the surface; a gentle scratch can elicit a furious response. “I will have none of the nonsense about oppressed and victimized women; no responsibility for the condition of women…none of the guilt or self-loathing that is traditionally used to keep men functioning in harness,” fulminates Richard Haddad, a champion of men’s rights. 

While researching my recent book, Guyland, I happened on a Brooklyn bar that has been home to generations of firefighters and their pals. There’s an easy ambience about the place, the comfort of younger and older guys (all white) sharing a beer and shooting the breeze. Until I happen to ask one guy about female firefighters. The atmosphere turns menacing, and a defensive anger spills out of the guys near me. “Those bitches have taken over,” says Patrick:

They’re everywhere. You know that ad ‘it’s everywhere you want to be.’ That’s like women. They’re everywhere they want to be! There’s nowhere you can go anymore—factories, beer joints, military, even the firehouse! [Raucous agreement all around.] 

Not long ago, I appeared on a television talk show opposite three such “angry white males” who felt they had been the victims of workplace discrimination. They were in their late twenties and early thirties. The show’s title, no doubt to entice a large potential audience, was “A Black Woman Stole My Job.” Each of the men described how they were passed over for jobs or promotions for which they believed themselves qualified.

Then it was my turn to respond. I said I had one question about one word in the title of the show. I asked them about the word “my.” Where did they get the idea it was “their” job? Why wasn’t the show called “A Black Woman Got a Job” or “A Black Woman Got the Job”? These men felt the job was “theirs” because they felt entitled to it, and when some other person (a black female) got the job, that person was really taking what was “rightfully” theirs.

That sense of entitlement—and entitlement thwarted—is what lies beneath the surface of these men’s resistance to women’s equality. These men employ what we might call a “wind chill” theory of gender politics: It doesn’t matter what the temperature actually is, it matters only how it feels. Gender equality is felt to be a zero-sum game: If women win, men lose. And to hear them tell it, men are losing.

Once the domain of real men, the participation of women and girls in sports is one of our era’s most significant gender transformations.

But they rarely just “tell it.” Urged on by anti-feminist media pundits, usually what we hear are screams. Just flip on virtually any talk radio station in America and listen to the callers as they rail against a system that no longer favors them. Eavesdrop on the myriad “men’s rights” groups that advocate for men as the new victims of reverse discrimination. Or tune into sports radio, the most gender-specific spot on your radio dial.

As women race onto the athletic field in record numbers, some men run off into sports talk. Once the domain of “real” men, the participation of women and girls in sports is one of our era’s most significant gender transformations. In 1971, fewer than 300,000 high school girls played interscholastic sports, compared with 3.7 million boys. By 2005, the participation of boys had increased by about half a million, but girls’ participation had soared to 2.9 million. But though women may play sports, they don’t tend to spend much time talking about them.

Sports talk radio often expresses the defensive male bonding that lies just below the surface of the easy camaraderie of that imagined locker room. Here’s how one regular listener explained it to communications scholar David Nylund:

It’s a male bonding thing, a locker room for guys in the radio. You can’t do it at work, everything’s PC now! So the Rome Show [Jim Rome is the most famous sports talk radio DJ] is a last refuge for men to bond and be men. . . I listen in the car and can let the maleness come out. I know it’s offensive sometimes. . . but men need that!6

Sometimes, this leads to some dizzying reversals of both conventional wisdom and common sense. Are feminists concerned about domestic violence? Proclaim “gender symmetry,” and then argue that women hit men as much as men hit women. Women concerned about sexual assault? “The way young women dress in the spring constitutes a sexual assault upon every male within eyesight of them,” wrote one retired professor.

Women seek to protect their right to choose? Attempt to establish a “man’s right to choose,” and then prevent a woman from aborting “his” child while ignoring any responsibility for the child once born. Or how about women in the workplace campaigning against wage discrimination or sexual harassment? Insist that the wage gap favors women and that sexual harassment is actually an expression of women’s sexual power. 

In the eyes of these anti-feminist men’s rights groups, it’s no longer a man’s world. They share this report’s perception that America has become a woman’s nation. And, in their view, it’s time to take it back.

This anti-feminist political agenda is best, and most simply, made by Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield, in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. “The protective element of manliness is endangered by women having equal access to jobs outside the home,” he writes. “Women who do not consider themselves feminist nonetheless often seem unaware of what they are doing to manliness when they work to support themselves. They think only that people should be hired and promoted on merit, regardless of sex.” 

While it can’t be true that only feminists actually believe in meritocracy, some who would support men evidently want to keep that playing field as uneven as possible. That’s certainly what groups such as the National Organization for Men, Men’s Rights International, and others seek as they organize men around perceived injustices against men by the feminist cabal that supposedly now rules Washington. In the eyes of these anti-feminist men’s rights groups, it’s no longer a man’s world. They share this report’s perception that America has become a woman’s nation. And, in their view, it’s time to take it back.

The “Masculinists”

To other men, women’s increased empowerment only highlights the loss of masculine vigor among American men. Their response was not to attempt to roll back women’s gains but rather to return to a nostalgic notion of masculinity, one rooted in ostensibly natural, primal, sacred, or mythic qualities.

If women have invaded all the previously all-male institutions, men needed to find, as Virginia Woolf might have put it, “a room of their own”—an all-male space where men can relax with other men, free from the constant policing that accompanies political correctness, and retrieve their inner sense of their own masculinity, in the presence of other men. For these “masculinists,” gender politics are a project of reclamation, restoration, and retrieval—not of some lost power over women, but of a lost sense of internal efficacy and sense of power.

To some men, women’s increased empowerment highlights the loss of masculine vigor among American men. Their response was not to attempt to roll back women’s gains but rather to return to a nostalgic notion of masculinity.

In the last decades of the 20th century, thousands of middle-aged, middle-class white men found themselves literally “lost in the wilderness” as they trooped off dutifully on what were called “mythopoetic” retreats with poets such as Robert Bly and story-tellers such as Michael Meade. These “weekend warriors” sensed that men had lost their vitality, their distinctively male energy in a world of alienating office cubicles, yucky diaper-changing and sappy date movies. 

For masculinists, power is not about economic or political aggregates or different groups’ access to resources. Nor is it to be measured by comparing wages or representatives on corporate boards or legislative bodies. Rather, power is an interior experience, a sense of dynamic energy. As a result, they tend not to engage with policy initiatives designed to push women back. At their best, they are indifferent to women’s collective experience; they may even take inspiration from women’s empowerment. They seek instead to combat their sense of emasculation not with impotent rage against feminized institutions, but rather by restoring their sense of power in reclaiming masculine myths.

Other guys find that lost all-male Eden in cyberspace. While cinematic and pornographic fantasies of men’s power have long been with us, the proliferation of video and computer games in which avatars wreak havoc on women, gays, and other “others” is still somewhat shocking. For significant numbers of younger men, remote corners of cyberspace are the newest incarnation of the Little Rascals’ “He-Man Woman Haters Club,” the tree house with the sign that says “No Gurls Allowed.”

These types of masculinists tend to rely on archaic notions of the essential, natural, and binary masculine and feminine. As a result, they may become momentarily enamored with anti-feminist policy initiatives, such as the re-segregation of schools into single-sex classes, ostensibly to promote boys’ engagement with education, but often to set back decades of feminist efforts to make classrooms and athletic fields more equal.

(These anti-feminists are not to be confused with those popular voices in minority communities—backed by many policy analysts—all of whom are engaged with the crisis facing many minority boys in school, which is both real and serious.) For these mostly white masculinists, their zeal to support fathers’ connection with family life and especially with the experience of fatherhood often draws them into “angry dad” campaigns against custody or divorce laws, in which men are said to be the victims of reverse discrimination.

The most interesting arenas of contemporary masculinism, however, are in some of America’s churches. The most visible of these renewed revirilization efforts is the group Promise Keepers, which holds massive 50,000-to-75,000 men-only rallies in sports stadiums (because that’s where men feel comfortable gathering) with ministers (called coaches) and their assistants (dressed in zebra-striped shirts as if they were football referees) who seek to return men to the church.

Founded in 1990 by Bill McCartney, former football coach at the University of Colorado, Promise Keepers is an evangelical Christian movement that seeks to bring men back to Jesus. Mostly middle class from the South and Midwest, they wed what you might think is a more “feminine” notion of evangelical Christianity—ideals of service, healing, and racial reconciliation—with a renewed assertion of men’s God-ordained position as head of the family and master of women. While mostly white, they have a real presence of African Americans in leadership positions.

In return for men keeping their promises to be faithful husbands, devoted fathers, and general all-around good men, the movement’s “bible,” “The Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper,” suggests that men deal with women this way:

[S]it down with your wife and say ‘Honey I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve given you my role in leading this family and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role.’ . . . I’m not suggesting that you ask for your role back. I’m urging you to take it back. . . . There can be no compromise here. If you’re going to lead you must lead.

Others have followed suit, from “The Power Team,” hyper-muscular zealots who pump up their gendered theology along with their biceps, performing such feats of strength as breaking stacks of bricks, to “J-B-C Men” who promise a “shock and awe” gospel and bonding at the movies (J-B-C stands for “Jesus – Beer – Chips!”). Or Seattle evangelist Marc Driscoll, who rails against the “Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ” offered by mainline Protestant churches.

The formal elements of the so-called “Masculinist Movement,” such as the Promise Keepers, have been predominantly white and upper- or middle-class. Men of color, however, have also participated in the Movement in different ways, some formal and some less formal. The 1995 Million Man March was a formal (and for some, troubling) engagement with masculinist politics. As scholar Maurice Orlando Wallace described it, the march was “ambitious and unprecedented,” but it focused on the crisis of black America as one centered on “an embattled black masculinity,” which “provoked rigorous dissent from African American feminists” and others.

To the new masculinists, it may no longer be a man’s world, but they’d like, at least, to find small pockets of all-male purity in which they can, again, be men among men.

Fatherhood as Politics

After enumerating men’s accomplishments in the workplace in his hit song, James Brown shifts his tone to a softer, more yearning, and plaintive tone. “Man thinks about a little baby girl, and a baby boy/ Man makes them happy,’ cause man makes them toys.” Here Brown signals the other defining feature of American manhood: fatherhood. After all, if one’s identity is wrapped up in being a family provider, one has to have a family to provide for.

In the 21st century, reconnecting men to family life is politicized terrain, filled with moral urgency, legalistic outrage, and social movements. Some advocates of the “new fatherhood” paint with far broader strokes than simply enabling married couples to better balance work and family. David Blankenhorn’s Fatherless America credited absent fathers with causing myriad social problems, ranging from juvenile delinquency, drug taking, sexual irresponsibility, crime and violence to unemployment. “Boys raised by traditionally masculine fathers generally do not commit crimes,” Blankenhorn adds. “Fatherless boys commit crimes.” His work was a catalog of specious correlations masquerading as causal arguments, but it struck a nerve about men’s responsibility, or lack thereof.

In the 21st century, reconnecting men to family life is politicized terrain, filled with moral urgency, legalistic outrage, and social movements.

With divorce so common, one arena in which fatherhood has become highly politicized is during and after divorce. Many of the organizations promoting involved “fatherhood responsibility,” especially in communities of color, seek to keep men engaged in family life because it’s good for the children, good for women, and good for the men themselves. For other men, mostly white and middle class, the stroke of the pen finalizing divorce turns hordes of doting daddies into furious fathers who feel aggrieved by a process they believe denies them the access to their children to which they feel entitled.

These “father rights” guys blend easily into more general anti-feminist organizations in advocating for public policy reforms. Case in point: Fred Hayward, founder of Men’s Rights, Inc., argued that women were “privileged because they are more frequently allowed to raise children, while men are being oppressed by denial of access to children.”

Fathers’ rights groups use a language of equality to exact their revenge against their ex-wives, their ex-wives’ lawyers, and the entire legal system, demanding mandatory joint custody and an end to alimony and child support payments. “Society cannot take away a father’s right to his children and expect him to cheerfully pay child support,” writes one activist. “Society cannot expect a father to make enough money to support two separate households. Society cannot afford to support mothers who choose not to work.” Fathers must have equal rights—the right to custody and the right to financial freedom without burdensome alimony and child support.

Well-documented racial disparities in enforcement of child support laws create a perception that some fathers are significantly more irresponsible, creating (or enabling) the very dynamics they are supposed to remedy.

In reality, the fathers’ rights groups are tapping into a problem that very few men report having. Most parents get the custody arrangements they say they want, and while, all things being equal, the legal system does tend to privilege ex-wives’ claims over ex-husbands’ claims, all things are rarely, if ever, equal. In a recent study of 1,000 divorces in two California counties, for example, psychologist Eleanor Maccoby and law professor Robert Mnookin found that about 82 percent of mothers and 56 percent of fathers received the custody arrangement they wanted, while 6.7 percent of women and 9.8 percent of men requested more than they wanted and 11.5 percent of women and 34.1 percent of men requested less than they wanted.

This suggests that “gender still matters” in what parents ask for and what they do to get it. That mothers were more likely to act on their desires by filing for a specific request also indicates that men need to ask for more up front to avoid feeling bitter later.

But one consequence of current custody arrangements is paternal withdrawal. Whether this is because the father is bereft about losing regular contact with his children, or because once the marital bond is severed he considers himself to have escaped from a conflict-ridden family situation, it appears that many men “see parenting and marriage as part of the same bargain—a package deal,” write sociologists Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin. “It is as if they stop being fathers as soon as the marriage is over.”

In one nationally representative sample of 11-to-16-year-old children living with their mothers, almost half had not seen their fathers in the previous 12 months. Indeed, we see a widespread “masculinization of irresponsibility”—the refusal of fathers to provide economically for their children, which has led to the “feminization of poverty,” with excruciatingly high poverty among single-mother families. What predicts continued paternal involvement in their children’s lives after a divorce is the quality of the relationship between the ex-spouses prior to the divorce.

This masculinizaton of irresponsibility is compounded by class and race. Poorer communities desperately need child support programs to enable and assist fathers in staying connected. Well-documented racial disparities in enforcement of child support laws create a perception that some fathers are significantly more irresponsible, creating (or enabling) the very dynamics they are supposed to remedy. Take just one example. In Dane County, Wisconsin, arrest rates for African Americans for nonpayment of child support are about 35 times those of white residents. Nearly one in two of those arrested for this reason were African Americans in a county whose African American population in 2000 was 4 percent of the total county population.

Found, Not Lost

The anti-feminists may shout loudest, and the new masculinists may be the most mediagenic of men’s responses to increased gender equality, but they represent only a small fraction of American men. The largest, if least acknowledged, response to women’s equality is the quiet acceptance of gender equality at both the public and private level. In the public sphere, the majority of American men support wage equality, comparable worth, women’s candidacies for public office.

The anti-feminists may shout loudest, and the new masculinists may be the most mediagenic of men’s responses to increased gender equality, but they represent only a small fraction of American men.

On the domestic front, surveys consistently show “substantial and persistent” long-term trends increasing the endorsement of gender equality in families. With only modest attitudinal adjustment, most American men have adapted to the dual-career couple model that now characterizes most marriages. Some are even delighted to have the additional family income. Most American men subscribe to a general “ethical imperative” and see women’s equality as right, just, and fair. They just don’t think it has all that much to do with them as men.

But it does. As I will show below, when fatherhood is transformed from a political cause to a personal experience, from an ideological position or an existential state of being to a set of concrete practices, men’s lives are dramatically improved. As are their children’s.

When fatherhood is transformed from a political cause to a personal experience, from an ideological position or an existential state of being to a set of concrete practices, men’s lives are dramatically improved. As are their children’s.

This acceptance isn’t the result of some grand ideological transformation in the meaning of manhood. Some part of it is simply financial. “These days, Ward Cleaver wouldn’t be able to afford a house in the suburbs or Beaver’s tuition—unless June went to work too,” writes Nicholas Kulish in The New York Times. Indeed, despite some evidence that the Great Recession may spur increases in reactive defensiveness among men, it may, in fact, propel the trend toward greater acceptance of equality. One recent survey found that a decline in men’s breadwinner status tends to promote egalitarian gender ideologies.

Plus, it is the inevitable result of countless micro-level decisions made by families every day: about their daughters’ and sons’ education, an increased intolerance for bullying or harassment, a sense of fairness about wage equality and reducing discrimination. It’s not that men woke up one morning and decided to scrap their traditional definition of masculinity. Rather, they gradually, and without fanfare or struggle, drifted into more egalitarian relationships because they love their wives, partners, and children.

Support for gender equality begins at home. Across race, class, and (nonevangelical) religious ideologies, support for the more conventional male-breadwinner/female homemaker ideology has fallen dramatically since the late 1970s. A new report by the Families and Work Institute finds that while 74 percent of men (and 52 percent of women) subscribed to that conventional model in 1977, just over two-fifths of men (42 percent) and less than two-fifths of women (39 percent) subscribe to it today.

What’s more, men’s attitudes about women’s ability to balance work and family also shifted in a decidedly positive direction. In 1977, less than half of men (49 percent) agreed with the statement, “A mother who works outside the home can have just as good a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work.” Thirty years later—a short time in terms of attitude shifts—two-thirds of men agree (as do 80 percent of women).

It’s not that men woke up one morning and decided to scrap their traditional definition of masculinity. Rather, they gradually, and without fanfare or struggle, drifted into more egalitarian relationships because they love their wives, partners, and children.

This change is more pronounced the younger the respondent. Just over a third of “Millennial” employees who were 28 or younger in 2008 support that traditional family model today, while slightly more than half (53 percent) of mature workers (63 and older in 2008) support it—though 90 percent of mature workers subscribed to the conventional model in 1977. And while 70 percent of men in dual-career couples still subscribed to the more conventional model in 1977, only about 37 percent of them subscribe to that today.

While most American men’s participation in family life, that is doing housework and child care, tends to be expressed by two two-word phrases—men “help out” and “pitch in”—men’s share of housework and especially child care has also increased significantly in the past few decades. Men are both more likely to do more housework, and also more likely to hug their children and tell them that they love them, than in previous decades. It took several decades for the norm to be a dual-career couple; it will take several more decades before the norm is also a “dual-carer” couple.

The average father today spends three hours a day on the weekend with his family, up significantly from estimates in earlier decades. While women still do the majority of routine housework, “husbands of working wives are spending more time in the family than in the past.” In 1924, 10 percent of working-class women said their husbands spent “no time” doing housework; today that percentage is less than 2 percent. Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, men’s household labor increased from five to seven hours per week, while women’s share decreased by about five hours, from 27 hours to 22 hours per week.

Though we tend to think that sharing housework is the product of ideological commitments—progressive, liberal, well-educated middle-class families with more egalitarian attitudes—the data suggest a more complicated picture that has less to do with ideological concerns.

When couples were asked to keep accurate records of how much time they spent doing which household tasks, men still put in significantly less time than their wives. The most recent figures from the National Survey of Families and Households at the University of Wisconsin show that husbands were doing about 14 hours of housework per week (compared with 31 hours for wives). In more traditional couples in which she stays home and the husband is the sole earner, her hours jump to 38 and his decline slightly to 12.

Reasonable, since they’ve defined housework as “her” domain. But when both work full-time outside the home, the wife does 28 hours and the husband does 16.26 This is four times the amount of housework that Japanese men do, but only two-thirds of the housework that Swedish men do.

Though we tend to think that sharing housework is the product of ideological commitments—progressive, liberal, well-educated middle-class families with more egalitarian attitudes—the data suggest a more complicated picture that has less to do with ideological concerns. In every single subcategory (meal preparation, dishes, cleaning, shopping, washing, outdoor work, auto repair and maintenance, and bill paying), for example, black men do significantly more housework than white men. In more than one-fourth of all black families, men do more than 40 percent of the housework. Men’s “share” of housework comes closer to an equal share.

In white families, only 16 percent of the men do that much. And blue-collar fathers, regardless of race (municipal and service workers, policemen, firefighters, maintenance workers), are twice as likely (42 percent) as those in professional, managerial, or technical jobs (20 percent) to care for their children while their wives work. This difference comes less from ideological commitments and more from an “informal flex time,” a split-shift arrangement with one’s spouse, which is negotiated by about one-fourth of all workers in the United States, and one-third of all workers with children under age 5.

Such findings are echoed among Mexican-origin families. Fathers in these families did more housework when the family income was lower or when wives contributed a larger share of family income, an indication that among this population, too, economic reality can modify ideological assumptions. Among immigrant groups, class position tends to be more important than ethnicity as well—though it might tend in a different direction. Taiwanese immigrant men, for example, in the professional class tend to hold more egalitarian attitudes and perform more housework and child care than do Taiwanese men in the working class.

As a result of these complex findings, researchers increasingly adopt an intersectional approach, exploring how race, class, ethnicity, and immigrant status interact to produce distinct patterns. It may be that class position—regardless of race, ethnicity, or immigrant status—may be the best predictor of both ideological orientations and actual behaviors, though the two may be contradictory or mutually reinforcing.

Housework aside, when it comes to being fathers, men are evidently willing to do more. A poll in Newsweek magazine found that 55 percent of fathers say that being a parent is more important to them than it was to their fathers, and 70 percent say they spend more time with their children than their fathers spent with them. What’s more, they are actually doing it.

According to the 2008 study by the Families and Work Institute, the amount of time fathers spend with their children under the age of 13 on workdays has increased from two hours a day in 1977 to three hours a day in 2008—an increase of 50 percent. Women’s rate has remained constant over that 30-year period, at 3.8 hours per workday. Millennial fathers spend 4.3 hours per workday (their wives spend five hours). Men are not merely walking their walk; they almost seem to be jogging it.

President Obama has also weighed in on the state of American fatherhood. In June 2008, during the presidential campaign, he took African American men to task for high rates of absenteeism in the lives of their children. And, as we’ve seen, after the dissolution of a relationship, many fathers dramatically reduce, or altogether lose, contact with their children. But while the couple is together—in both black families and white, native-born and immigrant, religious and secular—men are, today, more involved in child care than possibly any other generation in American history.

To be sure, there are some racial and ethnic differences. According to one 2005 U.S. Census Bureau study, 20 percent of white fathers are primary caregivers for their children when the mother is at work, compared to 11.3 percent of Asians, 12.7 percent of African Americans, and 15 percent of Hispanics. Note, though, that these differences are for primary caregiving, not caregiving in general, and that the rates are not so dramatically different. What’s more, in all cases the trajectory is up.

Men’s increased participation in child care has its challenges, of course. Men are reporting significantly higher levels of work-family conflict than they did 30 years ago.

Men’s increased participation in child care has its challenges, of course. Men are reporting significantly higher levels of work-family conflict than they did 30 years ago (and their rates now surpass women’s). Three of five fathers in dual-earner couples report significant work-family conflict, up from just over
a third (35 percent) in 1977.

What’s more, with men’s child care participation increasing so much faster than their housework, a dangerous disequilibrium is developing in which dad is becoming the “fun parent.” He takes the kids to the park and plays soccer with them; she stays home. “What a great time we had with dad!” the kids announce as they burst through the kitchen door to a lunch that mom prepared while also folding the laundry and vacuuming the living room.

But when men do share housework as well as child care, the payoff is significant. Research by sociologists Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams looked at national survey data and found that when men increase their share of housework and child care, their children are happier, healthier, and do better in school.35 They are less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, less likely to be put on prescription medication, and less likely to see a child psychologist for behavioral problems. They have lower rates of absenteeism and higher school achievement scores.

“When men perform domestic service for others, it teaches children cooperation and democratic family values,” said Coltrane. “It used to be that men assumed that their wives would do all the housework and parenting, but now that women are nearly equal participants in the labor force, men are assuming more of the tasks that it takes to run a home and raise children.”

Perhaps the most telling correlation is that when school-aged children do housework with their fathers, they get along better with their peers and have more friends. And they show more positive behaviors than if they did the same work with their mothers. “Because fewer men do housework than women,” said Adams, “when they share the work, it has more impact on children.” Fathers model “cooperative family partnerships.”

When men share housework and child care, it turns out, their wives are happier. This is intuitively obvious. Historically, working mothers reported higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression than full-time housewives. Yet they also reported lower levels of marital satisfaction than do their husbands, who are happier than the husbands of traditional housewives. This was because under such arrangements, women’s workload increased at home, while the men benefited by having almost the same amount of work done for them at home and having their standard of living buttressed by an additional income.

But wives of egalitarian husbands, regardless of class or race and ethnicity, report the highest levels of marital satisfaction and lowest rates of depression, and are less likely to see therapists or take prescription medication. They are also more likely to stay fit, since they probably have more time on their hands.

The benefits for the men? Men who do more housework and child care are physically healthier. They smoke less, drink less, and take recreational drugs less often. They are more likely to stay in shape and more likely to go to doctors for routine screenings, but less likely to use emergency rooms or miss work due to illness.

They’re also psychologically healthy. They are less often diagnosed with depression, and see therapists and take prescription medication less compared to men who do not share housework. They report higher levels of marital satisfaction. They also live longer, causing the normally staid British financial magazine The Economist to quip, “Change a nappy, by God, and put years on your life.” “When males take full responsibility for child care,” sociologist Barbara Risman points out, “they develop intimate and affectionate relationships with their children.” Nurturing their children is good for men’s health.

And they have more sex. Research by psychologist John Gottman at the University of Washington found higher rates of marital sex among couples where men did more housework and child care. This last finding was trumpeted by Men’s Health magazine with the headline “Housework Makes Her Horny” (although I suspect that is not true when she does it). It is probably worthwhile pointing out that there is no one-to-one correspondence here; I would advise male readers of this essay against immediately rushing home to load the washing machine. Instead it points to wives’ lower levels of stress in balancing work and family, coupled with a dramatic reduction in resentment that they alone are doing the second shift.

“Nothing Without a Woman or a Girl”

There’s an old adage that the Chinese character for “crisis” is a combination of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” While some men see increased gender equality as a dangerous reversal of traditional gender arrangements, most men are going along for a rather apolitical ride, seeing neither danger nor opportunity. They’re doing more housework and child care, supporting their wives’ career aspirations, and sharing the decision-making about family life and career trajectories, not because of some ideological commitment to feminism, but because of a more commonplace commitment to their families and loved ones.

In a sense, they know the fix is already in. Women are in the labor force—and every other public arena—to stay. So the choice for men is how we will relate to this transformation. Will we be dragged kicking and screaming into the future? Flee to some male-only preserve, circle the masculine wagons, and regroup? Or instead, will the majority of us who are now somewhere between eager embrace and resigned acceptance see instead the opportunity for the “enthusiastic embrace” of gender equality?

Chances are we will—not only because it is inevitable (which it is) and not just because it’s right and just and fair (which it is). We will because we also see that men who embrace equality will live happier, healthier lives, lives animated by love and connection with our wives, our partners, our children, and our friends. And so will the children of these and most other men, who grow up with working mothers—and have sisters, friends, and girlfriends who expect to be equal at work and at home.

Men who have renegotiated a more gender-equitable path forward in their lives and their work have reaped significant benefits, yet many men continue to struggle with lost incomes, lost breadwinner status, and downward economic mobility that threatens their ability to see women’s progress for what it is. There is a role for government in helping all men understand there is a clear path forward where masculinity and gender equality are complementary, not adversarial:

• Most men are “apolitically accepting” of the new status quo, but there needs to be public space to develop a politically forward-thinking agenda where men and women together can champion the reforms presented throughout this report. Men need to help create this public space, not rely on women to do so. Men need to speak out in the public sphere as fathers and partners, just as women have embraced their role as workers in their homes.
• As a result, both men and women both need the kinds of support that makes it possible to have dual-earner, dual-carer families, but these issues are most often misperceived as “women’s issues” in Washington and statehouses around the nation. Men need family-friendly policies, including on-site child care, health care reform, flexible working hours, and parental leave so that they can have the sorts of relationships they say they want to have.
• Policymakers need to support the choices of the majority of men who are pursuing gender equality within their homes. Men today are nearly as likely as women to take time off from work to care for ailing family members, but men remain less likely to take time off to bond with a new child. Policies that redefine what it means to be a good provider and a good citizen should encourage men and women to be both breadwinner and caretaker in their families.

Becoming a woman’s nation can be a vast improvement for everyone over remaining a man’s world. Gender equality is not a zero-sum game, but rather win-win.

Endnotes

1. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 10th anniversary edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 20.
2. “A NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript: The Jobless Recovery,” available at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/economy/jan-june03/jobs_6-23.html (last accessed August 2009).
3. Reihan Salam, “The Death of Macho,” Foreign Policy, June 22, 2009, available at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/18/the_death_of_macho.
4. Richard Haddad, “Feminism has Little Relevance for Men.” In Keith Thompson, ed., To Be a Man: In Search of the Deep Masculine (Los Angeles: Jeremy Tarcher, 1991), p. 100.
5. Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 12.
6. David Nylund, Beer, Babes, and Balls: Masculinity in Sports Talk Radio (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), pp. 118–119.
7. Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), pp. 298, 301.
8. Harvey Mansfield, “Why a Woman Can’t Be More Like a Man,” The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 1997, p. A 22.
9. Michael Kaufman and Michael Kimmel, “The New Men’s Movement: Retreat and Regression with America’s Weekend Warriors,” Gender Issues 13 (2) (June 1993): 3–21.
10. Tony Evans, “Reclaiming Your Manhood.” In Al Janssen ed., The Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper (Colorado Springs, CO: Focus on the Family Publishing, 1994), pp. 79–80.
11. Molly Worthen, “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?” The New York Times Magazine, January 11, 2009, p. 20.
12. Billy Hawkins, “A Critical Reading of a Promise Keepers Event: The Interworkings of Race, Religion, and Sport,” Sociology of Sport Online 3 (1) (2000), available at http://physed.otago.ac.nz/sosol/v3i1/v3i1a2.htm.
13. Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 5.
14. David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995).
15. Anna Gavanas, Fatherhood Politics in the United States (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Jocelyn Crowley, Defiant Dads: Fathers’ Rights Activists in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Marcy Sheiner, “What do Men Really Want…and Why Should we Care?” East Bay Express, July 10, 1992, p. 11.
16. Jon Conine, Fathers’ Rights: The Sourcebook for Dealing with the Child Support System (New York: Walker, 1989), p. 2.
17. Eleanor Maccoby and Robert Mnookin. Dividing the Child: Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
18. Robert Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: BasicBooks, 1993), p. 263; Nancy Polikoff, “Gender and Child Custody Determinations: Exploding the Myths.” In Irene Diamond, ed., Families, Politics and Public Policy: A Feminist Dialogue on Women and the State (New York: Longman, 1983), pp. 184–185; Robert H. Mnookin and others, “Private Ordering Revisited: What Custodial Arrangements are Parents Negotiating?” In Stephen Sugarman and Herma Kaye, eds., Divorce Reform at the Crossroads (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 55; Eleanor Maccoby and Robert Mnookin, Dividing the Child: Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 101.
19. Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin, Divided Families: What Happens to Children When Parents Part (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 38.
20. “The Effect of Child Support and Criminal Justice Systems on Low-Income Noncustodial Parents,” available at http://www.cffpp.org/publications/effect_child.html#coopreq (last accessed August 2009).
21. Arland Thornton and Linda Young-DeMarco, “Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States: The 1960s through the 1990s,” Journal of Marriage and Family 63 (4) (2001): 1009–1037.
22. Nicholas Kulish, “Editorial Observer: Changing the Rules for the Team Sport of Bread-Winning,” The New York Times, September 23, 2005, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/opinion/23fri4.html; Jiping Zuo and Shenming Tang, “Breadwinner Status and Gender Ideologies of Men and Women Regarding Family Roles,” Sociological Perspectives 43 (1) (2000): 29–43.
23. Ellen Galinsky, Kerstin Aumann and James T. Bond, “Times Are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home” (New York: Families and Work Institute, 2008), p. 10.
24. Ibid, p. 11.
25. Randall Collins and Scott Coltrane, Sociology of Marriage and the Family: Gender, Love and Property (4th edition) (Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1995), p. 378.
26. Lisa Belkin, “When Mom and Dad Share it All,” The New York Times Magazine, June 15, 2008, p. 47.
27. Almudena Sevilla-Sanz, “Household Division of Labor and Cross-Country Differences in Household Formation Rates.” Working Paper 325 (University of Oxford Department of Economics, May 2007).
28. Bart Landry, Black Working Wives: Pioneers of the American Family Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Scott Coltrane, “Research on Household Labor: Modeling and Measuring the Social Embeddedness of Routine Family Work” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (4) (2000): 1208–1233; Margaret Usdansky, “White Men don’t Jump Into Chores,” USA Today, August 20, 1994; Julia Lawlor, “Earning It: For Many Blue Collar Fathers, Child Care is Shift Work, Too,” The New York Times, April 26, 1998, available at http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/26/business/earning-it-for-many-blue-collar-fathers-child-care-is-shift-work-too.html.
29. Katy Pinto and Scott Coltrane, “Divisions of Labor in Mexican Origin and Anglo Families: Structure and Culture,” Sex Roles 60 (7-8) (2009): 482–495; Beth Shelton and Daphne John, “Ethnicity, Race, and Difference: A Comparison of White, Black, and Hispanic Men’s Household Labor Time.” In Jane Hood, ed., Men, Work, and Family (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993).
30. Yen Le Espiritu, “Gender and labor in Asian immigrant families,” American Behavioral Scientist 42 (4) (1999): 628–647.
31. Scott Coltrane and Kristy Y. Shih, “Gender and Household Labor.” In Joan C. Chrisler and Donald R. McCreary, eds., Handbook of Gender Research in Psychology (Springer, forthcoming); Heather Dillaway and Clifford Broman, “Race, Class, and Gender Differences in Marital Satisfaction and Divisions of Household Labor Among Dual-Earner Couples: A Case for Intersectional Analysis,” Journal of Family Issues 22 (3) (2001): 309–327.
32. Jerry Adler, “Building a Better Dad,” Newsweek, June 17, 1996; Tamar Lewin, “Workers of Both Sexes Make Trade-Offs for Family, Study Shows,” The New York Times, October 29, 1995, p. 25; Galinsky and others, “Times Are Changing,” p. 14.
33. “Who’s Minding the Kids? Child Care Arrangements: Spring 2005,” available at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/child/ppl-2005.html (last accessed August 2009), table 2B.
34. Galinsky and others, “Times Are Changing,” p. 18.
35. Scott Coltrane, personal communication, July 25, 2009.
36. “When Dads Clean House, It Pays Off Big Time,” available at http://newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=611 (last accessed August 2009).
37. Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); Paul Amato and Alan Booth, “Changes in Gender Role Attitudes and Perceived Marital Quality,” American Sociological Review 60 (1) (1995).
38. Coltrane, “Research on Household Labor: Modeling and Measuring the Social Embeddedness of Routine Family Work.”
39. “Sex, Death, and Football,” The Economist, June 13, 1998, p. 18; Robert D. Mintz and James Mahalik, “Gender Role Orientation and Conflict as Predictors of Family Roles for Men,” Sex Roles, 34 (1-2) (1996): 805–821; Barbara Risman, “Can Men ‘Mother’? Life as a Single Father,” Family Relations 35 (1) (1986); Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett, “Fathers Do Best,” The Washington Post, June 20, 1993, p. C5.

In some ways, it’s just common sense.  Like every other creature, birds need three things:  food, water, and shelter.  If you can provide those things they will visit.  Most likely, there are a vast variety of birds in your area; some are native while some may be  ‘tourists,’ who stop for a bit on their annual migrations.  All we need to do is figure out what tickles their fancy, and then provide it. 

Food:   Food for our wild birds comes from two sources.  Either we provide the plants in the garden and/or we purchase food specifically designed for those birds.  Starting with the plants, we need to take a moment to think about how that bird actually feeds.  Does it have a long beak that needs to dip into nectar, such as a hummingbird?  Or does it have a sharp little one that feasts on seeds and berries, such as a thrush?  There are also the birds that feed on insects, making them the perfect form of pest control. 

An important thing to consider is that the birds native to your area have evolved over the years to feed on the local plant life.  If you want to support that population, research the plants that are found in your community and focus on planting those.  Most of the plants I recommend below are ones native to Southern California, but related species of many can be found around the country.

Hummingbirds are extremely easy to please.  Think long, tubular flowers:  Any number of sages make great hosts, with Cleveland Sage (Salvia clevelandii) and Hummingbrid Sage (Salvia spathacea) being two of my favorites.   Other great sources are Beard Tongue (Penstemon), Columbine ( Aquilegia),  and Monkeyflower  (Mimulus).  Personally, I stay away from hummingbird feeders.  Though there may be the rare exception, they are rather like feeding kids chocolate bars all day – lots of sugar, not much nutrition.

For birds that feed on seeds or berries, Currants (Ribes), Wild strawberry (Fragaria), or Manzanita (arctostaphylos) are great options.  Most oaks (Quercus) are also great food sources, and the trees are absolutely spectacular in their grandeur.  If you do decide to put out bird seed, make sure it is wild bird seed suited to the species in your area, and put that feeder up high, where the local cats can’t get to them.   As for the insect eaters, you don’t need to do anything except be extremely cautious of using chemicals in your garden.  After all, those little bugs we spray could be someone else’s lunch!

Water:  Water is a treat in the garden, and not just for the birds.  We all know how we respond to water, whether it is the bubbling of a fountain, or the silent mirror of a still pond.  Birds really just need a tiny bit to drink and splash around in.  If you are purchasing a fountain for your birds, consider buying one that has a lip or ledge to land on.  You also can’t go wrong with the birdbaths.  There is nothing more delightful than watching a couple of birds flitting and flirting in a birdbath.  If you have a larger body of still water, consider adding mosquito fish as they are a nearly foolproof source of mosquito control.

Shelter:  Finally, birds need a place where they can feel safe and build their nests.  Trees are the optimum solution.  If you don’t already have one, plant one!  I must have a dozen families living in my grapefruit tree, and a hummingbird just set up housekeeping in my Western Redbud (Cercis occidentalis).  The other thing to consider is nesting material.  Being the lazy gardener that I am, it is the perfect excuse to let my garden get a little messy.  Twigs, leaves, and bits of dried grass make great stuffing.  I’ve even heard stories of folks who’ve left out bits of yarn, fabric or twine for them.

So as you wander around your garden this weekend, cup of tea in hand, delighting in the bounty nature has to offer, think about the small things you can do to invite the birds into your garden.  Then sit back and enjoy the party!

© 2010 Marianne Simon 

President Barack Obama delivered a budget to Congress in February that prioritized innovation and targeted new federal dollars in competitive funding to drive education reforms. And Congress will soon have the opportunity to act on the president’s priorities when it takes up the fiscal year 2011 education funding bill known as the "Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations."

Policymakers and education advocates may question whether the focus on innovation and the competitive investments that drive it are misguided or whether it’s the right time given our burdened economy. But they can’t ignore that the status quo as, evidenced by persistent academic achievement gaps and low-performing schools, is clearly not working.

Federal investments in educational innovation can help transform our schools to meet the demands of the 21st century. Here’s a brief look at why we need to shake up the status quo and invest in innovation, and why the right time is now.

STATUS QUO: We can’t afford to invest in new reforms and innovation while our economy is in dire straits.

INNOVATION: The need for innovation has never been greater. Our education system is failing to adequately prepare the 21st century workforce that we need for a healthy economy. Only about a third of eighth graders are proficient in math and reading, and black and Latino students have a 50 percent chance of earning a high school diploma. New ways of schooling are needed to ensure that American students and schools keep their competitive edge with students in countries where investment in innovation has been paramount. Innovation will help dig our economy out of these trying times and put our country on a path to economic prosperity.

STATUS QUO: We should not level fund major formula education grant programs like Title I and increase investments in competitive grant programs at a time when schools are burdened and cash-strapped.

INNOVATION: A strained economy requires responsible and effective public spending. Competitive grant funding can inspire innovative and new ways of schooling, which can in turn inform how major formula education grants, such as Title I and Title II, are spent in the future. Activities that lead to improved educational outcomes and results could be identified and rigorously evaluated, and future spending across major formula grant education programs could then help support such reforms across all high-poverty schools.

A shift toward investing new dollars in competitive grants would be balanced by the essential formula grant investments that Congress and the administration made under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The recovery package added $10 billion in Title I funding, $12.2 billion for the Individuals with Disabilities Act, $3 billion in school improvement grants, and $39.8 billion in State Fiscal Stabilization Fund education dollars, all of which were allocated to states as formula grants.

STATUS QUO: The administration’s proposed investments in competitive grants will increase educational inequities by putting high-poverty and rural school districts at a disadvantage.

INNOVATION: Hallmark federal education funding streams that were established to level the field—such as Title I dollars for the country’s poorest schools and the Title II teacher improvement state grants—remain as formula-based programs in the administration’s proposal. In fact, more than three-fourths of the proposed education budget would continue to be formula based. What’s more, some of the competitive grant programs, such as the Teacher and Leader Innovation Fund, are targeted to high-need areas, and the current Investing in Innovation Fund, or i3 fund, includes a special priority for rural schools.

STATUS QUO: Investing in the Teacher and Leader Innovation Fund instead of the Title II formula-grant program will hinder access to effective teachers.

INNOVATION: The Teacher and Leader Innovation Fund builds on the existing Teacher Incentive Fund, or TIF, and awards competitive grants to states and districts that are willing to consider fresh, new approaches to recruiting and retaining effective teachers and principals, particularly in high-poverty districts and schools where there is the most need. Evaluations of TIF-supported pay-for-performance programs—such as the Mission Possible program in Guilford County, North Carolina, and the Teacher Advancement Program—have demonstrated positive preliminary outcomes for student achievement.

There is little evidence that indicates, on the other hand, that Title II has supported activities that improve student learning. Title II supports a wide range of activities, which limits its impact. And the activities in which school districts choose to use the majority of Title II dollars—professional development and class-size reduction—are not cost effective and lack evidence of effectiveness.

STATUS QUO: There is not enough evidence to justify a continued federal investment in Race to the Top or the Investing in Innovation Fund.

INNOVATION: The Race to the Top fund has been part of the federal education agenda for only a short period, but it has already yielded some of the most significant outcomes in education. Ten states changed their laws to better their chances in the competition, including lifting restrictions on charter school development and expansion, and enabling the link between student outcomes and teachers, all before even a penny of the program was released.

The Investing in Innovation Fund, or i3 fund, features tiered grants in which the largest grants are reserved for innovations and models that demonstrate the highest evidence of effectiveness, while smaller grants are available for promising but more novel school reforms. This evidence-check system ensures that valuable federal dollars are targeted to the most effective reforms. The i3 fund also requires applicants to secure a 20 percent private sector match, which will extend the reach of the federal government’s investment and help sustain the reforms for the long term.

STATUS QUO: Expanding the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program to award competitive grants to schools to expand the school calendar and establish community schools will dilute funding for afterschool programs, stress instruction time over enrichment time, and diminish the role of community-based organizations.

INNOVATION: CCLC dollars are currently limited to activities during nonschool hours, which prohibits the expansion of expanded learning time and establishment of community schools.

ELT schools formally incorporate traditional out-of-school activities such as the arts and service opportunities into the official school calendar so all students, including those living in the highest poverty, have access. Afterschool programs can help address both students’ academic and nonacademic needs, but participation in these programs is voluntary—a significant drawback. What’s more, low-income and disadvantaged students who are most likely to benefit from such programs are often less likely to participate.

ELT schools often elevate the role of community providers in the school by allowing them to become active partners within the school by co-teaching classes with regular full-time teachers and participating in the school’s leadership and management structure.

Community schools transform schools to serve not only students but entire communities. They are fully equipped to tackle “out-of-school” barriers such as inadequate health and social services and provide each student an equal chance at college and career.

STATUS QUO: Valuable programs are being consolidated or eliminated to support competitive grant programs, including Race to the Top and the i3 fund.

INNOVATION: Many of the programs that the president’s budget proposes for elimination are small grant programs that serve niche purposes and have limited reach such as the Arts in Education and Close Up Fellowship programs. There are also multiple programs that share a similar purpose, such as the Mental Health Integration in Schools and Safe and Drug-Free Schools programs. Consolidating these programs into competitive grant programs with an expanded budget can free up resources and maximize the impacts of these programs. Streamlining programs more effectively would also “reduce states’ burdens in juggling multiple programs,” according to the Council for Chief State School Officers, a national organization representing state superintendents of elementary and secondary education.

After a hard day at work—or no day of work since you’ve been laid off—and maybe tending to children or aging parents as well, you click on the remote. On any given evening, in fictional television, you will see female police chiefs, surgeons, detectives, district attorneys, partners in law firms and, on “24,” a female president of the United States.

Reality TV offers up the privileged “real” housewives of New York, Atlanta, and New Jersey, all of whom devote their time to shopping or taking their daughters to acting coaches. Earlier in the evening, the nightly news programs, and the cable channels as well, feature this odd mix: highly paid and typically very attractive women as reporters (and on CBS, even as the anchor) and, yet, minimal coverage of women and the issues affecting them.

Many of us, especially those who grew up with “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best,” are delighted to see “The Closer” (Kyra Sedgwick) as an accomplished boss and crime solver, Dr. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) as the take-no-prisoners surgeon on “Grey’s Anatomy,” and Shirley Schmidt (Candice Bergen) as a no-nonsense senior partner on reruns of “Boston Legal.” Finally, women at or near the top, holding jobs previously reserved for men, and doing so successfully!

But wait. What’s wrong with these fantasy portraits of power? And what are the consequences of such fantasies? In short, what happened to everyday women in the media? Where is Roseanne Barr when we need her?

Fantasies of Power

The profound gap between media images and lived reality

So here is the unusual conjuncture facing us in the early 21st century, and especially amid the Great Recession: Women’s professional success and financial status are significantly overrepresented in the mainstream media, suggesting that women indeed “have it all.” Yet in real life, even as most women work, there are far too few women among the highest ranks of the professions and millions of everyday women struggle to make ends meet and to juggle work and family.

“Roseanne” humorously balanced that almost impossible mix, engaging audiences of millions, men and women alike, because of its cheeky take on everyday situations. By contrast, what much of the media give us today are little more than fantasies of power.

Here is the unusual conjuncture facing us in the early 21st century, and especially amid the Great Recession: Women’s professional success and financial status are significantly overrepresented in the mainstream media, suggesting that women indeed “have it all.” So what much of the media have been giving us,then, are little more than fantasies of power.

Why should policymakers pay attention to media images of women? Because the media—and especially (although not exclusively) the news media—may not succeed in telling us what to think, but they certainly do succeed in telling us what to think about. This is called agenda setting, and thus it matters if the real lives of most women are nowhere on the agenda, or if the agenda promotes the fantasy that full equality is now a reality for all women. And policymaking matters because the news media typically follow the lead of political elites in Washington.

If the president, or Congress, make an issue such as “ending welfare as we know it” a top priority, the news media will cover the debates around welfare, which will invariably focus some attention on poor women and their families. Without prominent politicians emphasizing the ongoing pay gap between men and women, or the continuing child care crisis in our country, and proposing major legislation to address such issues, the news media will rarely take up such topics on their own.

This essay argues, then, that it is time to consider the rather profound contradictions between image and reality currently facing us, and to examine the consequences they might have on public policy and on the lives of women and their families.

These contradictions include:

• Women’s occupations on television that bear scant resemblance to the jobs women actually hold
• Successful, attractive women journalists in front of the camera that masks how vastly outnumbered women are by men as experts and pundits
• The hype of the nontrend of mothers “opting out” of the workplace rather than the real lives of mothers as breadwinners
• Young women in America portrayed as shallow, cat-fighting sex objects obsessed with their appearances and shopping
• The dismissive coverage of powerful, successful women versus their real achievements
• The denigration of feminism—which is a movement important to the well-being of men, women, and children—as somehow irrelevant to the realities of the workplace and family life in the 21st century

What might the repercussions of these misrepresentations be? Well, it’s misleading for the media to imply that full equality for women is real—that now they can be or do anything they want—but then simultaneously suggest that most women prefer domesticity over the workplace. This reinforces the notion that women and men together no longer need to pursue greater gender equality at work and at home. Roseanne Barr, for one, would never stand for it.

That’s why this essay argues that we need to remember what the feminists of the 1970s taught us—ridiculing unrealistic media images can be fun as well as important.

If you immerse yourself in the media fare of recent years, what you see is a rather large gap between how the vast majority of girls and women live their lives, the choices they must make in life, and what they see—and don’t see—in the media. Ironically, it is just the opposite of the gap in the 1950s and ’60s, when images of women as stay-at-home housewives, or blonde bombshells, effaced the exploding number of women entering the workforce, attending college, and becoming involved in politics.

Back then the media illusion was that the aspirations of girls and women weren’t changing at all when in fact they were. Now, the media illusion is that equality for girls and women is an accomplished fact when it isn’t. Then the media were behind the curve; now, ironically, they’re ahead.

The discrepancy between the reality of most women’s economic situations and what we see on our nation’s TV, computer, and silver screens is deep and profound.

At the same time, there has been a resurgence of retrograde dreck clogging our cultural arteries—“The Man Show,” Maxim magazine, “Girls Gone Wild,” and “The Bachelor”—that resurrect stereotypes of girls and women as sex objects obsessed with romantic love and pleasing men.1 And, finally, representations of women as working-class or middle-class breadwinners, such as those we used to see in “Roseanne,” “Grace Under Fire,” “One Day at a Time,” “Kate & Allie,” and “Cagney & Lacey,” have virtually vanished from the small screen.

The situation is equally contradictory online. Sites such as Catalyst.org, for example, seek to advance professional opportunities for women, yet one of the most successful and important news and entertainment websites, the Huffington Post, also showcases, on its main page, stories about actresses posing nude. And then there’s the “Jezebel” controversy, in which bloggers claiming to speak for a new generation of liberated young women write under the handle “slut machine” and dismiss the prevalence and impact of date rape. 

Of course, women online are also engaged in far more positive efforts to inform Americans about the hard realities of work and life today. Case in point: PunditMom, the blog that makes clear the connection between mothering and politics. But overall, the discrepancy between the reality of most women’s economic situations and what we see and hear on our nation’s TV, computer, and silver screens is deep and profound.

These gaps between image and reality have both honorable and ignoble roots. Certain show creators, writers, and producers have indeed sought to develop “role model” characters who demonstrate that women can hold jobs previously reserved for men, including that of president of the United States. News organizations, local and national, have recognized the importance and appeal of female reporters and anchors.

Of course, advertisers, the main support of most American media, want to present “aspirational” images of financially comfortable, even wealthy people so we will envy the future selves we will become if we buy their products.

Thus, women’s magazines need to provide a congenial environment for such ads and to offer visions of the individual empowerment that will result from exercise, the right makeup, and shrewd consumerism. The film industry, focused on the young and especially the teenage audience, devotes the bulk of its output to superheroes, science fiction, and “chick flicks” in which the women are desperate to get married.

The mainstream news media, faced with cutbacks and declining audiences, have reduced their hard-news coverage and investigative reporting in favor of lifestyle, celebrity, and soft-news features.

But let’s not forget the persistence of plain old sexism. Talk radio is dominated by conservative men who are either openly sexist or have no interest in how the economy or public policy affect women. The mainstream news media, faced with cutbacks and declining audiences, have reduced their hard-news coverage and investigative reporting in favor of lifestyle, celebrity, and soft-news features.

Websites that aggregate and then comment on this kind of news coverage rarely replace it with reporting of their own. And advertisers’ niche marketing, which divides women up by age, race, class, and lifestyle, allows mainstream and alternative media alike to target younger audiences with more stereotypical images.

Why should we care about something as evanescent and often banal as media imagery, or the contradictions between this imagery and women’s everyday lives? Because the media, in their many forms, have become such powerful and ubiquitous institutions in our society, shaping public understandings of which issues and which people are important and which ones are not. The media are not, as some in the industry would have us believe, “mirrors” simply reflecting reality.

The media are funhouse mirrors that magnify certain kinds of people, values, attitudes, and issues, while minimizing others or even rendering them invisible.

Rather, the media are funhouse mirrors that magnify certain kinds of people, values, attitudes, and issues, while minimizing others or even rendering them invisible. Through the repetition of particular images and the erasure of others, the media play a central role in constructing a national “common sense” about who we are and who we should be. And these distorted reflections contain and perpetuate significant class biases by either ignoring or silently ridiculing most women who make less than $100,000 a year and aren’t media perfect in appearance.

Because of the privileged position that rich, successful, or exceptional women now hold in the media, there exists a blackout, however unintended (or not), of how the majority of women, and especially those whose median earnings are about $36,000 a year or less, live their lives.

Dr. Meredith Grey, Meet My Hairdresser

Women’s occupations on television versus the jobs women actually hold

For decades, television drama has been dominated by crime-fighting shows, police and detective stories, hospital dramas, and soap operas, with some programs hybrids of these genres. Although it took a while (in the aftermath of the women’s movement), by the 1990s the success of “Law & Order,” “L.A. Law,” and “E.R.” led to more celluloid female professionals, including law firm partners, female doctors, surgeons and hospital administrators, and female cops and police officers, especially in the 10 p.m. prime-time slot. By 2009, here’s a partial lineup of whom we had met:

• Lt. Anita Van Buren on “Law & Order”
• Detective Olivia Benson on “Law & Order: SVU”
• President Mackenzie Allen in “Commander in Chief”
• President Allison Taylor on “24”
• Deputy Police Chief Brenda Johnson on “The Closer”
• Detective Claudette Wyms in “The Shield”
• White House Press Secretary C.J. Cregg on “The West Wing”
• Dr. Lisa Cuddy, the hospital administrator and benighted boss of Dr. House in “House”

All these women, concentrated in high-profile, male-dominated lines of work. Hey, do women have it made, or what?

And the way they get to talk to their male bosses or co-workers! Lt. Anita Van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson) tells a doctor who demands to see his patient, a suspect in a murder case, “Until you have more stars on your collar than I do, Doctor, you can’t demand a damn thing.”

In “Grey’s Anatomy,” Dr. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is equally fearless when taking on her superiors. She notifies her boss Dr. Burke (Isaiah Washington), “I think you’re cocky, arrogant, bossy, and pushy, and you also have a God complex, you never think about anybody but your damn self.”

These are delicious fantasies for women—to succeed and be taken seriously in male-dominated professions, and to be able to talk back to male privilege. That’s one of the reasons all these shows are successful. Nonetheless, they overrepresent how far women have in fact come in the workplace, underrepresent the kind of work most women do, and misrepresent how women can, and do, comport themselves on the job.

The most telling case in point: the top five jobs for women in the United States are not surgeon, lawyer, police lieutenant, district attorney or cable news pundit. In fact, the top five jobs for women in 2008 were, in first place, secretaries, followed by registered nurses, elementary and middle school teachers, cashiers and retail salespersons. Further down the list? Maids, child care workers, office clerks, home health aids, and hairdressers.

Or consider that in 2008, the median earnings for women was $36,000 a year, 23 percent less than that of their male counterparts.  And even more privileged women who attend college still earn 80 percent of what men make one year out of college. (And 10 years out? 69 percent.) Of the top Fortune 500 companies in 2008, only 15 had a female chief executive, and only 1 percent of police chiefs are women. And mothers, as financial journalist Ann Crittenden amply documents, pay an enormous price in lost wages once they have children, a price fathers rarely pay. 

Also, various studies suggest that rather than verbally smacking down their co-workers—let alone their superiors—the majority of female supervisors are “team builders,” often more open and accessible than men, more tolerant of and able to deal with different styles and personalities, more likely to solicit advice. They are, again in contrast to the tough-talking broads on TV, actually more likely to praise co-workers and to mentor and motivate them. 

It is male managers, according to these studies, who are more likely to punish co-workers, despite everything we’ve learned from “The Devil Wears Prada.” This doesn’t mean that women are better managers than men, but that many of them are different because of how women have been socialized. Certainly most women managers are quite at odds with the leathery, acid-tongued female law enforcement officers and other types so dominant in the media.

But if some think that females in power are more intimidating or unsympathetic or acerbic than men in power, it’s not hard to see how these stereotypes are reinforced every day in the media. At the same time, all these confident, linguistically brawny women personify the assumption that, whether they deserved it or not, women have smashed through the glass ceiling. Who in their right mind would think there would ever be a need for a revitalized feminist politics with hard-bitten, flinty, successful women like these at the top?

Terry Who?

Women journalists in front of the camera versus women as experts and pundits on all issues

The success and prominence of certain women in television news—Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, Gwen Ifill, Christiane Amanpour, Maria Bartiromo, Judy Woodruff—has certainly been a welcome change over the past 20 years. In 2007, women were 40.2 percent of the television news workforce. Nonetheless, significant inequities remain.

In 2006, only 28 percent of the broadcast evening newscast stories were reported by women. In newspaper newsrooms, while women were 37 percent of the workforce in 2008 (and minority women were 17 percent), 65 percent of all supervisors were men, and they are also 58 percent of copy editors, 61 percent of reporters, and 73 percent of photographers.

The preponderance of those hosting or featured on television talk shows are white men who have shown scant interest in the challenges facing working-class or lower-middle-class women in particular.

“Terry Who?” is Terry O’Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, the largest women’s advocacy group in the United States. Yet where is she and other prominent women who would happily discuss the challenges of work and life faced by women and men today on CNN, the network news, or other television talk shows?

Women as news sources, experts, or commentators on these profound changes in our economy and society have been utterly marginalized. As a result, virtually unnoticed by the media are the enormous changes in family life wrought by massive male layoffs and more women becoming breadwinners; the increasing, pressing need for child care and quality after-school programs; and the persistence and consequences of pay inequity.

Importantly, the preponderance of those hosting or featured on television talk shows are white men who have shown scant interest in the challenges facing working-class or lower-middle-class women in particular. Men outnumbered women by a four-to-one ratio on the Sunday-morning talk shows in 2005 and 2006.

Of the 35 hosts or co-hosts on the prime-time cable news programs, 29 were white men. As the Media Report to Women, an organization that covers women and the media, noted, “Women did not make up at least half of the guests on a single one of the three cable networks, and on some networks they comprised as little as 18 percent.”

Paris Hilton, All-American Girl?

Images of young women as shallow, cat-fighting sex objects versus the real girls of America

The turn of the millennium marked a rise in television shows, movies, music videos, and magazines resurrecting sexist stereotypes of young women as little more than sex objects, defined first and foremost by their faces and bodies, as obsessed with boys, relationships, and finding Mr. Right, as addicted to shopping and defined by what they buy, and as shallow, materialistic twits who love getting into catfights with each other, especially over men.

So we get TV shows about young women desperate to become the next “top model,” plastic surgery and makeover shows, “reality” TV shows about rich women desperate to stay young in Orange County, Atlanta, or New York, and celebrity magazines obsessed with “Who Wore it Better.”

Just a glance across the media landscape reveals these pervasive sexist images. Young women on MTV’s “The Real World” are categorized as “sluts,” “bitches” (including “the black bitch”), and party girls. Rap music videos—with the derogatory term “video ho’s”—reduce African American women to gyrating hootchie mamas. And the latest bachelor on “The Bachelor” is presented with 25 women he gets to sample until he chooses the one he likes best.

How did this happen, given the successes of the women’s movement and the understanding that sexism is reactionary? The chief culprit is the use of an arch irony—the deployment of the knowing wink that it’s all a joke, that we’re not to take this too seriously. Because women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, and now that full equality is allegedly complete, it’s OK, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women. After all, TV shows such as “Are You Hot?” or magazines like Maxim can’t possibly undermine women’s equality at this late date, right?

But the line this kind of media fare sells is that true power comes from getting men to lust after you and other women to envy you. Such representations reinforce the notion that a girl’s appearance is more important than her achievements or aspirations—not a very useful message in the real world of women as breadwinners.

These kinds of images also promote the notion that given these allegedly inherent female traits, girls may simply be unsuited for professional careers or positions of power. So images may have very real consequences on girls’ ambitions, especially girls from low- and medium-income families, on their notions of feasible career choices, and on their accepting being tracked into lower-paying, dead-end jobs. Research shows that after being exposed to certain sexist media fare that objectifies women, in a subsequent task girls choose not to assume leadership positions in team groups.

Other studies show that after being required to focus on their bodies, girls do less well in certain kinds of cognitive tasks.14 And researchers also document that stereotypical imagery has a negative impact on what boys think girls and women can and cannot do. Indeed, another experiment shows that when applying for a managerial position, the women who appeared more sexy got rated as less competent and less intelligent than the more conservatively dressed applicants.

The tensions between media fare and the lives and experiences of most everyday young white women and women of color couldn’t be starker. The vast majority of ordinary young women in America cannot shop till they drop, do not like being objectified by boys, and will need to earn a living and be taken seriously at work.

Smart, hardworking, accomplished young women who care about ideas, politics, social justice, and their future careers are very few and far between in America’s mass media, yet they are going to college in record numbers, and at some elite institutions getting a greater share of honors degrees than men. 

Back to June Cleaver?

Mothers “opting out” of the workplace versus mothers as breadwinners

Several years ago we were told that a big new trend was sweeping the land. According to an instantly infamous article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine from October 2003, women were now “opting out” of work.18 The cover headline asked “Q: Why Don’t More Women Get to the Top? A: They Choose Not To.” The subtitle read, “Abandoning the Climb and Heading Home.” Reportedly the newspaper got more mail about this story, most of it hostile from furious women, than any other in recent history. 

The magazine article sparked intense debate at the time, yet ever since the debut of “the mommy track” in the early 1990s, the women of America have been subjected to these kinds of stories about mothers seeing the light and chucking it all for Junior’s sake.

What made this particular piece distinct was a statistical blip that showed a small decline in the number of working mothers in the workforce. The article, written by Lisa Belkin, herself a former New York Times reporter who decided to quit and write freelance instead, cited the experiences of several highly privileged white women who were Princeton alums (as is Belkin). Their decision to “opt out” was then held up as a new, national trend embraced by all women of all races and classes.

The biggest problem with this and similar stories was the emphasis on “choice.” Supposedly sensible, devoted mothers who truly cared about their kids simply chose to “opt out.” But despite the headline, what we learned inside the article was that the first two women we met, one an attorney, the other a television reporter, were confronted with speed-up at work—55- to 75-hour weeks—at the same time they were having children. Both asked for shorter and more flexible hours and were turned down. Their “choice” was to maintain their punishing schedules or to quit. As one of these women admitted, “I wish it had been possible to be the kind of parent I want to be and continue with my legal career.”

The real story here was not about mothers “choosing” not to work. It was about the ongoing inhumanity of many workplaces whose workaholic cultures are hostile to men and women alike.

Then there was the old selective use of statistics. There was no empirical evidence at all that mothers were “opting out.” The article emphasized findings from a recent survey in which 26 percent of women in senior management said they did not want a promotion. So that meant nearly three-quarters did. We then learned that Fortune reported that in a survey of 108 women in high-powered jobs, “at least 20” had chosen to leave. Doesn’t that mean that four-fifths have not made this “choice”?

Katha Pollitt of The Nation, Heather Boushey, then at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and others debunked Belkin’s other statistical sleights of hand in the piece, which allowed her to overstate how many mothers were actually “opting out” of the workforce. In fact, the most interesting thing about the article was its buried lead.

The real story here was not about mothers “choosing” not to work. It was about the ongoing inhumanity of many workplaces whose workaholic cultures are hostile to men and women alike. After all, there aren’t many women (and men) today who can afford to opt out of the family-unfriendly rat race and have the financial strength to start their own businesses suited to their family needs.

At the same time, the standards for what constituted being a good-enough mother had become unattainable. There was the emergence of what Smith College professor Meredith Michaels and I termed “the new momism” in our book The Mommy Myth—the insistence that no woman is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual being, 24/7, to her children.

The new momism is driven by fear, stoked by so many stories about missing children, dangerous products, and child care centers supposedly staffed by child molesters. It has also been driven by marketing, the desire to sell anxious mothers as many products as possible to protect their children from germs, and stoke their intellectual and physical development as early as possible—hence, piping Mozart into your womb while pregnant—and to sell magazines with such angst-producing headlines as:

“Are You a Sensitive Mother?”

“Is Your Child Eating Enough?”

“Is Your Baby Normal?”

No wonder 77 percent of mothers with children at home said they believe it’s harder to be a mother now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, and 50 percent felt mothers were doing a worse job today than mothers back then, according to a 1997 Pew Research Center poll. Even mothers who deliberately avoid TV and magazines, or who pride themselves on seeing through them, have trouble escaping the standards of perfection, and the sense of threat, that the media ceaselessly atomize into the air we breathe.

While important websites such as Catalyst, MomsRising, Feministing and those for the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority all seek to address these issues at home and abroad, many user-generated sites and blogs such as Adventures in Motherhood, Mothers & More, and Motherhood Uncensored, to name only a few, focus disproportionately on motherhood, its challenges, its joys, and the need to confess one’s failings. This is powerful testimony to the tyranny of the new momism and women’s need to talk back to it and connect with each other in honest and mutually sustaining ways.

Mothers, often isolated from one another because of geography or work patterns and forced to think of themselves as lone heroes (or failures), have found on the Internet a place where they can try to connect with each other and not feel so alone. The proliferation of all the “momoir” books and these online sites documents the struggle that mothers—including working mothers—face, how neglected they remain by our government, and the extent to which motherhood in particular remains the unfinished business of the women’s movement. 

And it Rhymes With Witch…

The dismissive coverage of powerful, successful women versus their achievements

On top of all this, there are the representations of powerful women as impossible divas: greedy, unscrupulous, hated by their staffs, unloved by their families. Just think Miranda Priestly in “The Devil Wears Prada.” But what about the corporate thieves of Enron—Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow, and others—all of whom bilked thousands of Enron employees and investors out of their life savings?

These guys did not come in for the same ridiculing and schadenfreude-filled media coverage that Martha Stewart faced when she was charged with covering up an insider trading deal of far less shattering financial importance. Yes, it’s true, the Enron boys weren’t celebrities. But they also weren’t women.

Let’s consider how the media dealt with the three most important women in the 2008 presidential contest: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama. Millions of women were outraged over the sexist coverage of Hillary Clinton during her presidential campaign. This smart and experienced U.S. senator was caricatured by a brigade of middle-aged, upper-middle-class white male commentators throughout the presidential primaries.

Clinton was cast by white, male TV commentator Joe Scarborough as “very shrill.”  And according to Tucker Carlson, she made men “involuntarily” cross their legs out of castration anxiety.  Glenn Beck cut to the chase and simply called her a bitch.  MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asserted that the New York Senator got where she was only because people felt sorry for her because her husband cheated on her. 

There are the representations of powerful women as impossible divas: greedy, unscrupulous, hated by their staffs, unloved by their families.

At first, Sarah Palin was spared such coverage. Indeed, in the wake of the commentary Senator Clinton received, it was verboten in the mainstream press to ask whether a mother of five, including a 4-month-old infant with Down’s Syndrome, could run for and hold such a high office. But in the online world Governor Palin’s many substantive and personal contradictions were the subject of immediate and intense ridicule from the left and lots of sexist attention from conservative men who proudly declared her a “hottie.”

But after the election, former aides to her running mate, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), began leaking all sorts of innuendo. The Alaska governor thought Africa was a country, not a continent. She was a diva and had tantrums. She was difficult and uncooperative. She was suffering from postpartum depression. And that it was Palin, not her handlers, who insisted on a $150,000 wardrobe makeover.  How much of this was true remains unclear, but it was all easy to believe because she was a woman, and an ambitious one at that.

The 2008 campaign was allegedly all about gender— at least on an individual basis—but collectively it wasn’t about gender at all. There was scant attention paid to how the health care crisis affects women and their families, the ongoing child care crisis, pay inequity, women’s health, or reproductive rights.

And then there is our current first lady. For much of the 2008 campaign the media had no idea what to make of the elegant, Princeton- and Harvard-educated Michelle Obama (except, of course, her clothes and bare arms). But the stereotype of the “angry black woman” was so pervasive, so available, that Fox News, National Review and the Internet rumor mill had no trouble trying to pin it on her.

Even The New Yorker magazine had its take on the stereotype, running its “fist-bump” cover, with Obama drawn in Black Panther garb with an assault rifle slung over her shoulder.30 After Barack Obama’s inauguration, black journalist and talking head Juan Williams—juiced on the fumes of “The O’Reilly Factor”—referred to Mrs. Obama’s “militant anger” and described her as “Stokely Carmichael [a 1960s black activist]…in a dress.” 

Michelle Obama has had to pay dearly for the prevailing stereotype of black women as “angry,” domineering and emasculating, according to her hometown newspaper the Chicago Tribune. She went on daytime talk show “The View” to chat with its women cohosts, she read to schoolchildren, she planted the famous White House garden, she tended to her kids, she shopped at J. Crew. She became the “mom-in-chief.” By May 2009, her favorability ratings had soared to 72 percent, higher even than her husband’s. 

The great irony of the 2008 campaign was that it was allegedly all about gender—at least on an individual basis—but collectively it wasn’t about gender at all. Between all the anxiety about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage and her tears during the New Hampshire primary campaign, or how “hot” Sarah Palin was, or how angry Michelle Obama was, there was scant attention paid to how the health care crisis affects women and their families, the ongoing child care crisis, pay inequity, women’s health, or reproductive rights. The media were sexist to all three and in the process ignored what really matters to women and men in American today as they try to balance work and life.

Those “Radical” Feminists

The demonization of feminism versus its importance to the well-being of men, women, and children

Feminism is now embedded in American life. The understanding that women can and should be able to hold the same jobs as men has led to TV shows such as “The Closer” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” At the very same time, feminism and feminists have been so thoroughly and effectively demonized in American society—Rush Limbaugh, for example, equating them with Nazis —that it is hard to think of a political group or movement that has had such a great impact on American life while at the same time being so discredited.

This rests on a new “common sense” in the media about the status of women. Allegedly, the women’s movement has been such a complete success that full equality with men is a fact, and so feminism is supposedly irrelevant now. Feminists have been stereotyped—in the news, books, movies, and television shows—as strident, humorless, deliberately unattractive, anti-family women who hate men and wish to make young women as unhappy as they are. Consequently, not only is feminism unnecessary because all its goals have supposedly been achieved, but also it is objectionable because it will make those who embrace it unattractive, unloved, and miserable.

In real life, of course, as Jessica Valenti, the co-founder of the website Feministing, put it, “The smartest, coolest women I know are feminists.”  Most feminists bear zero resemblance to the stereotype describe above. Just think Ellen DeGeneres, Geena Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Ehrenreich, Wanda Sykes, Toni Morrison, Katha Pollitt, Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA), Margaret Cho, Billie Jean King, Isabel Allende, and Naomi Klein.

That may be the biggest challenge facing women today—to re-imagine and embrace collective action that cuts across the lines
of race, class, and sexuality.

Similarly, in the everyday world most women display a feminist sensibility that detracts not at all from their humor, looks, outlook on life, or the workaday world they engage in. But this common sense about feminism keeps feminist voices and women’s issues out of much of the media. What dominates instead is a discourse of individualism—each woman is a product that she alone must make and shape. In this imagined world, any and all successes and failures are up to her and her alone—and so ingrained is this view that it is hard to imagine another model, another way of thinking.

And that may be the biggest challenge facing women today—to re-imagine and embrace collective action that cuts across the lines of race, class, and sexuality. This new, all-encompassing movement would hold the government, our workplaces and our educational, cultural, and religious institutions responsible for building a more just and humane society based on real equality.

Where do we go from here?

Women as mindless consumers, young women as airheads or enmeshed in catfights, powerful women as difficult and unloved and, yet, women who have cracked the glass ceiling, all appear on our nation’s media screens. But you note I have not yet used the word “breadwinner” because that role, implying as it does active support of a family in multiple forms, is more absent from the media today than when “Cagney & Lacey” or “Roseanne” were on the air in the 1980s and 1990s.

Women as breadwinners today include low- and middle-income women as well as the upper-middle-income and wealthy women more often portrayed in the media. Women as breadwinners reminds us of the central economic role of African American, Hispanic and other minority women and low- and middle-income women in our economy. These women—the majority of us—are invisible, erased. And when women as breadwinners are not seen, our needs are not even acknowledged. That’s why our media would be more reflective of real life and real work, and our society would be better off if we:

• Increase the presence of family-friendly and female experts in the news media
• Expose sexist media fare and promote media literacy among our youth
• Make the role of women as breadwinners more visible

To achieve these ends, I recommend that we work together to pressure the  media much, much more than we have in the past, and the news media especially, to increase the presence of women, including experts on issues affecting women.

Where are the routine women’s voices, backed by studies about pay inequity, health care, inadequate child care, homeless women and their families, on “Meet the Press” or CNN? This is a huge fight, given the stereotypes about feminists and the dismissing of women’s issues.

We need to match the reality with the image of women as citizens and breadwinners and render visible what has been so effectively eclipsed.

Finally, we need to talk back to the media more. Let’s remember that it was a group of high school girls in Pennsylvania, so outraged by the Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for girls that read “Who needs brains when you have these?” that got the shirts removed from stores.  But this must also be a more sustained, long-term activity, involving the promotion of media literacy for children and fighting against the sexist stereotypes—and the advertisers who support them—that target young people. We would do well to trumpet the analysis of the Women’s Media Center, the reporting of Women’s eNews, and the pushback of Media Matters.

In short, we need to match the reality with the image of women as citizens and breadwinners and render visible what has been so effectively eclipsed. Pay inequity, dead-end jobs, sexual harassment, abuse of overtime pay, speed-up at work, out-of-date maternity leave policies, inadequate or nonexistent child care—these are all burdens carried by tens of millions of women with minimal help or acknowledgment. And these are all problems that government, employers, and society can help overcome.

It’s time for leaders across the country to emphasize the discrepancies between image and reality, and to get women’s issues and a feminist perspective back in the media spotlight. Let’s first consider these misleading images and the real lives of women, then identify the pressure points in the media where women and men together can apply humor and satire, and justified outrage whenever appropriate to chastise the overt and inadvertent stereotyping of women today.

And we should also identify when and where we can praise the media for giving voice to women’s real needs and concerns. Because despite everything, the media do this too—just not often enough. This is one of main effects of today’s media—by overemphasizing certain kinds of people, policies, values, and solutions, it makes imagining alternatives all the much harder. It is time for us to take on the current “common sense,” to smash it, and to dare the country and the media not to take us seriously.

Endnotes

1. Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2006).
2. See Sarah Hepola, “Jezebels Without a Cause,” Salon, July 8, 2008, available at http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/07/08/jezebels/?source=refresh.
3. United States Commission on Civil Rights, “Window Dressing on the Set: Women and Minorities in Television” (1977).
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Quick Stats on Women Workers, 2008” (2009), available at http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/main.htm.
5. U.S. Census Bureau, September 10, 2009, http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/014227.html.
6. American Association of University Women, “Behind the Pay Gap” (2007), available at http://www.aauw.org/research/behindPayGap.cfm.
7. “Women CEOs of the Fortune 1000,” available at http://www.catalyst.org/publication/322/women-ceos-of-the-fortune-1000 (last accessed September 2009); Jacqueline Mroz, “Female Police Chiefs, a Novelty No More,” The New York Times, April 6, 2008, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/06Rpolice.html.
8. Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (New York: Owl Books, 2002).
9. Alice Eagly, Mary Johannesen-Schmidt, and Marloes L. van Engen, “Transformational, Transactional and Laissez-Faire Leadership Styles: A Meta-Analysis Comparing Women and Men,” Psychological Bulletin, 129 (3) (2003): 569–591.
10. Media Report to Women, “Industry Statistics” (2009), available at www.mediareporttowomen.com/statistics.htm.
11. Ibid.
12. Angela McRobbie, “Notes on Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime.” In Anita Harris, ed., All About the Girl (New York: Routledge, 2004); Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007).
13. Paul G. Davies and others, “Consuming Images: How Television Commercials That Elicit Stereotype Threat Can Restrain Women Academically and Professionally,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28 (12) (2002): 1615–1628.
14. Barbara L. Fredrickson and others, “That Swimsuit Becomes You: Sex Differences in Self-Objectification, Restrained Eating, and Math Performance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 (1) (1998): 269–284.
15. Peter Glick and Susan T. Fiske, “The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating Hostile and Benevolent Sexism,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70 (3) (1996): 491–512.
16. American Psychological Association, “Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls,” (2007), p. 30.
17. Jay Mathews, “Study Casts Doubt on the ‘Boy Crisis,’” The Washington Post, June 26, 2006, available at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/25/AR2006062501047.html; Tamar Lewin, “At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust,” The New York Times, July 9, 2006, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html.
18. Lisa Belkin, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” The New York Times, October 26, 2003, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/26WOMEN.html.
19. “Letters to the Editor,” The New York Times Magazine, November 9, 2003, p. 14.
20. Heather Boushey, “‘Opting Out?’ The Effect of Children on Women’s Employment in the United States,” Feminist Economics, 14 (1) (January 2008): 1–36.
21. Katha Pollitt, “There They Go Again,” The Nation, October 30, 2003, available at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20031117/pollitt; Boushey, “‘Opting Out?’”
22. Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (New York: The Free Press, 2004).
23. Pew Research Center For the People & the Press, “Motherhood Today—A Tougher Job, Less Ably Done” (1997), available at http://people-press.org/report/109/motherhood-today-a-tougher-job-less-ably-done.
24. See, for example, Ayelet Waldman, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
25. “Hardball with Chris Matthews for Feb. 10,” available at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11326818, last accessed September 2009.
26. Katharine Q. Seelye and Julie Bosman, “Critics and News Executives Split Over Sexism in Clinton Coverage,” The New York Times, June 13, 2008, p. A1, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/world/americas/13iht-13women.13681561.html.
27. Media Matters For America, “CNN’s, ABC’s Beck on Clinton: “[S]he’s the stereotypical bitch” (March 15, 2007), available at http://mediamatters.org/research/200703150011.
28. Howard Kurtz, “Hardbrawl: Candid Talker Chris Matthews Pulls No Punches,” The Washington Post, February 14, 2008, p. C1, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021303418.html.
29. Ed Pilkington, “Palin Returns to Alaska Amid Criticism from Disgruntled McCain Aides,” The Guardian, November 6, 2008, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/06/sarah-palin-wasilla-hillbillies; Jonathan Martin, “Palin Story Sparks GOP Family Feud,” Politico, June 30, 2009, available at http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=33D91FFD-18FE-70B2-A87D66E6D1BFE37B.
30. Bary Blitt, “The Politics of Fear,” cover of The New Yorker magazine, July 21, 2008, available at http://www.newyorker.com/online/covers/slideshow_blittcovers?slide=1#showHeader.
31. Media Matters For America, “Juan Williams Again Baselessly Attacked Michelle Obama, Claiming ‘Her Instinct is to Start with This “Blame America” ... Stuff” (January 27, 2009), available at http://mediamatters.org/research/200901270002.
32. Stacy St. Clair, “Michelle Obama Image Makeover: First Lady’s Approval Ratings Soar as She Embraces Traditional Role—With a Modern Twist,” Chicago Tribune, April 28, 2009, available at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-michelle-obama-28-apr28,0,3727662.story.
33. Media Matters For America, “Repeating ‘Feminazi’ Comment, Limbaugh Reprises Familiar Theme” (January 6, 2006), available at http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200601060006.
34. Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), p. 15.
35. Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett, “Girls Must Be Girls,” AlterNet, November 29, 2005, available at http://www.alternet.org/rights/28884.

Others were not so lucky and I buried a number of them. It occurred to me that designing an all-volunteer health and veterinary care program for such desolate places might make life easier for a whole lot of people.

It took a few years to work out the concept, but in 1985, Remote Area Medical® was born. We have been called RAM ever since and, in quite a few parts of the world, the appearance of a RAM Team means an opportunity for poor folks to get some real treatment free of charge from real doctors and veterinarians.

But real doctors can’t do it without real help from nurses, technicians and all sorts of support people. In fact, about 50,000 of these medical and support personnel have temporarily left their comfortable homes, jobs and families behind and signed up as RAM volunteers; about 400,000 patients are very glad they did.

So, if you are a physician, dentist, ophthalmologist, optometrist, veterinarian or any one of those support people these specialists cannot function properly without, please realize how important you are to the lives of thousands of people in desperate need of your help.

Browse through our web site and see where your skills might fit in. Then give us a call or signal us via e-mail. Yes, we fly airplanes that are probably older than you are and sometimes we parachute out of them. And, although you should glance at our WARNING page, don’t be deterred. Most of our work is done with two feet on solid ground and you don’t have to be an athlete to participate. You just need to be willing and compassionate.

I look forward to seeing you.

Stan Brock

(Editor's Note: RAM will be holding a massive free medical event in the Los Angeles Sports Arena next to The Coliseum, from April 27th to May 3rd.)

Fortunately, there are guardian angels in the City of Angels such as Dr. Jay Grossman, who provides dentistry for homeless people at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars out of his own pocket. His non-profit charity is called Homeless Not Toothless. 

The Playa Wire recently caught up with Dr. Grossman at his busy office in Los Angeles and chatted with him about his past, present and future plans.

The Playa Wire: How did you come up with the idea for Homeless Not Toothless?

Dr. Grossman:  I went to NYU for my dental training and met my wife there.  She’s from Santa Monica, CA (in Los Angeles County).  We went out there to visit her folks and I fell in love with (nearby) Brentwood. So I closed up shop in New York and moved to California in 1989.  I didn’t have a California license to practice dentistry, so I joined the Navy as a dental officer because they would accept a New York license.

I did one tour of duty as a dental officer, got my California license and hung my shingle in Brentwood. Back then, I had no patients; I was starting from scratch. Everyday I drove to my office and I would pass by the VA Hospital and, on the corner, there was a veteran with a sign that said, “Will work for food.” 

So I reached into my wallet and I gave him a dollar every day.  Then I thought “This just isn’t making a big enough difference, what I really need to do is end the cycle.” My business card was right next to my money in my wallet. Looking at my business card, I thought, “I could do more with the skills that I have as a dentist than I can with the few dollars I have in my wallet.” 

So instead of handing him a dollar, I handed my business card to this veteran and I said, “If you’re really interested in ending this horrific rut that you’re in, come see me. I just opened my practice; I’ve got tons of time because I’ve got no private patients right now. I’ll take a look and see what I can do about your mouth.” 

Slowly, but surely, more homeless patients started to come in.  And I thought, “I don’t want to give them teeth and just be done with them. If I really want to have a solution to this challenge, I need to cause them to be sober and actively look for work.” So I set up relationships with sobriety programs in West LA.  To get them jobs, I partnered up with the Chrysalis in Santa Monica.

Chrysalis is a job placement organization that has a 92% job placement rate. So my new deal for homeless people was: Show me that you’ve had three months of sobriety, show me that you’ve registered at Chrysalis and Ill give you teeth so that you can go interview at the job leads that Chrysalis is giving you.

That’s one of the biggest issues they have, either they’re in a lot of tooth/gum pain, or they don’t look good and nobody will hire them.  The amount of jobs that you can actually do without teeth is very limited. So that’s how the program started, that was in my first year of practice in 1991 when I got out of the Navy.

The Playa Wire: How many homeless people have you helped since starting Homeless Not Toothless?

Dr. Grossman: Since 1991, we have worked on several thousand homeless patients and we’ve done just over two million dollars worth of dental work.  I was thrilled with the contribution, but then thought, “I wonder if can replicate this and get more of ‘me’ out there so that it’s not ‘just me’ helping the homeless with their teeth.”

So I go to dental conferences where my dental colleagues are and I ask for the podium for three minutes to make an appeal.  “Who is willing to volunteer one hour a month?”  And, inevitably, I get dozens and dozens of dentists saying “okay.” I realized that if I asked for something so nominal, that’d get a lot of people. 

The Playa Wire: Do you have any memorable stories or patients?

Dr. Grossman: Four years ago a homeless patient was referred to me by the Claire Foundation, a sober living facility in Santa Monica. I get him in the chair, his name is John. I’ve got my hands in his mouth; I’m working on him and I'm talking to my dental assistant Jennifer about how I’m going to be pouring cement at my house.

John asks, "Do you need a hand pouring that cement?” So I give him my address. Sure enough, the next day he shows up. I showed him the steps I wanted to pour and the two hundred pounds of cement that I bought. He asked for one hundred bucks to go get some supplies. He comes back later with two thousand pounds of cement.

I had absolutely no clue how much I needed or how to do it. He kept saying, “Doc, why don’t you put on a pot of coffee, I’ll do it.”  They were the most beautiful steps I have ever seen, mine would not have come close.

John tells me how he had a very successful construction company, but work totally took over his life, 18 to 20 hours a day, because the money motivated him.  The next thing he knows, his wife leaves a note on the refrigerator saying, “This is not what I signed up for.  I want a relationship, not a workaholic.”  She and his 2-year-old son were gone.  He looked for them, but had no success.

So he started using drugs to get rid of the pain and stopped showing up to work because the drugs took over.  He lost his company and house.  Then he was on the streets for fifteen years.  He had a major heart attack and that was his wake up call to become sober.

Today, we are the best of friends, he moved into my house for two years and rebuilt our whole house, room-by-room, and maintained his sobriety. I got him paying taxes, found his ex-wife and reunited him with his kid who is now 17-years-old.  I flew his kid out here as a surprise.  His son and I are very close; he flies out every summer to visit his dad. 

The Playa Wire: How did you start working with foster children? 

Well, this homeless guy, John, his sister’s best friend, Tina, is Sharon Stone’ assistant.  His sister happens to tell this story to Tina who tells this story to Sharon Stone. I get a phone call on my cell phone from Sharon Stone; I didn’t believe it was she.

She says, “Dr. Grossman, my name is Sharon Stone, perhaps you’ve heard of me.”  I figured one of my buddies might be doing a practical joke.  I say, “How can I help you?”  And Sharon says, “I got your number from John.”  I have some celebrity patients and I’m thinking she means John Travolta, but she’s talking about John, the homeless guy. Now, what are the odds of a homeless guy connecting me to a famous celebrity?

Sharon tells me, “I have a non-profit, called Planet Hope, perhaps you have heard of it? We send foster children to summer camp.  At the camp, we have arts and crafts; we have the UGG company give them new shoes. We have UCLA give them medical exams and vaccinations.  I need a dentist and I’m wondering if your program could help?”

So every summer I go to their camp and I’m the dentist to hundreds and hundreds of foster kids.  That’s how Homeless Not Toothless started branching out to kids.

The Playa Wire:  You’re building a medical and dental facility for foster care kids, how did this come about?

Dr. Grossman: Last year I get a phone call from Dr. Charles Sophy, the medical director of DCFS (Department of Children and Family Services), he runs foster care in Los Angeles County. He says, “I got your number from Sharon Stone.  I’ve got a problem, the state of California is broke and they cut out dental care for foster kids.  So now I have all these foster children who don’t have dental care. I need to build a dental facility and Sharon said you could help.”

I asked, “How many kids are we talking?” He said, “About twenty thousand.” I answer,  "You want me to build a dental facility for 20 thousand kids? That’s a big undertaking!”  

So I put thousands of hours into devising how this clinic would work. I came up with a five million dollar proposal.  For five million, I could build the building, supply equipment and hire staff.

We had a gala fundraiser in September in 2009 and honored Sharon Stone for her philanthropic work.  William Macy gave the award to her. Felicity Huffman, Larry King, his wife Shawna King, did a duet with Willie Nelson.  Antwone Fisher was honored because he is a foster care kid who became a successful director. As a result of that fundraiser, we only have a million dollars to go, and this in the worst economy ever.

The Playa Wire: Where will the dental facility be?

Dr. Grossman: The building is in El Monte, ten miles east of downtown Los Angeles. We chose El Monte because it happens to be the geographic center of foster care families in Los Angeles County. The right side of the building will be for medical exams and the left side will be for dental exams.  The medical exam side opened twelve weeks ago. 

The dental side was gutted, painted and floored, but the rooms are bare. We need to raise about one hundred thousand dollars for the last pieces of equipment. We also need to raise nine hundred thousand dollars for staffing and supplies to keep the project up and running for the next 2-3 years. We are so darn close.  And to think the foster care clinic got started because of Sharon Stone and because of a homeless patient that I treated, that’s the wildest, craziest story.

The Playa Wire: Do you have any other goals after the clinic is built?

Dr. Grossman: Many years ago I had a business partner, outside of dentistry. At a private dinner I had with him, he told me a story. He met with Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi on two separate occasions. He asked them both the same question, “If you could live your life over again, what would you do differently?”

They both gave him the same answer, independent of one another. They both said they would have “dreamed bigger.”  So this business mentor turned to me and asked, “So Jay what is your dream?”

I said, “I’m going to end homelessness.” 

And I’ve been working on that for twenty years.  And I’m thrilled that I’ve got to help thousands of people who are no longer homeless. They’ve been able to get jobs, become sober and have a life of integrity.  I have only started. I’m going to take this model and replicate it throughout the United States. So that’s my dream.

If you would like to be part of this dream and contribute to the Homeless Not Toothless, please click this link.

The agreement that emerged from December’s U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen continues to attract support from a growing number of nations despite naysayers who still insist that the meeting ended in failure. A recent Reuters article shows that there are now 110 countries on board, including the world’s major carbon emitters, representing more than 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

These countries’ collective commitments will not yet achieve the accord’s stated goal of holding temperature rise over pre-industrial levels at 2 degrees Celsius, but achieving these commitments could hold us to a 3-degree increase rather than the 4.8 degree rise we would see by 2100 under a business as usual scenario. These commitments also represent a vital first step toward achieving the 2-degree goal.

These results are consistent with CAP’s previously published analysis following the first deadline for submissions to the accord on January 31. Modeling from Project Catalyst showed at that point that the largest emitters had increased their ambitions for reducing carbon pollution from the period prior to the December Copenhagen climate summit to their January submissions to the Copenhagen Accord. Developed countries increased their reductions from 3.6 to 4.9 gigatons annually by 2020 and developing countries boosted theirs from 8.7 to 8.9 gigatons by 2020. More recent numbers from Project Catalyst project these commitments to the accord at 5.0 and 9.2 gigatons respectively for developed and developing countries.

These commitments bring us a bit less than 5 gigatons shy of the reductions needed to stabilize temperature increase at 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels assuming that countries succeed in meeting the high end of the goals they have set for themselves and also that commitments tied to other countries’ comparable efforts go forward.

So how do we achieve the remaining reductions needed to achieve climate safety? The first step in this process is to make the Copenhagen accord binding in order to lock in the reduction commitments, and the second is to increase the ambition of those parties that have signed onto the accord.

On the first issue, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon previously pledged to shift the Copenhagen Accord from a political agreement to a legally binding agreement by the next U.N. climate summit in Cancun, Mexico this December. U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern has agreed that we should be moving toward a legal agreement this year. Most participants in the process believe that the 2010 meeting in Cancun should at least include a discussion of how to make the accord legally binding by the 2011 meeting in South Africa if it cannot be made legally binding before then.

On the second issue, the easiest way to increase the ambitions of countries signing onto the accord is to fix one of the biggest holes in the agreement: the lack of any emission reduction targets for those parties signing on. This gap is in sharp contrast to the Kyoto Protocol, which did include such targets. Reduction targets for developed and developing countries, starting with the 17 to 20 largest emitters responsible for almost 80 percent of emissions globally, should be the first priority. This would bring us closer to the overall temperature goal of the accord than simply increasing the number of parties signing onto it since the countries that have not yet made commitments collectively represent a tiny fraction of global emissions.

Any emission reduction targets added to the Copenhagen Accord will have to conform to the 2 degree Celsius temperature target that is part of the accord. As such, additional emission targets would need to aim to close the 5-gigaton gap from the current Copenhagen pledges if this figure does, in fact, represent the reductions needed to achieve the 2 degree Celsius target for climate safety. If it turns out that we need to achieve greater additional reductions than 5 gigatons, then we should do so.

The United States can make the needed reductions, but it would be a big help if Congress were to pass legislation like the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which would achieve overall emissions reductions greater than the current U.S. pledge of 17 percent cuts below 2005 levels by 2020. The direct set aside in ACES for international forestry programs—which is separate from the allowable forestry offsets in the bill—could alone achieve 750 megatons of reductions annually by 2020.

But if emissions reduction programs like this were eliminated in a Senate bill, then these additional reductions would be difficult to achieve, even if the bill is ultimately successful. Those interested in a global agreement on achieving climate safety will therefore have to work hard to make sure that Senate legislation is structured so that it generates revenue to pay for such programs.

One good outcome of Copenhagen is that the accord is still a work in progress. Our calculations of what can be achieved by current pledges under the accord are not final. They can still be improved. It doesn’t make sense to worry that the commitments made so far put us on a disastrous pathway to a world 3, 4, or more degrees warmer. That would only be a legitimate worry if the Copenhagen Accord had been finalized last December as a legally binding document at the current level of commitments. Instead, we still have time to use the accord to get us to a safer world.

New York Knicks shooting guard and co-founder of Sister Schools Tracy McGrady was inspired to visit the camps after learning about the crisis from NBA legend Dikembe Mutumbo. In 2007, McGrady traveled to the region with Enough Project co-founder John Prendergast.

“After spending time with children in the refugee camps, I was humbled and compelled to share their stories with the world,” said McGrady.

“I wanted to do something different in order to help them. That is why we created the Darfur Dream Team.”

Upon their return, McGrady and Prendergast co-founded the Darfur Dream Team’s Sister Schools program. The funds and pledges will ultimately provide 22,000 children in the 12 Darfuri refugee camp schools with access to quality education.

Over 350 U.S. schools in 26 states have signed up to participate in the program. As Prendergast explained, “American students participating in the program are making an impact on the lives of Darfuri children, and also taking the opportunity to develop life-long bonds with their Darfuri peers.”

They had all just been brutally raped. The look on their faces, especially their eyes, will forever be etched in my memory. They had been beaten, tortured and brutalized, and stripped of everything human, left on the ground in unimaginable agony; this was a harsh glimpse into the life of a Congolese woman.

We were met by our guide who proceeded to show us around the hospital. There were hundreds of women everywhere; their pained gazes looked as if they were living in some horrible nightmare, the kind of nightmare where one never wakes up. They were awake.

We walked over to a blue and white building where I saw 25 to 30 beautiful children. Once they saw me, they began to sing loudly and proudly. They were laughing and smiling and, after the scene I had recently witnessed at the entrance, seeing the kids was helping me return to some form of reality; our guide turned to us and said, as casually as if giving us directions to the nearest gas station, “These are the children of rape. Their mothers are either dead or have abandoned them because they cannot bear the sight of them.” 

I wondered to myself what it must feel like to give birth to your rapist’s child. I looked into their little eyes and prayed. I prayed that they would never learn the hideous truth. I hoped they would never hear that their fathers were monsters.

We went into a part of the clinic to meet with the women and children. I held a child that I did not think would live another hour. He was two-years-old yet resided in the body of a six-month-old infant. He was severely malnourished and gasping for air. I just kept looking into his eyes and taking deep breaths so I wouldn’t weep. I was not about to cry in front of them and I didn’t. My tears would have meant nothing.

Next we went over to meet with Dr. Denis Mukwege who does the fistula repair at Panzi. I was so looking forward to seeing him because we hadn’t seen each other in a year; Dr. Denis is one of the few people who bring me to my knees. If through my work I can become half the person he is, my life would be complete.

When I walked into his office, I was thrilled to see the award we had bestowed upon him last year. It was prominently displayed on his bookshelf next to his crowded desk. I walked over to give him a hug and could immediately sense that something had changed dramatically since the last time I had seen him.

He looked tired, immensely sad and utterly beaten down. He shared with me that he didn’t know how much longer he and his staff could go on. He said at least nine newly raped women were coming in every day. He would operate on a young girl only to have her return a few months later having been raped again. He said he was tired, burnt out and felt like giving up. I asked him what he needed, so I could help. He looked at me squarely in the eyes and said, “We need peace.”

He told me the story of a young girl who was six when she was first raped and brought to the hospital. She came back to Panzi a few years later after having been taken into the hills and gang raped by several men. He operated on her again and she began to recover.  After her recovery, it was time for her to go, as there is always a constant shortage of beds at Panzi. There were still the women waiting outside the gate. The newcomers.

When she was told it was time to leave she grabbed onto him with every ounce of strength she possessed. She pleaded with him to let her stay.  She cried and begged for her life, but had to go because they had to make room for others. Dr. Mukwege learned that she was killed last week. His eyes began to fill with tears. His raw emotion had just given me the permission that I desperately needed.  At that moment, I began to weep. I feared the tears would never stop.

I gave Dr. Mukwege a donation from Children Mending Hearts. It was not nearly enough, but it was all that we could afford. I left Panzi and promised Dr. Mukwege that when I put my head on my pillow that night and pray, I would pray for the women waiting outside the gate, pray for the dying baby I had just held, pray for the young girl who had begged for her life and lost, and most importantly, I promised him I would pray for peace.

"[I wish church leaders could] spend a day with a typical working mom, single mother, or caregiver to see the stresses of women’s jobs."

"[I’d love to] change the perception that a working woman is less of a mother and that her family suffers because she works."

"It’s a fallacy to think women can do it all. Women can do what they’re called to do."

These women’s voices, captured in a series of focus groups and conversations across the country, express a dilemma facing millions of women today: how to balance work, family, and faith. It is hard enough for women to find sufficient hours in the day for job and family. Finding time for religious involvement is harder still, even though the support and services that organized religion provides may be needed now more than ever.

Religious institutions today also face a dilemma. They exist in a competitive, mobile marketplace and must adapt to the changing roles and time constraints of women in order to grow—and even to survive.

Religion is important in the lives of many women who look to it for sustenance, community, inspiration, and guidance in their daily lives. Women also seek in religion a purpose larger than themselves and the opportunity to put their faith into action and work for a better world. For women whose lives are often fragmented and harried, religious communities provide a place where stresses can be unburdened and joys shared—where they can step back from the fray, connect with God and others, and prepare to re-enter the world.

As more and more demands have been placed on women, many religious institutions have attempted to respond, adapting their beliefs and practices to meet the needs of women and their families. Many have done so out of a sense of mission, connecting theological beliefs in human dignity, equality, and justice with practical support.

Some religious institutions maintain a firm belief in the spiritual superiority of the “traditional” family and primacy of women's domestic role,yet they offer programs to accommodate working mothers and blended families.

For some religious institutions, the reality of working women’s lives has exposed a discrepancy between their beliefs and day-to-day practices. On the one hand, they maintain a firm belief in the spiritual superiority of the “traditional” family and primacy of women’s domestic role, yet they offer programs to accommodate working mothers and blended families. Child care programs, especially, are growing across faith traditions, so that at least one-quarter of children in child care centers are in programs located in churches, synagogues, and other places of worship.

That is not the only discrepancy regarding women and religion today. Women say that religion matters a great deal to them, but the numbers show that as their workforce participation increases, their religious participation declines. Women today are also religiously mobile, moving from one faith tradition to another, and in and out of organized religion altogether. Spirituality is also on the rise. From meditation and yoga to contemplative walks and New Age self-help books, more and more women are seeking renewal in sources outside organized religion.

These changes—and the dynamic interactions among them—are highly significant for individuals and for society. The faith communities that women belong to exist within larger institutions with histories, doctrines, cultures, and influence. Over the centuries, these institutions have helped shape social morality and cultural norms, and in turn, have been influenced by them. In the private sphere, religious institutions shape how we find meaning, balance responsibility to others with self-fulfillment, and respond to the modern world. In the public sphere, religious institutions can be prophetic voices for justice, as well as rigid defenders of an unjust status quo. Their views on family and morality have helped form government policies, and their power to engage and inspire people to action remains a powerful force today.

This chapter examines many of these changes and challenges. We examine the role of religion in women’s lives—how it helps to unify their different identities and navigate competing demands and stresses. We look at the ways religious institutions are responding to changes in their congregations. We also analyze the growth of spirituality and how it is shifting followers away from the traditions, teachings, and public witness that many religious institutions provide.

As women (and men) increasingly grapple with shifting gender roles and responsibilities, as families face greater economic stress, and as women juggle multiple tasks in days that are too short, religious institutions can provide sustenance and support. However, their budgets are shrinking as demands for their services are rising. Their volunteer pool of women has been greatly diminished. The challenges facing religious institutions today are significant. They need to provide for the spiritual and material needs of women and their families, while speaking out on behalf of a moral vision that values women and family in a way that is neither regressive nor nostalgic, but authentic and prophetic for today.

Religion Matters to Millions of Women

A glance at polling data might lead one to think that as women have left the home for paid work, they have also left religion. There are many reasons for declining religious participation in this country, but the correlation between women’s rising workforce participation and decreasing religious activity is real.4 The opposite also tends to be true—the more religious women are, the less likely they are to work outside the home.

A Current Snapshot of Women and Religion: Diverse and Mobile

A variety of federal commissions and conferences have supported efforts to encourage family-friendly workplace reforms, but with very little success in achieving new family-friendly benefits needed by today’s workers. Cases in point:

The picture of religion and women in America is varied and complex, filled with seeming contradictions and blank spaces where research is missing. For instance, as women’s workforce participation has risen, their religious attendance has declined. And yet religion is important in women’s lives—more so, according to research studies—than in men’s. For instance, women are more likely than men to say they believe in a personal God,5 to pray daily, and to attend weekly worship services.

More than 82 percent of American women are Christian. Over 53 percent of all women belong to the Protestant tradition, nearly 27 percent are affiliated with evangelical churches, 19 percent with mainline churches, and 8 percent with historically black churches. Twenty-five percent of American women are Catholic. Other affiliations include Mormonism (1.8 percent), Judaism (1.6 percent), Buddhism (0.7 percent), Islam (0.4 percent), and Hinduism (0.3 percent). Thirteen percent of women claim no specific religious affiliation. Although their numbers are lower, millions of women are not religious: 0.9 percent are atheists, and 1.7 percent are agnostics.

Women outnumber men in virtually every Christian tradition (see Figure 1). The numbers are highest for African American women: 60 percent of those affiliated with historically black churches are women. In fact, African American women are the most religious of all Americans. More than eight in 10 say that religion is very important to them and about 6 in 10 attend worship services every week. In non-Christian faiths, the numbers are reversed. For example, there are higher proportions of men than women affiliated with the Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu traditions.

Hispanic women—both Catholic and Protestant—are also more religiously active than men, although Protestant Hispanics of both sexes are more active than those who are Catholic. Asian Americans are most likely to be unaffiliated with a religious tradition. Nearly one in four have no religious affiliation. About 17 percent of Asians are evangelicals; another 17 percent are Catholic, and 14 percent are Hindu.

None of these figures captures the extent to which women are involved in more informal religious practices. Studies of Latinas find that they are often leaders within their own communities in the practice of folk religion—activities not sanctioned by the Catholic Church but that are manifestations of popular religious beliefs. Ignoring this role (what one scholar labels the “matriarchal core of Latino Catholicism”) can lead researchers to underestimate the significance of religious commitment in this community, and the leadership roles of women within them. Similarly, an in-depth study of immigrant congregations including Hindus, Greek Orthodox, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and Mexican Catholics found that women are often central to the practice of domestic religious rituals in these faiths.

One obvious reason for women’s declining religious participation is lack of time. As women cram into their day a host of work and family responsibilities, they often find their tasks spilling into the next day and their energy stretched to its limits. This is what University of Minnesota sociologist Penny Edgell found in a study of working mothers who were religiously active—they felt drained in their family and work life. According to Edgell, managing work, family, and religious activities could be harder for women than men, partly because of the longer hours women spend on housework and home chores.

In fact, a study that Edgell conducted of pastors and lay leaders in upstate New York found that many cited lack of time as the main problem facing their congregations. National data back this up, showing that “for both men and women, long hours spent at work is related to lower levels of church attendance, less involvement in other congregational ministries and a reduced sense of the importance of religion…these problems [may be] particularly acute for workers in lower-paying service and blue-collar jobs, who may not have resources to pay for services that help them cope with the time squeeze.”

Besides lack of time, another reason for declining religious attendance among women is generational. Young people often reconnect with or participate for the first time in organized religion when they get married and have children. Starting a family seems to trigger the desire to belong to a faith community, as new parents seek help giving their children a moral and spiritual foundation for growing up. New parents also look for others like themselves to find support and community.

Today, however, women are getting married and having children later in life. This means that most adults in their early 20s are now single, and not yet inclined in large numbers to join religious communities. It used to be that young people who went to worship services and those who did not were similar in terms of marriage and family. But that is no longer the case. Now those who are religiously active are far more likely to be married than those who are not.

Young women facing economic and work stresses, mobility among friends, relationship uncertainties, questions of identity,and more, are unlikely to seek out a faith community as a place of understanding and support.

There may be a confusion of cause and effect here, whereby the family orientation of many religious institutions discourages singles from attending. For young women, this means that at a time when they may be facing economic and work stresses, mobility among friends, relationship uncertainties, questions of identity, and more, they are unlikely to seek out a faith community as a place of understanding and support.

This is not to say that religious institutions are not reaching out to singles. Indeed, many are. A participant in a conversation with faith leaders in Atlanta convened for this report described efforts of her synagogue to attract young singles and build community among them. In addition to holding regular activities and events, leaders make a practice of following up with attendees, inviting them to lunch or Shabbat dinner.

There are other, less easily explained, reasons for declining religious participation among women and men. At the conversation in Atlanta, a female pastor described “regular nonmembers” in her congregation—those who show up weekly for worship services and put money in the offering plate, but get no further involved. Some attend for a good sermon and music, but don’t want the commitment of belonging.

Others go “church hopping” because they like various aspects of each place and don’t want to settle on one. The pastor said that these “regular nonmembers” have few demands. If they get sick, they don’t expect a pastoral visit, nor do they expect services from the church community. The pastor described other parishioners who are active—but in specific, self-directed ways. They are not interested in serving on committees, but instead want to do projects that involve their families, such as working in a food bank or helping to build a house.

Millions of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women are people of faith—and yet they are not welcomed as participants, members, or leaders in many religious institutions. A few denominations, such as the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association, are officially inclusive. Some religious institutions have no public position regarding gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals participating and joining their congregations, while others declare homosexuality to be a sin.

Increasingly, religious institutions are facing a challenge to their beliefs and practices when it comes to gays and lesbians who participate in worship services, offer their time and gifts as volunteers, contribute financially, and enrich the community in myriad ways. One participant in the Atlanta conversation with faith leaders told of her church welcoming those who’d been turned away from other churches.

Her church expanded its capacity for compassion and deepened its sense of community through an AIDS ministry it created that eventually broadened its scope to care for the sick and deliver meals to those in need—programs and services that had not existed before.

Many Women Want to Connect Family, Work, and Faith

Despite a significant decline in women’s religious participation, the fact remains that religion is central in the lives of millions of women. It offers them daily guidance and help in navigating life’s complexities, as well as a way to unify their different roles. Sociologist Mary Ellen Konieczny at the University of Notre Dame discovered this in her ethnographic study of two Catholic parishes, one theologically conservative and the other more liberal.

In both parishes, women said their faith helped them make decisions on a range of family issues, including the struggle over whether to leave their jobs to stay home and raise their children. Women said they were guided by the moral ideals of their faith, its practices, and by connecting with others in their church.

Similar themes emerged from a series of focus groups conducted by the Catholic Church in 2002 that asked nearly 300 women in dioceses across the country about their spirituality and their work outside the home. Despite geographic, racial-ethnic, and age differences, the women echoed one another in a number of areas. First, they refused to compartmentalize the different aspects of their lives, seeing spirituality as a “unifying factor” that connected work and family.

Women want the Catholic Church to see their paid work as valuable, and to recognize and utilize their skills.

In addition, women wanted the church to see their paid work as valuable, and to recognize and utilize their workplace skills. Women also wanted the church to acknowledge the time constraints they faced. When asked how the church could be of help to them, women offered a variety of suggestions, such as: Reach out to single mothers, provide support to unmarried women, invite older women to be mentors for younger women who are juggling home and work, and support legislation and policies that help working women, such as affordable child care, living wages, and more.

The need to connect work, family, and faith was also echoed by Protestant women, both liberal and conservative, in interviews conducted by Emory University sociologist Tracy Scott. Conservative women saw motherhood as the most important “work” a woman could do—yet many were dissatisfied with its day-to-day realities. One young mother told Scott, “Being a mother is the largest part of my identity…but it’s hard to raise kids; it’s hard to be with them endless hours a day…. I know that when I work [at my paid job]… I come home and I have so much energy. If I spend all day home…by five-o’clock I’m like a wet rag.”

Conservative women interviewed in this survey valued the esteem, appreciation, and praise they got from working—and having their own paycheck. They liked feeling productive, contributing to the community and world, and having an identity apart from those of “wife” and “mother.” When they talked about the “God-created differences between men and women,” many felt that their churches encouraged domestic work as women’s “real work” and family as their top priority.

Some women searched for biblical passages to give them guidance about “women’s roles outside of ‘family work.’” One woman began occasionally attending an evangelical church with fewer fundamentalist notions than her home church. It was at this new church that she heard a sermon proclaiming that there was nothing wrong with a woman having a paid job, as long as her priority remained the home. The woman told Scott: “I agree with that.”

Liberal women spoke of choices and struggles, too—especially choices made between job and family. Yet they did not speak of pressure “to live up to any prescribed roles” nor did they feel constrained by theological gender restrictions.

Both conservative and liberal women discussed the religious notion of “calling”—in which work has spiritual meaning and purpose that provides fulfillment. The sense of being called to a vocation was stronger among conservative women, even though they were less committed than liberal women to paid work.

According to Scott, the notion of “calling” among conservative women was flexible, referring to any number of tasks or roles and included both paid and family work. For conservative women, the sense of being called by God justified the different choices they made and blessed their roles outside the home. In contrast, liberal women spoke of “calling” in terms of paid work, not motherhood, and linked it to fulfillment and purpose in the world.

The centrality of religion in the lives of African American women cannot be overstated. Not only are women the backbone of many traditional black denominations, a number of which might not exist without their contributions, but faith is a basic pillar in many black women’s lives. As Daphne Wiggins, associate pastor at the Union Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, found in her ethnographic study of two African American congregations in Georgia, spirituality and church membership not only provide practical assistance to women (help with family care, for instance) but also emotional sustenance and spiritual fortification that help them cope with the challenges of family and work.

A nurse in the study who had a stressful job told Wiggins, “It’s only my spirituality and my closeness with God [that] gives me that confidence. I feel confident when I’m at work, even with all the chaos going on.”

Not only are women the backbone of many traditional black denominations, a number of which might not exist without their contributions, but faith is a basic pillar in many black women’s lives.

Religion is also a vital force in the lives of many Latinas. Although there is little research that directly speaks to the role of faith in helping Latinas grapple with paid work and family, scholars have remarked upon the active presence of religion in the lives of Hispanic men and women. For women who struggle against discrimination, toil in low-wage jobs, and bear heavy domestic responsibilities, religion is often a daily source of sustenance and support.

In the words of one author, “Latinas’ God is a personal, living God with whom they converse daily—upon awakening, while driving to work, booting up a computer, reprimanding children, and wondering how they will possibly get through another day.”

One of the Jewish participants at the faith leaders’ conversation in Atlanta spoke of the importance of religion in the home and of teaching religious values to one’s children. “I wear the tallis in my family,” she said, referring to a prayer shawl traditionally worn by males, adding that she felt women were “spiritually hard-wired” to transmit religious values.

In addition to carrying out traditions in the home and contributing time and skills to synagogue, many Jewish women are leaders in faith-based organizations such as the National Council of Jewish Women, Jewish Women International, and other groups that have long and impressive histories of working on social justice issues, especially those involving women, children, and families.

Religious Institutions are Adapting to Women’s Changing Lives

Historically, religious institutions have held as a spiritual ideal the model of a two-parent family in which women cared for the children and home and men were the financial providers. Although many families never reflected this model—high numbers of African American, immigrant, and white working-class women were always in the workforce—the notion of a female caregiver and male breadwinner was often sanctified as the way God intended the world to be.

Religious institutions benefited greatly from the traditional nuclear family, especially in the post-war years. Women served as volunteers, teaching Sunday school, organizing charity efforts, devotional classes, and more. As one author wrote about synagogues, “Women emerged as the most powerful and sustaining force….They dominated congregational activities, and their efforts made all religious functions possible.”

The concept of the nuclear family came crashing down in the 1960s. Divorce rates increased, women entered the workforce in record numbers, had fewer children, and challenged traditional gender norms. Religious institutions came under scrutiny as well. Women criticized male-dominated structures and fought to be ordained. They questioned patriarchal theology and created feminist doctrines of the divine. They looked for spiritual fulfillment outside religion. And they left the volunteer positions that had sustained religious institutions and led them to thrive.

In the 1980s, many conservative evangelical churches decried the dramatic transformation of the family. Blame often fell on women for “forsaking” their maternal nature and “deserting” their children for paid jobs, thus destroying the moral fabric of society. Policy issues such as child care and parental leave were caught in an ideological battle, as conservatives battled mainline Protestants, Jewish organizations, and others that supported federally funded child care.

Despite the inflammatory rhetoric that often surrounded such battles, the reality on the ground turned out to be somewhat different, as even evangelical churches had to adapt to increasing numbers of working mothers and divorced parents in their congregations. According to Penny Edgell, “as the proportion of the population who are most likely to attend church—two-parent families with children in the home—shrinks, the religious ‘market’ shrinks.”

Adapting Their Attitudes and Beliefs

Given the traditional foundations and centuries-old beliefs of many religious institutions, it isn’t surprising that there remains within them a residue of outdated views that have the veneer of truth. Often these views are unspoken, or even unconscious. But assumptions about the primacy of women’s domestic responsibilities and related beliefs about the spiritual superiority of traditional families, motherhood, and restrictive sexuality can stymie religious institutions from being more creative and supportive in meeting the needs of women today.

Yet, religion exists in a spiritually competitive marketplace. Unlike ages past when the faith you were born into was likely to be the faith you died in, religious traditions today gain and lose members on an ongoing basis. And while people who shift allegiances claim a variety of reasons for doing so—from disagreeing with spiritual teachings to disapproving of the rigidity of religious institutions—the reality is that religious institutions must work to gain and retain their followers.

Many mainline Protestant denominations, such as Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal, have shifted their views to support women’s changing roles. In these churches today, there is broad acceptance of mothers’ employment and diverse kinds of families—including, in some churches, same-sex couples and parents. These are also the denominations in which female clergy are most welcome and likely to be found.

Jewish faith traditions—Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox—have also changed their views toward women. Many synagogues have taken down the partition (mehitzah) that separates men and women during services, and women have taken on religious practices once exclusively controlled by men. Some researchers have found that feminism has had a beneficial impact on the Jewish community, increasing educational rates of women and raising their profile and leadership in the community. Since the early 1970s, Reform and Reconstructionist branches of Judaism have ordained women as rabbis, and women became rabbis in the Conservative branch in the 1980s.

The response of the Catholic Church to changes in gender roles, sexuality, and the family has been complex. Historically, Catholic churches have been somewhat more accepting of working mothers than mainline or evangelical denominations because many parishes served immigrant communities in which a number of women worked outside the home.

In addition, an important dimension of Catholic social teaching emphasizes providing for the needy and vulnerable. For many Catholics, this support has included government assistance for programs on poverty, health care, and more.

Still, many Catholic leaders—all of them male and unmarried—maintain a rigidly conservative stance on abortion, contraception, sexual education, and divorce—all issues of elemental importance to women. Female leadership in the church remains constrained, since women are forbidden to be priests. However, Catholic women have shaped history as nuns, religious activists, and heads of faith-based institutions delivering much-needed services and fighting social and economic injustice.

An important dimension of Catholic social teaching emphasizes providing for the needy and vulnerable. This support has included government assistance for programs on poverty, health care, and more.

White evangelical churches have also found themselves forced to adapt to societal change. Despite their preaching and pronouncements, mothers in these congregations went to work, children went to child care, and husbands and wives got divorced. However, the adaptation by evangelicals was neither easy nor swift. Initial reaction to the feminist movement in the 1970s was harsh.

Leaders criticized evangelical feminists who challenged claims that women’s subordination to men within marriage was biblically ordained, and they criticized mothers for working outside the home. As recently as 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a statement declaring that “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband, even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”

Despite such sexist statements by religious leaders, church communities have begun to speak in a different voice—one that emphasized marital partnerships and male and female complementarity in which men and women were created differently but not unequally. A “pragmatic egalitarianism” took hold in many churches. At the same time, many evangelical churches became less condemning of divorce, shifting from denouncement to silence.

As congregations included more single parents and blended families, divorce became less decried as a spiritual and social ill. Evangelical leaders turned to other issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, to blame for threatening the soul of America. The advantage of those two issues was that they were “external sins” that did not visibly affect most evangelicals, while an issue such as divorce was “too close for comfort.”

In reality today, many evangelical churches support men and women as equal decision-makers in the home, and evangelical men appear to be as engaged as other men, if not more so, in day-to-day parenting. Moreover, although evangelical mothers have lower rates of workforce participation, their numbers since the 1990s have been rising. As Penny Edgell observes, “Lived religion blunts the sharp edge of ideological zeal while new understandings of the good family evolve. This lived religion is what most Americans encounter and what shapes hearts and minds.”

Offering New Programs and Services

In addition to shifting their views, religious organizations have been adapting their programs and ministries to respond to the changing family. Typical shifts include moving the time of worship and other activities and offering new kinds of services. For instance, many activities for families are no longer offered during the daytime when most parents work, and many denominations now have programs for single parents.

Child care is of particular importance to working parents. Although some religious institutions have long provided it, the growth in mothers’ workforce participation since the 1970s prompted more religious institutions to move into this area. Between 1992 and 2008, there was a 76.4 percent increase in child care provided in Protestant institutions, a 52.6 percent increase offered by Catholic institutions, and a 47.7 percent increase by Jewish institutions.

Today, one-quarter of children under the age of 5 who are in center-based child care are in programs located in churches, synagogues, and other places of worship. This figure may even underestimate the proportion of children in religiously affiliated child care because many children are in “faith-affiliated” and “faith-infused programs” that are located outside places of worship.

Conservative Protestant churches also are increasingly providing child care, driven in part by the desire to teach religious values through these programs. In fact, one study has found that although liberal churches tend to be more symbolically accepting of diverse lifestyles and nonrestrictive gender roles, they offer fewer programs and services for women and their families than conservative churches do. Conservative churches have also been more likely to find innovative ways to adjust the schedules of their children’s programs to attract kids amid the competition of secular activities.

One point to highlight is that the Great Recession we’re in has greatly increased the need for services provided by religious and faith-based institutions. These institutions are close to their communities, witnessing job losses, home foreclosures, and members of their congregations and communities going without health insurance and food.

At a time when social-service programs can be out of reach or nonexistent for many people, religious and faith-based institutions are among the places that provide support. Besides offering prayer and spiritual guidance, many religious organizations offer practical assistance through food and clothing banks, emergency loan programs, job retraining, and more—and doing so at a time when their budgets are shrinking. Many religious institutions are also advocating for public policies such as universal health care as part of their mission.

“Churches are at the forefront of this recession,” said a participant at the faith leaders’ conversation in Atlanta. “People are reducing their tithes and offerings…yet more are coming to church with needs. The rent is due. The car broke down. Church is a refuge. How do we help them?”

Religious institutions with immigrant congregations are often active providers of social services, despite the fact that in some disadvantaged communities they lack the resources to offer a wide array of programs.

In addition to responding to these urgent needs, religious institutions provide ongoing services, such as marriage and family counseling, programs for senior citizens, youth mentoring, and after-school programs.59 A 2000 study of Islamic mosques found similar services for families. For instance, 74 percent offered marital or family counseling, 84 percent provided cash benefits to families or individuals, and 16 percent provided child care or preschool. Educational programs were also important: 21 percent of mosques had a full-time Islamic school, while 71 percent provided a weekend school for either children or adults.

Religious institutions with immigrant congregations are often active providers of social services, despite the fact that they lack the resources in some disadvantaged communities to offer a wide array of programs.61 In addition to youth groups and summer camp, many immigrant congregations, including those of non-Christian faiths, hold their own “Sunday school” as a way to teach children their religious beliefs.

One in-depth study of immigrant congregations found that a number sponsored women’s groups to provide social services, especially to other immigrant women. A Muslim woman in the study said that their activities focused on areas “where women have always taken a leadership role behind the scenes,” such as helping children, the sick, divorced women, and in other areas of need.

Among religious institutions that offer the most programs and services are mega-churches. For many mega-churches, their sense of mission is intimately tied to an entrepreneurial business model whereby they aim to be responsive to their followers—or “clients.”

This spiritual-business model often relies on a sizeable budget that allows a dazzling variety of services and amenities, such as health clubs, cafes, and movie theaters, to attract and retain followers. For instance, Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, offers 16 basketball courts, a Cybex health club, a bank, a rock-climbing wall, eateries, and shops. And Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, offers drama, dance, and video workshops; finance and tax classes; activities for children of all ages; marriage-strengthening classes; programs for women including movie nights, autism support groups, and Bible study; service opportunities; and more.

According to a 2002 New York Times article, “these churches are becoming civic in a way unimaginable since the 13th century and its cathedral towns. No longer simply places to worship, they have become part resort, part mall, part extended family and part town square.”

For many mega-churches, their sense of mission is intimately tied to an entrepreneurial business model whereby they aim to be responsive to their followers—or “clients.”

Spirituality is growing fast

Spirituality in America is growingly rapidly, especially among women. Books, retreats, workshops, rituals, and meditation practices are gaining followers among women who are religious, and those who are not. At first glance, there might seem to be little commonality among spiritual practices that range from massage therapy and sweat lodges to Zen meditation, 12-step programs, feminist nature rituals, and fasting.

And it is true that many practices called “spiritual” are so simply because that is how their followers describe them. Yet among its varied expressions, spirituality is often thought to fall into three categories: spirituality that is separate and distinct from organized religion; spirituality that is in conflict with organized religion; and spirituality that complements, or is part of, organized religion.

For many African American women, religiously inspired spirituality offers an effective way to respond to work-related stress. In one research study, 97 percent of black women said that spiritual practices helped them cope with stresses at work. Spirituality was the most frequently named coping mechanism, with many women saying they prayed “a great deal.”

In addition to prayer, African American women relied upon their trust in God, in their hope for a miracle, and in the renewal of their faith as they faced difficulties on the job. For these women, major stresses included the overwhelming demands of their job, the need to make ends meet, and working with prejudiced co-workers.

Spirituality was also important to the Catholic women in the focus groups discussed earlier. A number of them identified “nonreligious” activities as spiritually renewing, such as gardening, walking on the beach, yoga, poetry, music, and exercise.

Younger women are more likely to be involved in spirituality than older women. They are more likely to choose personal experience over church doctrine as the best way to understand God70 and to create their own belief system from a variety of sources, such as friends, websites, magazine articles, TV shows, books, and movies. Because fewer of them are involved in organized religion, their spiritual beliefs and practices tend to be separate from religion.

There are a number of reasons for the growth of spirituality among women. It is flexible and portable, able to fit into a busy schedule of work, chores, and travel. For many women, doing yoga or meditating each morning can provide them with greater spiritual focus and energy than going to weekly worship services. This is especially true if worship services are scheduled at a time that competes with family activities and chores. Reading spiritual self-help books can provide specific methods and techniques for self enhancement—a toning up of the soul, just as the gym tones up the body.

There are a number of reasons for the growth of spirituality among women. It is flexible and portable, able to fit into a busy schedule of work, chores, and travel.

Another reason for spirituality’s appeal is that it doesn’t claim a specific set of doctrines or beliefs to conflict with or supplant the beliefs of organized religion. The fluidity of spirituality seems appealing to increasing numbers of Americans, many of whom have “only a vague denominational identification” and are unclear about which religious group they belong to.

In addition, as people travel longer distances to reach houses of worship, spirituality can feel more convenient and efficient. Furthermore, the once-unique role of clergy in answering spiritual questions has been supplanted by a wide variety of sources, including the Internet, which can answer questions instantly and anonymously in the comfort of one’s home. Finally, the community that women once found in religious institutions is now being found in the workplace, at the gym, and other places where women spend their days.

Not everyone thinks the growth of spirituality is a good thing. In his essay “Against Spirituality,” the late Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf argues that the Kabbalah and other forms of Jewish spirituality are undermining the deep sense of social connectivity, mutual responsibility, self-criticism, historical roots, and intellectual rigor of Judaism. Wolf quotes Reverend Donna Schoper, who warns of the “dangerous lure of spirituality” for all religions. She says, “Amateurish tai chi and yoga, quasi-Buddhist meditation, and New Age prayers are a far cry from the ancient practice of the Sabbath.”

Schoper goes on to complain about highly personalized spirituality replacing organized religion. Spirituality can mire a person in the self, she says, and cause him or her to lose sight of the sacred. According to Schoper, “religion steeps people in its long history of reflection on ethics” and at its best “offers time and space for spiritual experience.” In contrast, “spirituality gives us a quick fix that fits into our fast-paced insular lifestyle.”

Others are not so critical. Theologian Sandra Schneiders, emeritus professor at the Jesuit School of Theology, sees spirituality as an important vehicle for transcendence. The paradox of religious institutions, she says, is that they are culturally based and can be hypocritical, rigid, corrupt, and reflect the biases of the larger society. However, she defends organized religion for its capacity to initiate people into “an authentic tradition of spirituality,” giving them “companions on the journey and tested wisdom by which to live,” as well as support in times of suffering.

Schneiders goes on to say that when people leave religious institutions to “find a small group of like-minded companions in exile, they are left without the corrective criticism of an historically tested community and the public scrutiny that any society focuses on recognized groups within it. And they also lose the leverage which would enable them to influence systemically either church or society.”

This last point is especially important for working women, since religious institutions can be strong allies and advocates for a social agenda and public policies that help women better fulfill their roles as parents and workers. Schneiders argues against a “privatized spirituality,” which she likens to “social cocooning,” claiming that it can be naive and narcissistic, and a private pursuit rather than a disciplined and committed participation in community. It is important to be outward looking as well as inward looking, focusing on social, as well as personal, transformation.

Where Do We Go From Here?

As more women become the breadwinners in their families and soon the majority of workers, the stresses and demands in their lives will grow. So will their need for support, sustenance, and services. It may be that women will continue to leave organized religion if institutions don’t respond to their needs. Already, more and more women are patching together a crazy quilt of religious practices and spiritual activities in order to find a space for reflection and wholeness in their lives. However, they need something more. They need religious institutions to listen to their voices and pay attention to the complicated reality of their lives.

As women strive to integrate work, family, and faith, religious institutions must also do their part. They must put forth a moral vision of what it truly means to value women and families, and lay out steps for achieving that vision. This means working for public policies that tangibly support families and make it easier for women (and men) to be both good parents and employees. It means valuing women’s leadership talents and skills—and eradicating outdated customs that value men above women. Finally, it means re-invigorating sacred teachings on compassion, dignity, justice, and equality to speak out forcefully on behalf of women and their families today.

Endnotes

1. “Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth: Diocesan Focus Groups (Part 3),” available at http://www.usccb.org/laity/women/focusgroups3.shtml (last accessed August 2009).
2. Ibid.
3. Kathy McDowell, conversation with faith leaders in Atlanta, GA, July 20, 2009. This conversation was part of a series convened by Maria Shriver to collect women’s and men’s views for this report.
4. There is dispute over this trend, with some scholars arguing that there has not been a decline. See Stanley Presser and Mark Chaves, “Is Religious Service Attendance Declining?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46 (3) (September 2007): 417–423. See also Holley Ulbrich and Myles Wallace, “Women’s Work Force Status and Church Attendence,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 23 (4) (December 1984): 341–350, which argued that workforce participation alone would not account for long term projections of decline.
5. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Beliefs and Practices: Diverse and Politically Relevant” (June 2008), p. 29.
6. Ibid., p. 38.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation: Diverse and Dynamic,” p. 62.
9. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “A Religious Portrait of African-Americans” (Jan. 30, 2009), p. 4.
10. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “A Religious Portrait of African-Americans,” pp. 63–64.
11. Larry L. Hunt, “Religion, Gender, and the Hispanic Experience in the United States: Catholic/Protestant Differences in Religious Involvement, Social Status, and Gender-Role Attitudes,” Social Forces 43 (2) (2001): 139–60.
12. Ibid., p. 41.
13. Milagros Peña and Lisa M. Frehill, “Latina Religious Practice: Analyzing Cultural Dimensions in Measures of Religiosity,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (4) (1998): 620–635.
14. Ana María Díaz-Stevens, “The Saving Grace: The Matriarchal Core of Latino Catholicism,” Latino Studies Journal 4:3 (1993): 60–78.
15. Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, “Agents for Cultural Reproduction and Structural Change: The Ironic Role of Women in Immigrant Religious Institutions,” Social Forces 78 (2) (1999): 585–613.
16. Ibid., p. 44.
17. R. Stephen Warner, “The De-Europeanization of American Christianity,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, Aug. 14, 2004.
18. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “Faith in Flux: Change in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.” (April 2009).
19. Andrew Greeley, “Defection Among Hispanics (Updated),” America 177 (8) (1997): 12–13.
20. Scott Thumma, Dave Travis, and Warren Bird, “Megachurches Today: Summary of Research Findings” (Hartford: Hartford Institute for Religion Research, 2001).
21. Donald E. Miller, “Postdenominational Christianity in the Twenty-First Century,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558 (1) (1998): 196–210.
22. R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (5) (March 1993): 1044–93; For a contrary view, see Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
23. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “Faith in Flux: Change in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.” (April 2009), p. 1.
24. Penny Edgell, Religion and Family in a Changing Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006), pp. 64–65.
25. “It’s a Matter of Time: Exploring the Relationship between Time Spent at Work and at Church,” available at http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/edgell-time.html (last accessed August 2009).
26. Ibid.
27. Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 49.
28. Mary Ellen Konieczny, The Spirit’s Tether: Family, Work, and Religion among American Catholic, (forthcoming).
29. “Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth: Women’s Spirituality in the Workplace: A Compilation of Diocesan Focus Group Reports,” available at http://www.usccb.org/laity/women/focusgroups.shtml (last accessed August 2009).
30. Ibid.
31. Tracy L. Scott, “Choices, Constraints, and Calling: Conservative Protestant Women and the Meaning of Work,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 22 (1/2/3) (2002): 1–38, see p. 15.
32. Scott, “Choices, Constraints, and Calling,” p. 19.
33. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
34. Ibid., p. 26.
35. Ibid., p. 14.
36. Ibid., p. 28.
37. Daphne C. Wiggins, Righteous Content: Black Women Speak of Church and Faith (New York: New York University Press, 2004), p. 79.
38. Pew Hispanic Center, “Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion” (2007).
39. Laura M. Padilla, “Latinas and Religion: Subordination or State of Grace?” U.C. Davis Law Review 33 (4) (1999–2000): 978.
40. Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 301.
41. Penny Edgell Becker, “Congregations Adapting to Changes in Work and Family: A Report from the Religion and Family Project.” Working Paper (University of Minnesota Religion and Family Project, 1999).
42. Margaret Bendroth, “Last Gasp Patriarchy: Women and Men in Conservative American Protestantism,” Muslim World 91(1/2) (Spring 2001): 45–54.
43. Sally K. Gallagher, “The Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism,” Sociology of Religion 65 (3) (2004): 228.
44. Gallagher, “The Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism,” pp. 228–230.
45. Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical’s Lament (New York: Basic Books, 2006), pp. 25–35.
46. Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, p. 10.
47. Gallagher, “Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism,” p. 229; W. Bradford Wilcox and John P. Bartkowski, “The Evangelical Family Paradox: Conservative Rhetoric, Progressive Practice,” The Responsive Community 9 (3) (1999): 34–39.
48. Darren E. Sherkat and Christopher G. Ellison, “Recent Developments and Current Controversies in the Sociology of Religion,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 372.
49. Penny Edgell, Religion and Family in a Changing Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2006), p. 5.
50. Ibid, pp. 133, 138.
51. “Sacred Places, Civic Purposes: Child Care Conference Event Transcript,” available at http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=6 (last accessed August 2009).
52. Roger Neugebauer, “Status Report #6: Trends in Religious-Affiliated Child Care” Exchange 184 (Nov/Dec 2008): 12–14.
53. National Center for Education Statistics, “Initial Results from the 2005 NHES Early Childhood Program Participation Survey” (2006), p. 59.
54. Monica Rohacek, Gina Adams, and Kathleen Snyder, “Child Care Centers, Child Care Vouchers, and Faith-Based Organizations” (Washington: Urban Institute, 2008).
55. Neugebauer, “Status Report #6: Trends in Religious-Affiliated Child Care.”
56. Penny Edgell Becker, “Congregations Adapting to Changes.”
57. Ram A. Cnaan, Edwin I. Hernández, and Charlene C. McGrew, “Latino Congregations and Social Service: The Philadelphia Story” (Notre Dame University: Institute for Latino Studies: February 2006).
58. Conversation with faith leaders in Atlanta, GA, July 20, 2009.
59. John Green, “American Congregations and Social Service Programs: Results of a Survey” (Albany: The Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, 2007).
60. Ihsan Bagby, Paul M. Perl, and Bryan T. Froehle, “The Mosque in America: A National Portrait” (Washington: Council on American-Islamic Relations, Apr. 26, 2001), p. 42.
61. Cnaan, Hernández, and McGrew, “Latino Congregations and Social Service.”
62. Ebaugh and Chafetz, “Agents for Cultural Reproduction,” p. 595.
63. Ibid., p. 598.
64. Patricia Leigh Brown, “Megachurches as Minitowns,” The New York Times, May 9, 2002, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/09/garden/megachurches-as-minitowns.html.
65. Ibid.
66. Sandra M. Schneiders, “Religion vs. Spirituality: A Contemporary Conundrum,” Spiritus 3 (2) 2003: 175.
67. Ibid., pp. 164–166.
68. Denise N. A. Bacchus, “Coping with Work-Related Stress: A Study of the Use of Coping Resources Among Professional Black Women” Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work 17(1) (2008): 70, 74.
69. Ibid., p. 69.
70. Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers, p. 133.
71. Ibid.
72. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” (2008), p. 2.
73. Arnold Jacob Wolf, “Against Spirituality,” Judaism 50 (3) (June 2001): 362–365.
74. Ibid., p. 365.
75. Ibid.
76. Schneiders, “Religion vs. Spirituality,” p. 171.
77. Ibid., p. 172.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., p. 177.

I made this request based upon a poll of moviegoers commissioned by Sony Pictures, which revealed:

• Two-thirds of moviegoers and three-quarters of parents are more likely to buy healthy snacks at theaters if they are offered.
• Forty-two percent of parents said they would buy concessions more often if healthy options were available.
• Sixty percent of parents said having healthier snacks in theaters would enhance their overall movie going experience.

I’m not asking theaters to stop selling popcorn, soda and candy.  Audiences love them.  I’m just talking about adding some healthier items to what they already sell.  To help in this process, the Alliance for a Healthier Generation has offered to meet with theater owners and offer advice on how to change menus in a way that makes sense for audiences and their businesses. 

“The private sector, including the theater industry, has the ability to improve the access families have to healthier foods and beverages," said President Bill Clinton, founder of the William J. Clinton Foundation, who co-leads the Alliance for a Healthier Generation with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and American Heart Association President Clyde Yancy. 

“The Alliance brokered voluntary agreements with the beverage industry that resulted in an 88 percent decrease in beverage calories shipped to America's schools in just a few years. We are eager to work with the movie theater industry to craft similar agreements to provide healthy concession options in movie theaters.” 

“In order to turn the tide on the obesity epidemic we are going to need to make soup to nuts changes in the number of calories we take in and the calories we actively use. Because kids are eating and foraging at home, school, sporting events and at the movies, changes are needed everywhere," said Dr. Neal Halfon, professor of pediatrics, public health and public policy at UCLA and director of the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities.

"We can’t expect kids to make healthy choices if they aren’t given healthy choices to make. And while this is a nationwide problem, and will require support from companies with a national stature like Sony Pictures and large theater chains, it will also depend on the ingenuity and commitment of local theater operators to make the difference in their communities.”

In a videotaped message to the convention, Dr. Mehmet Oz, vice chair and professor of surgery at Columbia University and host of The Dr. Oz Show, said, “"Everyone enjoys popcorn and a soda at the movies, but there are healthier alternatives. Good nutrition doesn't mean eating spinach at every meal. But with so many children and teens going to movies so often these days, I think we've got to be mindful about what they're eating and drinking, and giving them the chance to choose healthier food makes a lot of sense."

I believe that theater owners should consider taking this step because childhood obesity is an epidemic, it’s the responsible thing to do for audiences and society, and it’s good for their business because it would help families enjoy theaters even more and, by giving them healthier options, more snacks will be purchased.

Now, I don’t think giant tubs of spinach or broccoli are a good idea.  And nobody wants to eat cauliflower while watching Spider-Man, or drink a 40-ounce cup of prune juice. However, moviegoers suggested to our studio’s interviewers the kind of snacks they’d like to see:

• Fresh fruit, fruit cups, apples with dip.
• Veggies with dip.
• Yogurt.
• Granola bars and trail mix.
• Baked chips, apples chips and unbuttered, air-popped popcorn.

Some people already sneak healthy snacks into movie theaters, like a granola bar or a box of raisins, which represents an untapped market for concession stands.  People are consuming food differently these days.  In fact, many theaters are located near Starbucks and Whole Foods, in malls and other places where consumers are finding more nutritious food and beverage options.  Audiences would love both a great theatrical experience and terrific snacks.

In fact, our employees at Sony Pictures are offered a subsidized healthy lunch special and expanded salad bar at the studio commissary.  Some theaters are moving in the direction of offering healthier foods; some use canola oil instead of coconut oil for their popcorn.  I understand that some things will prove to be logistically or economically impossible, but even small steps in the right direction can have a big impact.

We were so inspired by this selfless act that we wanted to share his story with you.

A seventh grader at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in New York City, Jordan discovered Greengrants through a class presentation on various nonprofits. He was struck by the local focus of our grantmaking, and felt it was "a very meaningful way to accomplish worthwhile environmental goals, while ensuring that communities are involved and local needs are met." Certainly, the thousands of dollars that he funneled to Greengrants are already having a tremendous impact around the world.

Besides supporting environmental justice internationally, Jordan also gives back to his local community. He volunteers once a week on a literacy project at a public school in the city and also at a neighborhood soup kitchen. When he finally takes time for himself, he is interested in filmmaking, loves math and fantasy books, and enjoys running cross-country and track on his school teams. Jordan has a younger brother and sister, and a dog named Holly.

Greengrants is grateful for Jordan's generosity and the generosity of all those who made gifts on his behalf. As one enthusiastic donor remarked, "We think your choice of bar mitzvah gift speaks wonders about the Jewish adult you have become!"

Congratulations, Jordan, and thank you!

Then I thought, “Well, I guess it doesn’t just have to be nice things for friends and family.  I should include nice things for strangers, charities, animals, the world… and anything else I can think of!”  And so the idea of 365 Days of Goodness was born.  365 Good Deeds in 365 Days; it was a challenge that proved to change me for the better.  From my blog, 365DaysofGoodness.com, here are just a few smatterings of goodness from that first month:

Matt (my husband) & I helped save 6 lives by each donating a pint of blood

My Mom & I helped a shelter dg find a home.

My Sister & I “crashed” dentist offices & got over 200 tubes of toothpaste to donate to the Pacific Clinics.

A friend & I attended an “Action Fair” where we showed our support for equality in marriage.

I helped feed the hungry, give free mammograms to women, assisted children in attaining literacy & healthcare, save the rainforest & feed rescue animals, all with the click of a button online! (This is a VERY SIMPLE good deed that you all can and should do!)

I left a kind note & money for parking on a stranger’s car.

I started a recycling program in my complex and at Matt’s work with the “proceeds” going to the needy.

I started a “Good Deed Program” in Ms. Good’s 2nd Grade Class.

That last act of goodness was literally life changing.  During my first month of good deeds, one of my friends, Lisa (or Ms. Good as her students called her) and I decided to incorporate a “Good Deed Program” into her 2nd grade classroom.  I’ll never forget the day when I explained to twenty 2nd graders what a good deed is, how they could incorporate goodness into their lives, and how I was on a mission to do 365 good deeds in 365 days. 

The “Good Deed Program” that Lisa and I created went like this: Each Friday, the kids used their journal time to write about the good deeds that they had done or had observed their peers doing for the week.

Then, they practiced their speaking skills by sharing their good deeds for the week with the class.  We picked three students’ names at random and those three students nominated another student who they thought should be recognized as the “Super Good Deeder” of the week.  The students who were chosen to nominate their peers had to give compelling reasons as to why their classmates’ good deeds stood out. 

Some of my favorite acts of kindness by the students included: Lulu who shared her Valentine’s Day candy with her neighbors, Sterling who helped his little brother when he got soap in his eyes, Emma who brought her twin sister lemonade when she had a fever, Sofie who made a Valentine card for a neighbor who she knew didn’t have many friends or family, and Tristan who (with his family) took bottles and cans to recycle at the recycling center. 

There were many more inspiring acts of goodness that the children shared with me during the 20 weeks of the Good Deed Program, but I would need to write a whole other article to list them all!  (You can read more on my website at 365DaysofGoodness.com, please click on "The Good Deed Program.")

From January to May 2009, the buzz around the school was quite positive about the “Good Deed Program” and all of the other 2nd grade classes had a chance to join in our good deed fun.  When the school year came to an end in June of 2009, I presented each student with a “Certificate of Recognition” that showed they had completed  “The Good Deed Program,” but reminded them that this was only the beginning of their good deed quest. 

I let them know that they are an important part of our world and that their acts of goodness will inspire others, who will inspire others, and others, etc. and the goodness ripple will go on and on throughout our world. 

They were so sweet, as they presented me with a handmade good deed book, which was a collection of their favorite good deeds that they had written this past year, and a cute picture of all of us in a handmade frame!  It was so sweet and thoughtful!

I was so thankful that I had this opportunity to do the “Good Deed Program” with the second graders.  It was the mission of the “Good Deed Program” for the students to learn to recognize what made a good deed, to do good deeds of their own, and to incorporate goodness into their everyday lives.   And it succeeded far beyond my greatest expectations!!

By the end of 2009, I looked back at many of the highlights of my 365 good deeds.  Here are some of my favorites that stand out:

Of course, helping inspire the children of Ms. Good’s 2nd grade class with “The Good Deed Program,” being able to help others and our planet with “The Recycling Program,”  visiting and volunteering at animal and homeless shelters, bringing toys and writing get well cards to children at The Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles and other locations, loaning a woman in Peru money to start her business (through Kiva.org) and jumping on a plane to Latin America with my husband, Matt, to volunteer in Peru and Costa Rica and experience life overseas.

One of the greatest gifts that I received from these 365 days is the affect that others had on me.  It is other people’s kind actions that helped me to grow and become more aware of how all of us have that goodness inside of us.  As 2009 came to an end, I was filled with an even greater desire to do more good deeds and inspire more people. 

After having an epiphany of sorts, I decided I wanted to build a non-profit organization that centers on bringing goodness programs to elementary schools across the world: teaching, sharing and creating ripples everywhere!  After my experience working with Ms. Good's students, I realized what a positive impact we can have on our younger generation. 

They are like little sponges, lapping up all the goodness that we open up their eyes to.  So my goal for the 365 days of 2010, is to start planting the seeds and building my non-profit organization.  I am calling it  “Project Goodness,” and the mantra of Project Goodness is that "every little bit counts!" 

Project Goodness, although similar to the Good Deed Program, will be more structured, as the children will tangibly work on a goodness project together as a team. We will brainstorm together on what our specific project will be (helping animals, the elderly, those less fortunate, the military, etc.).

By the end of the 8-12 week project, the children will be able to gain an understanding of what it means to give back, they will be able to see that even though they are "just kids," they can make a huge difference in our world, and they will truly understand that "every little bit really does count!" 

My hope is to inspire our children, who are our leaders of tomorrow, to find and do good in their everyday lives--AND of course to continue that goodness ripple! 

Making this emotional rollercoaster more difficult was the lack of support and information on the web about Madison’s rare condition. Everything I found on the Internet was either very outdated or written in heavy medical jargon.  Also, there was no way to find or speak to parents whose children had this disease.

In response to this vacuum, I created MADISONSFoundation.org, a unique web site that offers medical information and support to parents (and caregivers) of children with rare diseases.  The website features a user-friendly free online library database where parents can look up info about their child’s disease among the over-500 conditions listed.

MADISONS Foundation (working with medical specialists) updates this one-of-a-kind online medical library in parent-friendly language, instead of hard-to-understand medical jargon. If a disease isn’t listed in the library, then a request can be made and researchers will post an article within 7 days.

Also, on the web site, MADISONS Foundation features “The Connecting Parents” program, an online network community of parents whose children have the same rare disease. Parents and caregivers can find support and share information, which can help alleviate some of the frustration they experience while fighting for their children's lives.

In addition to the online library and the network community of parents, Madison’s Foundation donates annually to hospitals across the country to support research into rare pediatric diseases.  Here are just a few examples.

MADISONS Foundation facilitated a $200,000 donation to Emerging Therapies Initiative in Pediatric Oncology at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, a facility at UCLA that provides clinical trials for children.  The foundation also provided a research room for parents in the children’s wing of Mattel Children’s Hospital, another facility at UCLA.

And that’s not all.  MADISONS Foundation also provides programs for doctors on diagnosing and managing rare diseases, communication skills needed to give bad news and how to give compassionate, holistic, and supportive care.  There is also a book, “Kid to Kid,” which is written by Madison, for youngsters who are facing the ordeals of medical treatment.

Along with the medical and parental backing, Madison’s Foundation has drawn support from Academy Award winning actors Charlize Theron and Tom Hanks, who appears in a video intro on the home page of MADISONSFoundation.org.  Additionally, I created a blog for more updates and information at MarcysChronicles.com.

What I hope is that one day, if a doctor has to tell you that your child has a rare disease,  the physician will also be able to add, “I know a resource called MADISONS Foundation where you can look up more information abut this rare condition and connect with other parents whose children been through this.” 

Madison, who is now 14, and I have dedicated our lives to this cause. To put it simply, we don’t want anymore parents and children to go what we went through.

However, and much more importantly, the ill-effects of youth unemployment cannot and must not be measured in monetary terms alone. The most devastating effects, in fact, are to be found in the breakdown of the social fabric of entire societies, youth criminality, despair and desperation, drug problems, suicides, the political, social and religious radicalisation of an entire generation, the threat it poses to national development, and increased and counter-productive ‘forced’ migrations. 

The Education For Employment Foundation (EFE) is a relatively new model for career education leading directly to employment for youth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). EFE’s mission is to create economic and social opportunity through constructive solutions to the problem of massive and growing MENA unemployment. The unique EFE model is employer and market-driven – youth are trained according to employers’ needs for the jobs that are in most demand. 

EFE has established affiliate foundations in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Yemen and West Bank/Gaza. Drawing on the best educational expertise in the international community, EFE provides career training in vocational, technical, and managerial skills.

The affiliate foundations partner with local businesses, international businesses with established local presence and community leaders to place graduates in jobs. The foundations help to identify existing personnel needs in a given corporation or institution and, subsequently, find disadvantaged youth with the required basic education (high school or university), who could potentially fill such needs, provided they undergo complementary training. 

The training programs are thereby directly linked to a potential employment, providing an almost guaranteed job opportunity (current success rate hovers around 85%) and stable career paths to graduates - resulting in economic growth and social benefits to individuals, families, local communities and countries alike.

Programs are implemented according to the needs of each country and sector. Each foundation is guided by a Board of Directors composed of prominent and experienced leaders from academia, business and civil society, predominantly from the country in question, with minority representation from the U.S., and Europe.

First-rate education and training leading to gainful employment are essential to the advancement of individuals, countries, and entire regions in the global economy. In the MENA region, there are too few educational institutions that provide basic education matching the requirements of today’s market, and even fewer technical and career-training opportunities.

This educational shortfall hinders effective economic and social development, which severely limits employment prospects for young adults and negatively impacts all of society. Given the high demand for quality career training throughout the region, and the urgent need to correct the mismatch between educational curricula and employers’ needs, EFE’s programs serve as a model for reform and development of the workforce throughout the region. By creating new, unparalleled training and job opportunities, EFE acts as a catalyst for economic and social development, with a direct impact on the country’s development as a whole.

How EFE Operates

Reflections from EFE Graduates

“Before joining the EFE program or even hearing about it the doors were closed and the tunnels were dark. Thanks to the people who spent their time and efforts to design and implement this unique program. Without the EFE Mini-MBA course and the efforts that were made, I would not be here working in a much -respected company, where you can achieve your goals and build your career. There is a very common saying, I think it’s a Japanese one, that says: ‘Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.  Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.’ This is what the Mini-MBA course did: they taught us how to fish and how to build our careers.” - Mohamed Ayesh (Palestine)

“I was putting all my efforts into looking for work, because work is a human being’s dignity. I was lucky to participate in the training offered by EFE. Today, I feel like an active member of society.”                     - Fayçal Jouaibi (Morocco)

 “I learned to plan my life, and to be persistent in pursuing my goals. I became a positive person I learned how to manage my time and my resources. I learned how to make decisions, and to be decisive. I alsolearned how to interact with my work mates and how to reach my goals in a positive way. Most importantly, I learned how to be confident. I am now in control of my life, more than ever before. Being employed is just like being re-born.” -Reena Kulaib (Yemen)

“Each alumnus creates a ring in the water by sharing his or her experiences with friends and acquaintances, but one ring does not suffice. In order to have maximum impact, we need to cover a greater surface area; we need to reach more youth.” […]  “This experience has provided me the happiest days of my life. It is the result of a collective effort of a network that aims to develop the abilities of youth throughout the world.”  - Mohammed Bahlaouane (Morocco)

Click here to read what TIME says about EFE
Click here to read about Queen Rania and EFE
Click here to watch what PBS says about EFE
Click here to watch what CNN says about EFE

The company that finds the right formula to get the most out of the talent base? That’s the company that’s going to win. That’s the company that will be distinctive. And nowhere is that more true than with women,” argues Samuel DiPiazza, Global CEO of accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers. “And in PwC, where we have so many talented women in our team, how do we get more of them into leadership of the organization? To me, that’s the critical question.”

DiPiazza has put his insights into action: His firm is ranked one of the top five global companies to work for by DiversityInc, a leading publishing, research, and consulting firm on diversity and business. But his words and deeds aren’t simply about “doing the right thing” by promoting diversity, they are also smart business.

By sheer numbers, women are now on half of U.S. payrolls and they are granted more degrees than men. Women represent the fastest-growing segment of small-business owners, are responsible for making 80 percent of consumer buying decisions, and are inevitably becoming the driving force fueling economic growth. These numbers indicate that change for businesses large and small is inevitable, ready or not.

Indeed, there is now such a strong business case for hiring, retaining, and promoting women that increasingly companies of all sizes are beginning to rethink their structures, hiring practices, and human resources strategies to respond to the workplace needs and expectations of women. These new efforts to bring women more fully into the American workforce at all levels benefit women and men alike. New research demonstrates that companies that consistently promote women to positions of power and leadership over time and across their operations have greater financial success across a variety of measures.

Yet most companies haven’t done enough to incorporate women into their business models. Nor have they made great strides in addressing the work-life conflicts that most workers, but especially women, face. The vast majority of companies in the United States still seem to be reluctant to embrace practices that will most effectively manage, promote, and retain women.3 Yet, for all workers, conflict between what their families need and what their employers need can make it difficult to be both good workers and good family members. Since the bulk of care responsibilities continue to fall on women (although this has been slowly changing), women bear the brunt of the costs of not addressing these issues.

New research demonstrates that companies that consistently promote women to positions of power and leadership over time and across their operations have greater financial success across a variety of measures.

Women across the income spectrum are struggling to cope with work-family conflict because of these important gains in women’s participation in the workforce. For hourly workers, work-life conflict can have particularly dire consequences. Many hourly workers have very little control over their schedules and can be fired for being late or missing a day’s work due to a schedule conflict. For middle- and higher-income workers these same conflicts may be the reason that women don’t reach the upper echelons of their organizations as fast as men, and also the reason that some leave the workforce altogether.

We contend in this chapter that those employers who have made the adjustments swiftly are reaping the benefits while those who have not are continuing to embrace management practices that are out of step with the needs and desires of today’s workforce. The problem for most companies is that deeply entrenched corporate cultures often value people’s time over their efforts, which impedes the retention and promotion of women and others who demand greater flexibility over their schedules.

The reality for all U.S. businesses, though, is clear: This change is unavoidable and organizations will need to change with it in order to thrive. The movement of women into the labor force has fundamentally altered the environment in which businesses function.

The conversation is no longer about whether women will work, but rather how businesses are dealing with both women workers and most workers sharing in at least some home-and-family care responsibilities.

This chapter juxtaposes the gains women have made with the barriers and challenges they continue to face. We then identify the changes in the way businesses operate that will allow women in the labor force to be successful. We conclude with a set of recommendations for both organizations and society as a whole to address the concerns and opportunities for women in business.

Where are the women?

What are women doing today? In spite of the much-heralded progress women have made in building careers, there is still a long way to go before women reach parity, especially in senior-level management positions. While it is encouraging to note that 38 percent of working women are employed in managerial, professional, and related occupations, a great many women in the United States remain employed in what might be seen as traditionally female occupations, such as secretarial, nursing, or teaching.

In terms of specific professions, women have obviously made progress across a broad spectrum of careers. For instance, more than half of accounting graduates are women and women make up about 54 percent of all accountants in the United States. Women of color represent nearly 30 percent of all female accountants.5 Women also represent 45 percent of all associates in law firms and are generally equally represented in industries such as banking and insurance.

The professional area where women continue to have low representation is in engineering and science. In engineering for example, women earn only about 20 percent of the degrees awarded in the United States, with the highest percentages of those being in chemical and industrial engineering (earning 30 percent or more.) The lowest percentages are in some of the largest disciplines such as mechanical and electrical engineering, in which women are representated at or below 18 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.

In 2008, 68 million women were employed in the United States. Seventy-five percent worked full time. Twenty-five percent worked part time (35 hours or less). Women are more likely than men to work part time and not surprisingly, those with young children are the most likely to seek reduced work hours. The result for women is a still-pervasive wage gap, as Heather Boushey amply demonstrates in her chapter of this report.

Advancing toward the C-Suite

Despite the progress women have made, as of July 2009, only 15 companies on the Fortune 500 list were run by female chief executives, and 14 of the next 501 to 1,000 companies, according to Catalyst, the leading women’s nonprofit research organization. That’s less than 3 percent. Further, only 15.7 percent of corporate officer positions in Fortune 500 companies were held by women—and this number has not increased at all since 2002.

These low numbers and the lack of progress in recent years suggest that it is not simply a time lag that results in the low number of women in senior management. It is also the effects of the so-called “leaky pipeline,” as women drop out of organizations’ talent management systems before they reach senior management positions.

Despite low representation of women in senior-level roles, the proposition that corporate bottom lines are improved if women are full participants at every level in companies is now bolstered by a number of studies. Several recent studies conducted both in the United States and abroad show that when women are at the helm of major corporations, those companies enjoy greater financial success. Among them:

• A 2001 Pepperdine University study led by the late marketing professor Roy Adler found that the 25 best corporations for women within the Fortune 500 list of companies (those that aggressively promoted women) had 34 percent higher profits compared to industry medians.
• A 2007 study conducted by Catalyst found that Fortune 500 companies with more female board members were more profitable than those with fewer or no women when using financial measures such as return on equity, return on sales, and return on invested capital. The top 25 percent of companies in terms of number of women on their boards of directors yielded a 13.9 percent return on equity compared to a 9.1 percent yield for companies in the bottom 25 percent in terms of number of women on their boards.

These are just a few examples of a range of recent studies that focus on the relationship between female executive leadership and corporate financial performance. While we would not suggest that these studies provide indisputable evidence that women are better leaders than men, they do suggest that the ways women lead can yield positive organizational outcomes.

In their recent report “‘Girl Power’: Female Participation in Top Management and Firm Performance,” University of Maryland business professor Cristian Dezso and Columbia Business School professor David Gaddis Ross examined more than 1,500 U.S. companies from 1992 to 2006 and found strong indications that when women exert influence in positions of leadership and power, they get more beneficial results. This is due in part to their participatory and democratic style of leading, which tends to foster both creativity and teamwork. The benefits of having women in these positions is now evident in the movement of more and more women into positions of leadership and influence outside the C-suite.

Hopping off the ladder

For the vast majority of women (and men for that matter), reaching a C-suite level position is not very likely (or perhaps even desirable). The statistics on educated women entering the workforce and the early but encouraging research we have outlined suggesting that women are highly effective in senior-level positions would lead one to ask:

• Why aren’t women more equally represented at senior levels of the business organizations?
• Why is the number of women at the top still so small?
• Why are there so many leaks in the pipeline of women into leadership in corporate America?

Later, we will discuss the underlying reasons that are thwarting women’s advancement, but first we consider the alternative career paths of the professional women who are not pursuing the C-suite, and examine how business supports (or fails to support, as the case may be) the vast majority of women who are working in occupations with little prospect of career advancement.

Among the many reasons women hop off the career ladder is work-life conflict. Two options that many women pursue to address these conflicts are: “opting out” (or downshifting) and pursuing entrepreneurial careers.

Off the career track

The term “opting out” was coined by Lisa Belkin in a 2003 New York Times Magazine article. 12 While the piece was controversial and empirical research contradicted the hypothesis that this is a widespread phenomenon, Belkin did rightly point out that many highly educated women leave their employers prematurely due to the barriers they encounter in the workplace and the challenge of integrating work and family.

But opting out is not simply a response to inflexible schedules and problems rectifying work-family conflict. In their 2006 book The Opt-Out Revolt, Lisa Mainiero and Sherry Sullivan point out that women are more likely to leave the workforce because their jobs are not satisfying or lack meaning. Many women, especially those at midlife, opt out because they do not feel valued.

A second option for women is to take on a reduced work schedule, working part time or job sharing. This approach, like opting out, is viable only for those families that can afford to live on less earnings. Women are far more likely than men to pursue reduced-hours arrangements in order to accommodate their caregiving demands. Unfortunately, employers appear to have an almost inexplicably high level of resistance to establishing part-time professional positions.

Many highly skilled women seek professional part-time roles where they can contribute in meaningful ways, only to find that such roles pay poorly, are marginalized, and often do not include benefits (not even on a pro-rated basis). The result is a serious talent drain that would be very easily remedied by employers simply letting go of an outdated belief that professionals and managers work full time.

Overall, a quarter of women workers are employed part time (fewer than 35 hours per week), and most are employed in a relatively small number of occupations, with cashiers (6.3 percent), waitresses (5.1 percent), and retail sales (5.1 percent) being the most common. As stated earlier, much of the overall gender wage gap is due to women’s propensity to work part-time schedules or take time out of the workforce to care for their children. Unfortunately, for many employees, part-time work often carries with it a stigma, a serious lack of “good” opportunities, and a wage-and-benefits penalty that limits career growth.

The entrepreneurial call

Another option that is an increasingly attractive alternative for many women has been to start their own companies. Data from 2008–09 indicate that women are running more than 10 million businesses with combined sales of $1.1 trillion. Women are starting these new companies mostly in industries where they have traditionally been well-represented as employees and line managers but not so often as owners and leaders.

Researchers at the Small Business Administration in 2008 took a deep dive into the data behind all this female entrepreneurial activity. They discovered that between 1997 and 2006, the number of women-owned businesses grew in number by 69 percent in service industries, 82.7 percent in professional services, 116.8 percent in arts and recreation services, 130 percent in retailing, 116.8 percent in real estate and 130 percent in the health care sector.

The challenge, however, is that many women-owned businesses make very little money: Forty-six percent of women-owned companies earn $10,000 or less and about 80 percent have annual revenues of less than $50,000.18 Despite the growing number of women entrepreneurs, only 3 percent of women-owned businesses have revenues of $1 million or more compared with 6 percent of men-owned businesses.

Pink-collar workers

The vast majority of women are not working in jobs that could take them high up the career ladder in a traditional, private-sector business. Most women are working as secretaries and administrative assistants in these businesses, as registered nurses in our hospitals, as teachers in our public schools, and as retail salespeople or cashiers. Table 1 shows the 10 most prevalent occupations for employed women in the United States.

The story of how businesses support these women is quite different from the stories about professional women. One of the most common characteristics of many of the jobs listed in Table 1 is that they are in the service sector and that many are hourly, not salaried. They may be subject to regular (or unexpected) shift changes, too many or too few hours, and wages that are low relative to comparably skilled male-dominated occupations.

They struggle with work-family conflicts just as professional workers do, but they earn much less, cannot afford to pay for high-quality child care or elder care, and often have far less control over their workdays. Since nonprofessional women make up the majority of women in the workplace, employers need to include them in their thinking about how to retain female talent overall.

The barriers women face in corporate America

While women have come a long way in corporate America, progress, as we point out—especially at the highest echelons—is still slow. What are the major barriers that help explain these numbers and why do women continue to trail their male counterparts?

The most common barriers women face as they navigate organizational life in corporate America are hardly new. They include the persistence of traditional gender-based caregiving roles, exclusion from informal corporate networks, and gender differences embedded in male-dominated organizational cultures—all of which can lead to “organizational invisibility” for women and for women’s issues. We will explore each of these barriers in more detail to set the stage for what can and is being done in some leading organizations to create an environment that fosters the engagement and development of key talent—and most especially women.

The (perceived) problem with moms

When it comes to challenges women continue to face, nothing compares to the issue of balancing (or integrating) their caregiving responsibilities with their work. In spite of the dramatic increase in the amount of time women spend in paid employment, the time mothers spend with children has declined very little over the past 30 years. This dual work-family role was termed the “second shift” by Arlie Hochschild in 1989 to describe women overloaded from working two full-time shifts—at work and then at home.

When it comes to challenges women continue to face, nothing compares to the issue of balancing their caregiving responsibilities with their work.

The second-shift problem is still alive and well for most women today. Many studies have shown that men have increased their commitment to domestic tasks and child-rearing. In fact, according to Suzanne Bianchi, one of the country’s leading work-family scholars, men have more than doubled the time engaged in domestic tasks and child-rearing over the past 40 years (from seven hours a week in 1965 to 16.3 hours a week in 2005). But this represents only about half the time women with children dedicate to these roles—31.8 hours a week in 2005.

Single and childless women seem to enjoy steady gains in organizational advancement, but their progress very often slows when they become mothers. The so-called “maternal wall,” a term coined by Deborah Swiss and Judith Walker in their 1993 book Women and the Work/Family Dilemma, describes the frustration of many women in the upper echelons of corporations who found their workplaces less receptive to them when they became mothers. These women felt they were more likely to be turned down for promotions, receive negative performance appraisals, be passed up for important assignments, and be viewed as less committed to their employers as a result of becoming mothers.

Hitting the “maternal wall” often results in wage gaps and career discrimination. While childless women working in corporations earn nearly the same pay as their male counterparts, mothers earn 15 percent less on average than men and single mothers earn 40 percent less.23 The gender gap has narrowed over the last 30 years, but it clearly remains substantial.

What is particularly problematic is that most mothers across all wage levels rely on their incomes to support their families. The reason: Flat wage growth for most Americans over the past two decades, in tandem with most layoffs—especially in this Great Recession—occurring in traditionally male-dominated industries, have left women as key and sometimes the sole breadwinners.

While childless women working in corporations earn nearly the same pay as their male counterparts, mothers earn 15 percent less on average than men and single mothers earn 40 percent less.

It is critical to point out that these dual responsibilities do not apply only to parenting. In the 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce, 35 percent of female and male employees said they had significant elder care responsibilities—a trend that continues to persist as Americans live longer and require greater care. Elder care is an enormous looming problem that will profoundly impact the U.S. labor force and businesses in coming years.

Unlike child care, where physical care gets easier over a relatively predictable time frame, elder care has a far less predictable time frame and increases in difficulty as the health of the person being cared for worsens. Caring for a child can also be uplifting and can offer many psychological benefits; caring for elders is often psychologically debilitating.

And elder care costs are significantly higher than child care, involving private care and nursing homes for families who can afford it and lengthy time off or careers deferred or upended for those who cannot. While men’s roles in elder care tend to be more equal with women’s than in child care, these caregiving roles occur at significant times in women’s careers.

No “old girl” networks

The second major problem faced by working women pertains to all women, not just those with significant dependent care issues. The famed “old boy” network doesn’t really exist for women in most companies. Such networks are critical to forging relationships with mentors, sponsors, and other important social connections that facilitate work effectiveness and career development.

Informal networking also fosters collaboration and social support and enhances relationships. Yet many women, and African American women in particular, have difficulty networking with individuals at higher levels of the organization, particularly if those individuals are predominantly white and male (which, most of the time, they are).

In their study of black and white professional women, University of South Africa Professor Stella Nkomo and Dartmouth Professor Ella Bell found that only 59 percent of African American women in the United States reported having white men in their professional networks. The women in their study explained that informal networking is the key to visibility in the workplace and that without access there are limited opportunities for growth and advancement.

White women also struggle to navigate informal networks in organizations that are particularly male-dominated. Without formal mechanisms for women and minorities to become a part of the network, this can remain a significant impediment to progress. Exclusion from informal aspects of the organization can often leave women feeling isolated and disconnected from their peers, work, and institutions.

Seemingly simple things such as joining colleagues for happy hour are often impossible for caregiving women, while single women face barriers to socializing with their married male colleagues or supervisors because of misconceptions that may arise, or due to the fact that these are often couples-only events.

The invisible woman in a male-dominated culture

Finally, women face the challenge of working in organizations whose character and culture have largely been forged by males. While discussions of culture are often more amorphous and organizational responses and solutions are frequently less clear, it would be a mistake to ignore this critical impediment to women’s success.

Studies show that men and women communicate, lead, and negotiate differently, with serious implications for women.26 Georgetown Professor Deborah Tannen’s work from the mid-1990s showed stark differences in how men and women communicate and the implications for women in the workplace. Tannen found that men communicate to preserve status in group settings while women use communication as a means to gain intimacy and closeness with others.

Several other studies show differences in how men and women negotiate for resources in the workplace. While managers try to give employees equal access to resources, women often get shortchanged because they don’t ask for resources as frequently as men. Women, it seems, ask for less due to gendered behavioral expectations—they don’t want to appear too aggressive. As a result, women give the appearance that they lack the skills to negotiate and claim authority in the workplace.

Women often get shortchanged because they don’t ask for resources as frequently as men. Women, it seems, ask for less due to gendered behavioral expectations—they don’t want to appear too aggressive.

Scholars have also looked at potential differences in leadership styles between men and women. In Ways Women Lead, University of California at Irvine Professor Judy Rosener found that men tend to use more delegating, transactional leadership whereas women use a more transformational style by sharing their power and information in a participative approach. This is in line with other research that supports the notion that transformational leaders inspire others to be more engaged, committed, and creative, which can lead to improved overall organizational effectiveness.

But other studies find those differences are more of a myth based on gendered expectation of differences rather than actual behavioral differences. In their recent book Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, Northwestern University and Wellesley College faculty members Alice Eagly and Linda Carli posit, “There is no defensible argument that men are naturally, inherently, or actually better suited to leadership than women are.”

These invisible assumptions are the foundation of most organizational cultures. They are forged in male-dominated senior management meetings and in informal networks that often exclude women. Consequently, the ways women instinctively respond to business situations may not conform to the widely accepted, and yet untested, cultural norms of organizations. This can create significant problems for working women.

Regardless of whether these differences are real or perceived, they often leave women at a disadvantage in traditionally male-dominated environments where masculine styles are expected and rewarded. Business organizations often cling to one interpretation of what effective leadership is rather than capitalizing on the strength of diverse styles of leadership. That may explain why we have yet to see a woman at the helm of a major company in male-dominated industries such as automotives, construction, and manufacturing.

The result is that women are faced with a double bind in many organizations—either staying true to their core values or adopting the masculine values and traits that are dominant in their organizations. When they enact the former approach they may be seen as too feminine, and when they enact the latter they can be viewed as trying to be something they are not.36 Likewise, when women take advantage of programs such as flexible work arrangements they are viewed as less committed or ambitious because doing so runs counter to “ideal worker” norms, which assume workers have no lives outside of their organizations.

Indeed, women fare better in newer industries such as high technology that recognize and reward differences rather than old-line companies that value masculine ways of knowing and doing. And it is these innovation-led companies that will be the driving force of the U.S. economy in the 21st century—not just big high-tech companies but the many small- and medium-sized businesses. Women will do well in these companies and the companies will do well in turn as more and more women take more and more positions of responsibility throughout their ranks of these businesses amid changing workplace structures in the coming years.

How companies are responding

Some leading companies have rethought some of their core principles and have been willing to alter longstanding management practices—embracing a more flexible approach to doing business that recognizes the new realities facing workers and their families. But most U.S. companies have not. There is ample evidence that those who have embraced change are reaping significant benefits and that there are three primary needs of women in business that employers need to address:

• Work-life and flexibility programs that enable women to adjust their everyday work schedules, especially women in low- and middle-salary ranges where these types of programs are noticeably absent
• Career development programs that take into account the fundamental changes in the relationship between workers and their employers and that recognize that career development should not assume a “one-size-fits-all” human resource development strategy
• Inclusive work environments in which women’s diversity of inputs into company decision making reap the best benefits for businesses

Women are faced with a double bind in organizations—staying true to their core values or adopting the masculine values and traits that are dominant in their organizations.

These three sets of workplace initiatives are clearly interrelated, but each needs to be examined separately to underscore their importance and the overall benefits to companies, women, and their families alike.

Work-life and flexibility programs

Since the mid-1980s, leading-edge organizations have been exploring ways to help their workforces minimize the conflict inherent in successfully integrating the work and family domains. Offerings can run a very broad spectrum, from on-site child care to flexible work schedules to telecommuting. The need for these organizational policies became more prominent due to the rise in professional working women and dual-career couples, but it would be a mistake to assume that such initiatives are only valued by women.

A 2005 Fortune magazine article, “Get a Life!”, for example, reported the results of a study of Fortune 500 male executives. These men made the case in no uncertain terms that flexibility is critically important for them, too. For instance, 84 percent of the participants in the Fortune study said they would like job options that allow them to realize their professional aspirations while having more time for things outside of work. And 87 percent said companies that do so will have a competitive advantage attracting talent.

The good news is that there are proven benefits for both employers and employees when companies institute flexible work schedules. A 2002 study by the Families and Work Institute, for example, found that when employees have greater access to flexible work arrangements, they are more committed and loyal to their employers and are willing to work harder than required to help their employers be successful.

Other studies have found significant cost savings and other benefits as a result of offering flexible work arrangements. Case in point: The professional services consultancy Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu estimates a savings of $41.5 million in 2003 in reduced turnover costs by retaining employees who would have left if they did not have a flexible work arrangement.

Workplace flexibility also improves the productivity of workers and can reduce the level of employee stress, which is a leading cause of unscheduled absences. Furthermore, worker flexibility facilitates commitment to the job. Examples of these programs abound. Hewlett-Packard Co., one of the world’s leading technology companies, has offered flexible hours to virtually all employees since the early 1970s. Or consider International Business Machines Corp., which designates 40 percent of its 330,000-person workforce as virtual workers—meaning they work from client sites or from home, not IBM offices.

Other companies boast compressed workweeks for all of their employees in specific business units, among them Raytheon Co.’s missile systems business. Under this arrangement, every employee can work nine days over two weeks, not including weekends, allowing them every other Friday off to take care of personal or family issues.

And some highly successful companies, among them Intel Corp., follow traditional maternity leaves with a “new parent reintegration process,” which allows up to one year of integration time following leave for new parents. During this time, an employee might work part time for 6 to 12 months and get access to a variety of forms of scheduling flexibility.

Phased retirement programs also are growing in popularity and seem particularly appropriate in light of the aging workforce population. Phased retirement programs allow employees to “ease” into retirement in stages by gradually decreasing hours worked over a period of months or years. This allows a smoother transition to retirement or into a new role during traditional retirement years and minimizes the adverse impacts of going from full-time work to an unstructured retirement. Businesses that utilize these kinds of flexible work arrangements have experienced dramatic improvements in productivity, loyalty, employee retention, and cost reduction.

Workplace flexibility improves the productivity of workers and can reduce the level of employee stress, which is a leading cause of unscheduled absences.

But offering these programs alone often is not enough to address the needs of working women. Indeed, many women (and men) are highly reluctant to utilize flexible work arrangements for fear they will be perceived by their employers as less committed. Women and men need to feel supported and respected for their flexible work choices and the benefits of offering these programs, for the employer and the employee, need to be highlighted.

Moreover, such flexibility should not be limited to white-collar workers. Hourly workers benefit greatly from flexible work options. Studies conducted by the Boston College Center for Work & Family47 and Corporate Voices for Working Families found that flexibility programs for hourly employees are just as successful as those created for professional employees.

Companies in a wide range of industries, including hotel giant Marriott and the national drugstore chain CVS, have invested heavily in addressing the work-life challenges of their hourly employees. The benefits of such programs for companies are similar to those experienced by companies offering these programs to their white-collar workforces—savings in recruitment and retention costs, improved productivity, and much greater employee engagement.

But too few companies are offering these kinds of programs to hourly or low-wage workers. While some hourly workers face rigid work schedules, with very little ability to alter their work hours, others must deal with constantly fluctuating work schedules, including the precise work hours and amount of work hours, both of which may vary dramatically from week to week.

The most effective dimension for improvement depends on the type of work schedule the worker faces. For workers on rigid work schedules, meaningful input into work schedules is key. For workers on unpredictable work schedules, predictability is key. For workers whose hours fluctuate, stable work schedules are key. And for those workers subject to challenging work schedules that are resistant to change, such as those who work overnight, strategies to mitigate the negative effects of those challenges will be key.

Career development

In addition to flexibility, women also need investment in their development. Companies need to help women thrive in the workplace to reap long-term benefits. Increasingly, the need to navigate careers while maintaining work-life integration has become an enormous challenge for all working people and their employers. Organizational careers within one company are increasingly a thing of the past and families’ structures are very different today than they were 20 to 30 years ago. Today, employers and employees alike are fast moving toward a self-directed career model that noted career scholar Douglas T. Hall of Boston University has termed the “protean career.”

A protean career puts individuals squarely in charge of steering their own career development, but supporting greater flexibility, creating customized careers, and ensuring that individuals have the competence to navigate the myriad of career options cannot be left to chance. It requires a coordinated effort that modifies organizational human resource policies and stresses shared responsibility between organizational leaders and individual contributors to create win-win solutions for the organization and its members.

Women and men need to feel supported and respected for their flexible work choices and the benefits of offering these programs, for the employer and the employee, need to be highlighted.

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu provides an excellent example of an employer that has taken an aggressive leadership position in protean career approaches. Its program, “Mass Career Customization,” enables employees to create individualized career goals that take into consideration obligations outside of work. Deloitte’s MCC program grew out of a women’s initiative within the company, but it is now being used across the board for individuals regardless of level in the organization, age, or gender.

For career development programs to work effectively, companies also need organizational mentors. Women and minority group members often struggle to find effective mentors within their organizations because these one-on-one relationships typically evolve informally. But the lack of mentors for minorities or female employees in the higher echelons of a company make this difficult. There are two things that organizations can do to help foster effective mentoring for women in light of the small number of senior female executives.

First, companies can develop formal mentoring programs. Many large companies, including the accounting and consulting firm KPMG, assign all new interns and employees a formal mentor. The formality of the arrangement is sometimes challenging, as most mentoring relationships evolve in an informal manner. The existence of a mentoring culture within the organization can help to overcome some of the artificiality of the relationships inherent in formal mentor-mentee matching services. It also ensures access to mentors for diverse employees who may not otherwise have an easy time developing mentoring relationships through informal channels.

Second, companies need to recognize the importance and usefulness of employee networks. A woman’s network, for example, which may be made up of peers, subordinates, and managers, can provide others in the network with the psycho-social and career support they need. IBM and the pharmaceutical company Merck are examples of large, global organizations that have invested heavily in developing and supporting these employee groups.

Inclusive work environments

Finally, women (and minorities) in the workforce need to be recognized and rewarded for their differences rather than being encouraged to fit outdated norms. Many organizations have developed diversity initiatives, but such programs can segment diverse groups by demographics rather than creating heterogeneous groups that would allow the members to explore and learn from their differences. Research shows that when diversity is viewed as strength and there is a high level of acceptance of distinct viewpoints, organizations benefit because it allows for a broader range of perspectives and unique contributions.

What’s more, when women and minorities feel respected for their differences, they will be more “retainable.” Companies that offer diversity and inclusion programs can benefit handsomely for the effort. These efforts typically include:

• Management and employee diversity training programs
• Succession planning systems aimed at increasing the representation of under-represented groups in higher-level roles
• Employee networks and affinity groups for women and minorities
• A wide menu of programs and policies crafted to respond to a variety of employee needs and family situations in different cultural contexts
• Access, recognition, and awards programs for nonwork obligations, such as leadership efforts in the community and volunteer work55

When differences are recognized and rewarded, women and other minority groups feel more comfortable raising issues that promote their well-being. Jane Dutton and her colleagues from the University of Michigan found in their 2002 study that women take cues from their environment that influence whether they are willing to raise gender-equity issues in their workplaces. Their study found that demographic patterns, qualities of top management, and qualities of the organizational culture each served as indicators as to whether women would feel comfortable voicing their concerns.

PepsiCo has been one of the pioneer U.S. corporations in promoting and rewarding women and minorities. As we mentioned, while only 16 percent of Fortune 500 corporate officers are women, as of 2009, 33 percent of PepsiCo’s executives and 30 percent of its board of directors are women.

The organization has a long history of both developing and promoting women, which is a major part of the firm’s overall business strategy and success.57 Since 2006, when Indra Nooyi took the helm, revenues have increased by nearly 10 percent, despite slow economic growth. In addition, over the past decade, the company’s share price has increased more than 50 percent while the Dow has gone down by nearly 18 percent during that same period.

More and more companies today recognize the advantages of promoting women throughout their organizational structures, yet there remain clear glass ceilings—organizational barriers to the advancement of women throughout their careers.

Where do we go from here?

The Great Recession may mark a turning point for women in the workplace. As some of the old icons of American industry struggle to survive, management practices that were seen as innovative in the early- to mid-20th century will be challenged because of new technologies, changing consumer needs, and contemporary workforce education, demographics, and values. Now is the ideal time to let go of outdated management frameworks that no longer foster employee engagement or facilitate desired organizational outcomes, given the increasing diversity of the American workforce.

For cultural shifts to occur across businesses and industries large and small, there needs to be a shift in U.S. policy around work-family issues, flexibility, and diversity. Despite its position as a global economic leader and a leader in the advancement of equality for women, our nation continues to show little appetite to address the needs of working women and families through government policy.

In a study of the maternity policies of 168 countries, for example, the United States ranked at the bottom in terms of time and financial support provided for maternity leave.58 And the lack of provision of medical insurance and caregiving all strongly suggest that the United States falls far below many less prosperous countries in the provision of the basic policies that would support families, specifically the U.S. working women who are primarily responsible for the care of these families.

To summarize, there are five key points that need to be clearly understood:

1. Women make up more than half the talent that is available for corporate America, and their outstanding performance in educational institutions—especially higher education and professional schools—demands that employers create workplaces that attract, retain, develop, and exploit (in the best sense of the word) this tremendous resource.

2. While we have grown and changed as a society over the past 30 years and women have reached greater equality in the workplace, life outside the workplace still places enormous and highly unequal challenges and demands on women. This must be understood and addressed by corporations and society as a whole. Otherwise, the unparalleled talent that women bring to business will always be underutilized as disillusioned women play roles that are well beneath their abilities and become part of the so-called leaky talent pipeline as they leave their employers.

Despite its position as a global economic leader and a leader in the advancement of equality for women, our nation continues to show little appetite to address the needs of working women
and families through government policy.

3. The highest impact actions employers can take to increase women’s contributions and enhance their progress cost very little. Such actions involve letting go of outdated mental models such as the idea that there is only one place that work gets done, one way to structure a workday, one model for the ideal career, and one leadership style that works in today’s workplace. Flexible work arrangements, flexible career paths, and new leadership styles better meet the needs of today’s diverse workforce but also today’s flexible and fast-changing economic environment.

4. Many companies are putting forward progressive workplace policies for women, but too few of these companies include policies that apply to workers who are at the low and middle end of the company pyramid. All workers need policies that meet the changed realities of work and family, not just high-end workers.

5. Too few businesses have taken the initiative to change workplaces on their own. Government has a real role to play in incentivizing businesses to update their employment policies.

In closing, the support that women need to be successful is not different from the support all working people need. Women’s responsibilities for childbearing and caregiving, and their lack of access to positions of authority in business, simply make women’s needs far more acute. If the United States is truly to be a successful economic engine and role model for the 21st-century global economy, it will be because we found a way to fully utilize the human potential that exists in this country. Now is the time to replace outmoded ways of operating with progressive and proven new models of leadership in organizations that will help us achieve that objective.

Endnotes

1. Samuel DiPiazza Jr., “Closing the Gender Gap: Challenges, Opportunities and the Future” (PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP video, 2008). Transcript available at http://www.pwc.com/en_GX/gx/women-at-pwc/assets/closing_the_gender_gap_full_film_transcript.pdf.
2. Marti Barletta, Marketing to Women: How to Understand, Reach, and Increase Your Share of the World’s Largest Market Segment, 2nd edition (Chicago: Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2006).
3. Sylvia Hewlett and others, “The Hidden Brain Drain: Off-Ramps and On-Ramps in Women’s Careers” (New York: Center for Work-Life Policy, 2005).
4. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of our Next Economic Revolution (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2008).
5. “2006 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Aggregate Report, NAICS-5 Code 54121: Accounting/Tax Prep/Bookkeep/Payroll Services,” available at http://www.eeoc.gov/stats/jobpat/2006/nac5/54121.html (last accessed August 2009).
6. National Science Foundation, “Bachelor’s Degrees, by Field and Sex: 1997 – 2006” (2008), available at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/degrees.cfm#bachelor.
7. Catalyst Inc., “Women CEOs of the Fortune 1000” (2009), available at http://www.catalyst.org/publication/322/women-ceos-of-the-fortune-1000.
8. Catalyst Inc., “Women in U.S. Management” (2009), available at http://www.catalyst.org/file/192/qt_women_in_us_management.pdf.
9. Roy Adler, “Women and Profits,” Harvard Business Review 79 (10) (2001): 30.
10. Catalyst Inc., “The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on Boards” (2007), available at http://www.catalyst.org/file/139/bottom%20line%202.pdf.
11. Christian Dezso and David Gaddis Ross, “‘Girl Power’: Female Participation in Top Management and Firm Performance.” Working Paper (Social Science Research Network, 2008).
12. Lisa Belkin, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” The New York Times, October 26, 2003, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/26WOMEN.html?pagewanted=all.
13. Pamela Stone, Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).
14. Lisa Mainiero and Sherry Sullivan, “The Opt-out Revolt: Why People are Leaving Companies to Create Kaleidoscope Careers” (Mountain View, CA.: Davies-Black Publishing, 2006).
15. Ellen Galinsky, Kerstin Aumann, and James T. Bond, “Times are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home” (New York: Families and Work Institute, 2008), available at familiesandwork.org/site/research/reports/Times_Are_Changing.pdf.
16. Center for Women’s Business Research, “Key Facts about Women-Owned Businesses” (2009), available at http://www.womensbusinessresearchcenter.org/research/keyfacts.
17. Darrene Hackler, Ellen Harpel, and Heike Mayer, “Human Capital and Women’s Business Ownership” (Washington: Small Business Administration, 2008).
18. Ying Lowrey, “Women in Business, 2006: A Demographic Review of Women’s Business Ownership,” Working Paper (Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, August 2006), available at http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs280tot.pdf.
19. Center for Women’s Business Research, “Key Facts about Women-Owned Businesses.”
20. Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 1989).
21. Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson, and Melissa Milkie, Changing Rhythm of American Family Life (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).
22. Deborah Swiss and Judith Walker, Women and the Work/Family Dilemma: How Today’s Professional Women Are Finding Solutions, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994).
23. Dane Waldfogel, “Understanding the ‘Family Gap’ in Pay for Women with Children,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 12(1)(1998): 137–156.
24. Herminia Ibarra, “Personal Networks of Women and Minorities in Management: A Conceptual Framework,” Academy of Management Review, 18 (1) (1993): 56–87.
25. Ella Edmonson Bell and Stella Nkomo, Our Separate Ways (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2001).
26. Deborah Tannen, Talking from 9 to 5: How Women’s and Men’s Conversational Styles Affect Who Gets Heard, Who Gets Credit, and What Gets Done at Work (London: Virago, 1994); Deborah Kolb, Judith Williams, and Carol Frohlinger, Her Place at the Table: A Woman’s Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004); Judy Rosener, “Ways Women Lead,” Harvard Business Review 68 (6) (November–December 1990): 119–125.
27. Tannen, Talking from 9 to 5.
28. Linda Babcock and others, “Nice Girls Don’t Ask,” Harvard Business Review 81 (10) (2003): 14–16.
29. Hannah Riley Bowles and Kathleen L. McGinn, “Claiming Authority: Negotiating Challenges for Women Leaders,” in David M. Messick and Roderick M. Kramer, eds., The Psychology of Leadership: New Perspectives and Research (Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), pp. 191–208.
30. Rosener, “Ways Women Lead.”
31. Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, “The Female Leadership Advantage: An Evaluation of the Evidence,” Leadership Quarterly 14 (6) (2003):807–834; Alice Eagly and Blair Johnson, “Gender and Leadership Style: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 108 (2) (1990): 233–256.
32. Peter Glick and Susan Fiske, “An Ambivalent Alliance: Hostile and Benevolent Sexism as Complementary Justifications of Gender Inequality,” American Psychologist 56 (2) (2001): 109–118.
33. Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders (Boston: Harvard University Business School Press, 2007).
34. Joyce K. Fletcher, Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Power at Work (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
35. Ibid.
36. Robin J. Ely, “The Effects of Organizational Demographics and Social Identity on Relationships among Professional Women,” Administrative Science Quarterly 39 (2) (1994): 203–238; Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Beyond the Double Binds: Women and Leadership (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
37. Joan Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Work and Family Conflict and What to Do About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
38. Eagly and Carli, Through the Labyrinth, p. 6.
39. Jody Miller, “Get a Life!” Fortune, November 28, 2005, available at http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/11/28/8361955/index.htm.
40. Fredric Van Deusen and others, “Overcoming the Implementation Gap: How 20 Leading Companies are Making Flexibility Work” (Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College Center for Work & Family, 2008).
41. Corporate Voices for Working Families, “Business Impacts of Flexibility: An Imperative for Expansion, (November 2005), available at http://www.cvworkingfamilies.org/system/files/Business%20Impacts%20of%20Flexibility.pdf.
42. Ibid, p. 14.
43. Ibid, p. 13.
44. Van Deusen and others, “Overcoming the Implementation Gap.”
45. Van Deusen and others, “Overcoming the Implementation Gap”; Fredric Van Deusen and others, “Making the Business Case for Work-Life Programs” (Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College Center for Work and Family, 2008).
46. Brad Harrington and Jamie J. Ladge, “Work-Life Integration: Present Dynamics and Future Directions for Organizations,” Organizational Dynamics 38 (2) (2009):148–157.
47. Leon Litchfield, Jennifer Swanberg, and Catherine Sigworth, “Increasing the Visibility of the Invisible Workforce: Model Programs and Policies for Hourly and Lower Wage Employees” (Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College Center for Work and Family, 2004), available at http://www.cvworkingfamilies.org/system/files/modelprogramsandpolicieforlowerwageemployees.pdf.
48. Corporate Voices for Working Families, “Innovative Workplace Flexibility Options for Hourly Workers” (May 2009), available at http://www.cvworkingfamilies.org/system/files/CVWF%20report-FINAL.pdf.
49. Brad Harrington and Douglas T. Hall, Career Management & Work-Life Integration: Using Self-Assessment to Navigate Contemporary Careers (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007).
50. Harrington and Ladge, “Work-Life Integration.”
51. Kathy Kram, Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life (Glenville, IL: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1985).
52. Kram, Mentoring at Work.
53. Boston College Center for Work and Family, “Partner Profile: Women’s Advancement” (2008).
54. Jeffrey T. Polzer, Laurie P. Milton, and William B. Swann, Jr., “Capitalizing on Diversity: Interpersonal Congruence in Small Work Groups,” Administrative Sciences Quarterly 47 (2) (2002): 296–324.
55. Harrington and Ladge, “Work-Life Integration.”
56. Jane Dutton, “Red Light, Green Light: Making Sense of the Organizational Context for Issue Selling” Organization Science 13 (4) (2002): 355–369.
57. Molly Selvin, “PepsiCo Names Successor to CEO,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2006, available at http://articles.latimes.com/2006/aug/15/business/fi-pepsi15.
58. Jody Heymann, Alison Earle, and Jeffrey Hayes, “The Work, Family, and Equity Index: How Does the United States Measure Up?” (Boston and Montreal: Project on Global Working Families and the Institute for Health and Social Policy, 2007), available http://www.mcgill.ca/files/ihsp/WFEI2007.pdf.

The Women's Biker Empowerment Experience is your New Yea......rs GPS for feminine transformation. GO PINK!

Have you ever wanted to ride a motorcycle, but hesitated because you didn’t think you could do it, had a fear of being able to control the bike or learning how to ride it? Maybe you’ve been riding on the back, but have wanted to go from the back seat to the front seat and take control of the handlebars yourself.

Riding a bike is one of the best stress relievers on the planet, if you’ve never ridden, or have a fear of riding, that may not sound logical. I’ve been riding for 14 years and I keep riding because when I crank up my Harley I get an instant smile on my face. I feel empowered, like I’m totally in control of my destiny. I’ve gone from the back seat to the front seat and taken control of the handlebars of my life.  I’ve steered myself to a bright and successful future and you can too.

This workshop was specifically created for women to break down barriers, eradicate limiting beliefs and find a new level of power in their lives. It’s an opportunity for women to learn about who they really are, push themselves to a whole new place of freedom and success.

Get fit to ride – a personal trainer with almost 40 years of experience will show you how to strengthen your core with exercises you can do at home – no need for a gym.

Obliterate Fear, Negative Self Talk and Limiting Beliefs – the first day is dedicated to getting you empowered, removing limiting beliefs, replacing negative self talk with powerful self talk and much more. You will get in touch with your femininity in a way that will allow you to release any thoughts and behaviors that aren’t serving you any longer.

Our Motorcycle Safety Course will help you learn how to ride a motorcycle in 2 days. If you already know how to ride, you can polish up your skills. If you have your license and don’t want to take the course, there will be options for you to participate in.

Skin care for the road – you will learn how to take care of your skin to ensure no damage happens while you are riding. We will relax, connect and pamper ourselves the first evening after the Motorcycle Safety Course.

Gracie Jis Jitsu will show you techniques for self-defense that can be used when you ride or in everyday life.

Many women take the Motorcycle Safety Course and then ask what next? You will learn how to pack for a road trip, minor bike maintenance, what gear to wear, sit on some bikes and much more.

This is an experiential and life-changing workshop. Women are born nurturers; we nurture everyone else first, but many times forget to nurture ourselves. When we operate from our “tank” instead of our abundance we go into burnout, feel overwhelmed and become stressed out. This experience will have you feeling totally stress-free and you will get your freedom on.

Ladies, come ride with us and let us show you the open road to the life of your dreams. Even if you never get on a bike and ride after this course, this is something that will challenge you and take you to a new level of confidence in your life. You will have an amazing breakthrough to freedom like you’ve never felt before. We guarantee it!

Parents often find themselves wondering how to be environmentally responsible, budget conscious and, most importantly, provide whatever their children’s needs require. Now that our society has finally begun to focus on reducing the negative impact of our society on the environment, we can focus on utilizing products and services that support that end result.

We use the term “green” to indicate anything that reduces energy consumption, carbon emissions, or a waste of natural resources.  The benefit to the earth is clear, but there are benefits to our own mental and physical well being that are often overlooked.  People can be profoundly affected by their environments; children, particularly those with special needs, are even more susceptible.

It would be irresponsible to say that certain design techniques will benefit everyone.  Children with special needs, disabilities and behavioral disorders are as unique as fingerprints. Each child requires a different type of support.  But there are several general principles that apply to almost all people, particularly those with special needs.

A child’s surroundings are often given little consideration.  Parents typically focus on the obvious, i.e. with a little boy, ‘typical boy” subject matter is introduced into their bedrooms or play room: primary colors, images of trucks, race cars and sports etc…  

Without realizing it, you’re exacerbating their already heightened sensitivity to color, light and pattern.  The materials we utilize are equally significant.  The basic materials we typically use often emit undetectable fumes, gases and chemicals.  These can be unhealthy, if not harmful.  Unfortunately, sometimes we are unaware of the damage until it is too late. 

Solution:

To provide the healthiest environment for your child, try giving special consideration for the following suggestions:

1)    Paints and finishes release low level toxic emissions into the air for years after application. The source of these toxins is a variety of VOC's (Volatile Organic Compounds) which, until recently, were essential to the performance of the paint.  Fortunately, this is no longer the case.

2)    There are several brands of paint that have significantly reduced VOC’s, or are 100% free.  Several maintain excellent coverage and fast drying time, and are available in a variety of colors and shades. We recommend Benjamin Moore’s Aura Guard and FreshAire Choice paints. Their scent is minimal, with a natural citrus origin.

3)     Color has a great deal of impact on emotional state.  If you take a moment to consider how the color and lighting of a room makes you feel, you may realize that you have an immediate, and in some cases, visceral response.

Your child will most likely have an immediate and more significant reaction, and if the colors provide the wrong kind of stimulation, the emotion response may lead to acting out verbally or physically, or completely withdrawing.  Soft blues and greens are calming colors.  Yellows and pinks are mildly stimulating.  Shapes and patterns can be used to draw focus and increase concentration.  There is no color or pattern that is ideal for any special needs child.  Consider your child’s individual needs, and, if you can, consult a specialist.

4)     Bringing elements of nature indoors.  Plants, whether real or artificial (let’s face it, we don’t all have a “green” thumb) make a big difference.  Large or small, greenery, or some element of nature in general, always makes a positive difference.  Try a cornstalk dracaena, a great “green” house plant.  They are physically appealing, robust and are great for providing oxygen while feeding on the carbon dioxide in the air.  This benefits both children and adults.

5)     Spend time outdoors in the sunshine.  Go where it’s green.  Sunlight, greenery and fresh air have a natural tendency to raise our spirits.  Remember that special needs children have a heightened sensitivity to sensory stimuli.  What we feel as adults, they feel much more intensely.  Don’t forget the sunscreen!

6)     Tactile elements can have a profound affect on a child’s sense of connection to his or her environment.  The experience of feeling the roughness of tree bark, getting wet in the rain, smelling flowers, or touching different types of rocks or sand provides interactivity and stimulation.  Since children with special needs are often very sensitive to texture, experimenting with these in a natural environment can help us find the objects that will be most effective in their home environment.

7)     Sound and music can be key factors in creating the optimal environment.  Soundscapes can be very effective at soothing an agitated child, or stimulating a withdrawn one.  Music can have strong positive influence on mind and spirit.  Experiment, see what your child responds to, and incorporate it into their environment appropriately

By acquiring a better understanding of these guidelines; parents and care givers can create a healthier environment for their children… one that is comfortable and emotionally supportive in every aspect of their environment. The improved surroundings can make an immediate difference in terms of your child’s ability to feel peaceful, connected and re-assured.  With some basic design knowledge and an understanding of your child’s specific needs, you can make a profound difference. No matter what you do, remember… always begin With a Brush with Love!

What do I mean? Many women keep their inner door closed tight with a double-bolt lock on it and have misplaced the key to open it. What inner door am I referring to? The one that leads to our inner thoughts… our inner life. Yes, you do have an inner life. It’s that voice of intuition and deeper-knowing that we all experience.

It speaks almost in a whisper so that we can barely hear it. Why? Because the outer door…our outer life, is wide open. It lets everything in: the noise, traffic, emails, cell phones, iPods, co-workers, never-ending meetings, grocery shopping, homework, community volunteer work. Have I covered it all? How could you possibly have the time to locate the key and then get the door open on your inner life when the outer life demands so much?

In my work with women, this is something that is supported from beginning to end. You see, the answers about what you want in your life are all within you. In fact, I would bet they are locked behind that inner door. It’s essential to have support in helping you to create the time and space to locate the key, unlock the door and step inside to take an inventory of what’s there.

How do I know this? Well, I have some experience with this. There was a time in my life that, if I had read this article, I would not have had any idea what this meant. I had no idea that I had any other life other than the one that I was living. It was busy, hurried, passionless, and one long to-do list of things that did not really provide much meaning in my daily life, let alone my future. While working with my own coach and creating the time and space to explore what was missing for me, I began to understand exactly who I am and, better yet, where I wanted to go next.

Isn’t it amazing that all the answers are within us and yet we question so many things every day? It’s about getting in touch with your inner voice that’s behind the inner door. Allowing the inner voice to be heard, and not drowned out by the outer “noise.”

How about you? Do you have any idea where the key is to your inner door? Do you visit your inner life on a regular basis? If you do, bravo! It means that you are in touch with where you are going in your life, dreams and goals. I shudder to think what might have happened if I had not taken the time and allowed myself to hear my inner voice. I can tell you that it has made all the difference in my life. I am living a life full of passion and energy for family, my work and myself that I love.

Anything is possible. Everything is waiting for you.

****

Copyright 2010 Joy Chudacoff
 
Joy Chudacoff, ICF, PCC, is the founder of Smart Women Smart Solutions(tm), a Professional Certified Coach to 1000’s of women, Motivational Speaker, and Entrepreneur.  She publishes a weekly buzz generating ezine, Reflections On Life and Business for Women Entrepreneurs.  If you’re ready take your life and your business to the next level, get your FREE Tips, 2 FREE Reports and FREE MP3 now at CreatingTheSpark.com. 

Even though the fastest growing careers are in traditionally female-dominated fields such as health care, the highest paying careers remain in male-dominated fields, including engineering, technology and other science-related industries and services—all fields in which women still lag very far behind men in educational degrees.

As more women take on breadwinning roles, the educational system must prepare women for jobs that can support a family rather than the jobs our grandmothers were allowed to hold. This means our postsecondary educational institutions—community colleges, four-year colleges and universities and their many graduate school programs alike—will need to take further proactive steps to ensure women pursue and complete degrees that allow them to bring home the same-size paychecks and benefits from the same array of professions as men.

For this to happen, these educational institutions must seek parity between the genders in all majors and concentrations from first-year postsecondary education to post-doctoral research. But this is not enough. They also need to provide family-friendly support and child care as well flexible class scheduling so that women (and men) can attain successive levels of education in order to boost their earnings in today’s economy while juggling shared responsibilities in life.

Here’s why. Despite reaching college in greater numbers, women still cluster largely in traditional female majors when they choose their course of study. They receive 86 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in the health professions, which includes nursing, 79 percent in education, and 78 percent in psychology.3 These professions, often called the “helping professions” or “women’s professions,” have always attracted women and were once the only professions open to them.

Men, in the era when they were typically the sole breadwinners of their families, were less attracted to these professions in large part because they offered lower wages and less career advancement, as they do today.

There are encouraging signs this dynamic is shifting in some academic arenas. The significant trend in college toward business degrees, the most popular major for both men and women over the past 20 years, means that women now receive 50 percent of all undergraduate business degrees. Similarly, 62 percent of biological and medical science undergraduate degrees are awarded to women, doubling their participation over the past 20 years.

But the distribution among the doctoral disciplines is not even close to parity in most fields. While women now receive 49 percent of the doctorates in the biological sciences, in the physical sciences women are still struggling to enter a male bastion. In 2006, women received 30 percent of the doctorates awarded in the fields of physical science and math, and only 22 percent of computer science degrees and 20 percent of engineering degrees.

Women with the same degrees still lag behind men’s pay and almost never catch up. Education raises women’s pay, but the gender gap remains at all educational levels.

Consider the impact of women’s education degree choices on their jobs and their wages. Women with degrees remain segregated in lower-paying occupations. Nearly all registered nurses (91.7 percent), elementary and middle school teachers (81.6 percent), and preschool and kindergarten teachers (97.8 percent) are women, but women comprise smaller percentages of the highest-paying occupations, such as lawyers and judges (36.5 percent), physicians and surgeons (31.8 percent), dentists (25.4 percent), civil engineers (11.8 percent), electrical and electronics engineers (7.8 percent), aircraft pilots and flight engineers (3.4 percent).

What’s more, women with the same degrees still lag behind men’s pay and almost never catch up. Education raises women’s pay, but the gender gap remains at all educational levels. In 2008, the ratio of women’s to men’s median hourly wages was about 77 cents on the dollar for those with college degrees as well as those with only high school degrees. Women who make significant investments in college educations earn more than they would otherwise, but they don’t earn as much as men, often because they remain in lower-paying female-dominated occupations. While the gap has narrowed in recent decades, we still have a long way to go to get to earnings parity (see Figures 1 and 2).

It is not new news that women do not receive equal pay for equal work, but what is depressing is that education, the much-touted engine for economic opportunity, fails to provide gender equality. Even with the increased numbers of women in higher education and in the workforce, the wage and power gaps remain large and stagnant at all educational levels. Women who are breadwinners simply cannot bring home a family income equal to a man with the same educational background (see Figures 1 and 2).

One reason that women may be encouraged or even choose not to enter male-dominated educational fields and occupations is that once female graduates enter the workforce, they find inflexible workplace policies that can exacerbate gender inequalities (policies that are often inflexible across the board, but may be exacerbated in male-dominated fields). Knowing this, students choose jobs they perceive to be more family friendly.

Most workplaces still maintain the structure established in the late 19th century, when husbands worked full time to support their families and never needed to consider taking time off to care for their a family member because most had a wife at home to attend to such matters. In this environment, workers are penalized for working less than full time, or for taking a break from their jobs to care for their family. In short, simply opening the door to higher education does not necessarily allow women to achieve true equality in the workforce.

Still, the educational system may finally be poised for change. First, women are now half of U.S. workers. As women become equal in numbers and take more leadership positions, traditional workplace policies may be revised to allow for alternate career ladders. Second, our existing gender equity laws, particularly Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination based on sex in educational programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance, are being looked at in new ways to level the playing field for women in science, technology, math and engineering much as it has done successfully in sports.

This chapter will first describe the current state of the U.S. educational system for women and girls, with special emphasis on how education often thwarts rather than advances the economic opportunities of women, beginning with community colleges, then four-year educational institutions, then graduate and post-graduate programs (see box “The forgotten third” that examines gender stereotypes in career training programs for young women and men without college degrees).

We will then explore the achievements nonetheless made by women despite these obstacles. We will then conclude with several suggestions for how American post-secondary education can be reformed to ensure that women are able to function as equal partners in the future workplace.

The First Career Gateway: Community Colleges

Community colleges provide opportunities for women to earn educational credentials that can help them increase their earnings potential through accessible, flexible, and low-cost academic programs. Today, community colleges are serving 37 percent of all students enrolled in postsecondary education.9 And the majority of these students are women: 62 percent.

What’s more, our community colleges educate single parents at nearly three times the rate of four-year colleges.11 And community college students are more likely to be older and independent of their parents—61 percent are not claimed as dependents by their parents compared to only 34 percent of students at public four-year colleges.

Originally, these educational institutions were structured to provide high school seniors an affordable first two years of college before they transferred into a baccalaureate program. Today, however, many community colleges have expanded their mission in order to accommodate the economy’s increased demand for graduates with specific career skills in disciplines such as information technology and home health care.

Community colleges offer nearly everyone a chance—95 percent of community colleges offer an open admissions policy and the annual tuition and fees are less than half that at private four-year institutions and one-tenth those at private four-year colleges and universities. For many older students they offer a second or third chance. Nearly half of all students at community colleges are over 25. Because of their accessibility and low cost, community colleges enroll a diverse group of students, including larger percentages of nontraditional, low-income, and minority students than four-year colleges.

Clearly, a community college degree is a good step forward for women, both to gain higher earnings and as a step toward a four-year degree. However, women often start, but fail to complete their degrees at community colleges. At community colleges, women were less likely to complete a degree or transfer to a four-year college within six years than men—41 percent of women compared to 48 percent of men.

The influx of students with significant family responsibilities presents new challenges not traditionally faced by younger students. Community colleges and universities found that mothers especially needed additional help to be successful at school, whether for financial aid, counseling, or esteem building. They also often needed child care on campus. All major educational institutions offer some type of program for students with families, but the role of integrating students with families into the mainstream of educational programs has traditionally fallen predominantly to two-year community colleges.

In the past decade, however, more colleges have taken inspiration from the type of opportunity offered by community colleges and sought to integrate low-income students with families into their educational programs. One case in point is Hamilton College’s ACCESS project, which creates a pathway to educational opportunity for very low-income parents in New York.

The project provides academic supports for a liberal arts education in conjunction with comprehensive social services. Within the first three years of operation, the ACCESS project achieved a 95 percent retention rate and movement of participating students from being 98 percent dependent on social services and income supports to being less than 10 percent dependent on social services. The project attributes its successful student retention and outcomes to the integration of liberal arts educational opportunities with basic services such as child care and transportation, supports for domestic violence survivors, and interventions to ameliorate homelessness and hunger.

Despite the openness and flexibility of community colleges, traditionally gendered career choices remain the norm. Women predominate in traditional female majors such as education (80.2 percent) and health sciences (83.4 percent all students), which includes nursing, while men predominate in computer and information sciences (73.1 percent) and manufacturing construction, repair and transportation (92.3 percent). These choices certainly influence potential earning power, but there are also fundamental concerns about how much earning power an associate’s degree from a community college will bring.

Indeed, community colleges often aren’t doing enough to get women on the path toward the highest-paying careers. Increasingly, many of the popular career choices pursued by community college students are requiring a four-year bachelor’s degree or specialized training. This is true for both men and women as more careers, including computer technology and science, education, and health, rely on higher-educated workers.

Community colleges often aren’t doing enough to get women on the path toward the highest-paying careers.

In the high-tech occupations that are growing most rapidly—computer engineering, computer science, and systems analysis—workers must have four-year degrees and women are severely underrepresented. In the health field, most workers have a job that requires less than a four-year degree, though the profession is highly divided in that the higher ranks of health care professions include some of the most highly educated workers in the country. Lacking a four-year degree, and even more so, lacking any sort of postsecondary specialized training, severely limits the advancement and income potential of health care workers, most of whom are women.

All other things equal, however, an associate’s degree generally provides workers with a wage boost of about 20 percent to 30 percent over a high school diploma and the returns are generally higher for women (even though the wage gap persists). The boost is much higher for workers who pursue a career track rather than a technical track. In the few studies that have been done on certificate holders who do not attain an associate’s degree, few positive wage effects were found.

Despite the more accessible environment of community colleges, large strides still need to be made toward assisting nontraditional students with degree and certificate persistence. Unfortunately, most of our educational institutions are not set up to offer the flexibility that is required in order to deal with the challenges presented by students who are older, more likely to work while attending school, and often have family obligations as well.

According to a report by the Center for American Progress, budget cuts, when combined with antiquated regulations and systems that were designed to meet the needs of a different era’s students, have created institutions of higher education that cannot adequately deal with today’s students. According to the CAP report, “as suppliers, postsecondary institutions are not fully ready to deliver quality, flexible education that leads to college and career success.”

But barriers to advancement beyond community college remain. Thirty-nine percent of students come from minority backgrounds, compared to only 24 percent at the four-year college level. The difference is particularly strong for Hispanic students: They represent only 7 percent of four-year college students, but 16 percent of community college students.29 Poor women, especially poor minority women, face particular challenges (see box “Excluding poor women”).

Reclaiming the American Dream Through Colleges and Universities

One of the most significant social phenomena of the last third of the 20th century and the beginning years of the new millennium is the steady rise of women in undergraduate, and more spectacularly, in graduate and professional education. Many factors, including gender equity laws, birth control, and recognition that women are now important players in the economy all contributed to this trend.

Much has been made of the fact that women now receive about 57 percent of all college degrees, and indeed across all ethnic and racial groups women significantly outpace men in receiving degrees. Closer inspection, however, reveals a more complex story. What is not usually acknowledged is that men and women enter college after high school at about the same rate. But it is the latecomers—the independents not sent by their parents, 2-to-1 of whom are women, some already with families—that tilt the final degree count. One-third of African American women who eventually graduate from college enroll when they are age 25 or older.

These so called re-entry women, many of them single mothers and some of whom are welfare recipients, realize that a college degree is necessary to support their families. Some colleges and universities provide special services and support for re-entry students. But this important trend has not received the attention and support it deserves (see Figure 3).

Still, women have advanced in both numbers and in proportion over the whole college degree-holding population in every racial and ethnic group over the past thirty years. This is good news, but more for some groups than others. The distribution of college degrees can be explained in large part by the size of the group in the general population.

Many of these groups, Hispanics and Asians in particular, have swelled on the new immigration wave. But are the new immigrants receiving their fair share of the degrees? No. Smaller percentages of Hispanic women and men earn degrees according to their population. This corresponds with the group’s disproportionate share of high school dropouts—there are fewer Hispanics prepared to enter the college pipeline.

Like their counterparts at community colleges, women pursuing bachelor’s degrees still cluster largely in traditional female majors when they choose their course of study.

In contrast, white and Asian women are overrepresented in college compared to their respective percentages in the population. African American women and white men earn bachelor’s degrees in approximate proportion to their representation in the general population. African American men are seriously underrepresented, and have not increased their participation in 30 years.

Like their counterparts at community colleges, women pursuing bachelor’s degrees still cluster largely in traditional female majors when they choose their course of study. In 2006, women received 86 percent of the degrees in education, and 79 percent of the degrees in the health professions, which includes nursing, and 78 percent of the degrees in psychology.

Yet there also are very positive signs, including the increase of women majoring in business and in the biological sciences. Women now receive 50 percent of all undergraduate business degrees. The biological sciences have captured the imagination of the public and the pocketbooks of drug companies and the government, creating many new jobs. Today, 62 percent of biological and biomedical science undergraduates degrees go to women—women now earn twice the number of degrees in these fields that they did 20 years ago.

The Door Not Open: Physical Sciences and Technologies

The discouraging news is that women are still a small presence among those receiving degrees in engineering, where a large percentage of high-paying jobs have been and are predicted to increase in the future. In 2006, women earned 18 percent of engineering degrees, only a minor improvement over the dismal 14 percent they earned in 1990.47 Distressingly, among computer sciences graduates, women are a declining share, falling from 29 percent to 21 percent over the past 15 years.

Yet these are the areas of technological innovation where a large percentage of high-paying jobs are predicted to increase in the future. Even in math and statistics, where women once represented close to half of the undergraduates, the past two decades have shown a decline in female participation.49 There is no easy explanation for this trend, but it rings an alarm bell, which calls for investigation.

Women are still a small presence among those receiving degrees in engineering, where a large percentage of high-paying jobs have been and are predicted to increase in the future.

The only bright spot is a positive trend in the share of women in the physical sciences and science technologies, up from 32 percent to 42 percent over 15 years.50 Again, there is no easy explanation, but there has been a concerted move by professional societies, in particular federal agencies to attract and retain women in this field. While too many women are taking themselves out of the high-tech pipeline at the undergraduate level, the women who graduate from college are more likely to begin graduate studies than they once were. Among computer science doctoral candidates, the percentage of women has increased in the past two decades, from 14 percent to 22 percent. Slightly larger changes can be seen among engineering doctoral students, where female participation has increased from 9 percent to 20 percent over the same period.

Despite these gains, women remain far less likely than men to pursue the highest graduate degrees and ultimately careers in cutting edge scientific research—careers that bring status power and higher salaries. This lack of women scholars at the top of the science and technologies pyramid boasts enormous implications for future generations of women.

Missing at the Top: Women as Role Models

The presence of a successful role model to inspire a career in any field is critical. In law and medicine there are a substantial number of women professionals working in the field, and a steady diet of popular media featuring women characters litigating in the courtroom or curing patients of deadly diseases. But there are many fewer role models for women in engineering or the computer sciences.

Overall, women make up less than 30 percent of full professors at four-year educational institutions.52 In engineering and the physical sciences the numbers are far smaller; in 2005, the American Institute of Physics found that only 10 percent of faculty members in physics were women. There are many physics departments in this country where women faculty number in single digits or are not present at all.

There are some innovative success stories of programs to attract and retain women in the sciences. In 2009, the fourth annual Conference for the Undergraduate Women in Physics sponsored by NASA, the Department of Energy, and three participating research universities attracted more than 350 young female students from across the country.

They came to network and to hear the dazzling research talks of distinguished female physicists from places such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California Berkeley.54 Many of these students were from small colleges where there were no women on the faculty. Preliminary results from the early years indicate that the conferences were influential in encouraging young women physicists to continue in graduate school.

Professorial Gains—Graduate and Professional Degrees

Gender parity in graduate and professional education is one of the most remarkable accomplishments of the last third of the 20th century. In 1966, only 10 percent of all American doctorates were awarded to women. By 2008 that number had soared to about 50 percent. The same story holds for the professions, particularly law and medicine, which began with an even lower proportion of women students.

Minority students, particularly women, are also earning doctorates at a historic pace, though the numbers do not match their proportionate representation in the U.S. population. Today, minority students represent 24 percent of all graduate students, more than doubling their representation over the past 30 years. Female students of color have made the most significant gains.

But once again, the distribution among the doctoral disciplines is not even. Women now receive half of the doctorates in the biological sciences but in the physical sciences, women are still struggling to enter a male bastion. In 2006, women received 30 percent of the doctorates awarded in the fields of physical science and math, and only 22 percent of computer science degrees and 20 percent of engineering degrees.

Science and engineering: Still a Man's World

The most troubling numbers show that while women earned 30 percent of the doctorates in the physical sciences in 2006, women still make up just 16.1 percent of the assistant professors on campuses, 14.2 percent of the associate professors and only 6.4 percent of the full professors. A 2009 survey by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences found that women who receive Ph.D.s in the sciences, including the very popular biological sciences, are far less likely than men to seek academic research positions—the path to cutting-edge discovery—and are more likely to drop out early if they do take on a faculty post.

Unfortunately, the National Research Council report says its survey could not shed light on why women drop out at these critical transitions, but other new research clearly makes the connection between women’s concerns about the lack of family accommodation in scientific careers and the decision to leave.

Data collected by the National Science Foundation, for example, show that family formation—most importantly marriage and childbirth—account for the largest leaks in the pipeline between receiving a Ph.D. and the acquisition of tenure for women in the sciences. Women who are married with children in the sciences have 37 percent lower odds of entering a tenure track position after receipt of their Ph.D. than married men with children. And they are 27 percent less likely than their counterparts to achieve tenure upon entering a tenure-track job (see Figure 4).

In contrast, single women without children are about as likely to attain a tenure track position as men. These findings illustrate that family formation, particularly marriage and childbirth together, is the most important reason why women with Ph.D.s in the sciences do not begin academic careers with tenure-track jobs. What is surprising is that while marriage and childbirth often derail the tenure plans of women, they actually have a positive effect on the tenure of men. Close to 80 percent of men who have a child within five years of receiving their Ph.D. receive tenure within 14 years, compared with about 70 percent of tenure-track faculty overall.

The decision not to continue in a research science career often begins in graduate school. Family balance weighs heavily on the minds of students in considering their career choices. In a survey of 8,000 University of California graduate students in all fields, 84 percent of women and 74 percent of men registered the family friendliness of their future workplace as a serious concern. But they do not see their own universities meeting that goal. More than 70 percent of women in the survey, and more than half of the men, did not consider research universities to be family friendly.

The number of young women who want to pursue careers in academic science decreases by 34 percent over the course of their doctoral study, and the number of men decreases by 20 percent. Most women offer family balance concerns as a major component of their decision-making process. Graduate student women in all disciplines indicate that having a female role model in their department is critical in how they perceive the university as a family-friendly workplace.

In the sciences, there are generally few women faculty, and even fewer who have children. Role models affect life decisions. In departments where women faculty with children are common, 46 percent of female respondents agreed that research universities were family friendly. Where they were uncommon, only 12 percent of women agreed.

Women scientists who do have children in graduate school are very unlikely to continue. The competitive race to achieve scientific breakthroughs and prove oneself offers little respite for childbirth or child-rearing. The effect of parenthood on the choices of female doctoral students supported by federal grants (the source of support for most students in the sciences) is undeniable. Only a fraction of universities provide paid maternity leave or any other family accommodation for graduate students. They must often return to work in a very few weeks.

Women scientists who do have children in graduate school are very unlikely to continue. The competitive race to achieve scientific breakthroughs and prove oneself offers little respite for childbirth or child-rearing.

The consequences are telling. Forty-six percent of female respondents began their graduate studies working toward a faculty position in a research university, but babies changed that, resulting in only 11 percent of new mothers saying they now want to continue on that path. And once again, fatherhood for men similarly situated in graduate studies appears to have less impact. Fifty-nine percent began their doctoral programs planning to pursue a research-intensive academic career and 45 percent still plan to do so.

Men and women scientists who wish to pursue a scientific research career are usually expected to spend from one to five years as a postdoctoral fellow to enhance their research skills and number of publications following the receipt of the Ph.D. before they take a professorial position. The women who have taken this step are usually already in their thirties and are serious about their research careers. This also is the optimal age for childbearing in the United States and many will have children during their post doctoral years.

But, as with graduate students, childbirth often derails the scientific ambition of postdoctoral students. Forty-one percent of women graduate student scientists who have babies in the University of California system while working in a post doctoral position decide not to pursue an academic research career. This drastic shift by mothers away from a research science career following childbirth may be explained in part by the fact that only a handful of the major research universities offer any paid leave for graduate students and postdocs, and some have no leave policy at all. Unfortunately, students and postdocs are also sometimes openly discouraged from having children by their mentors, who explain that, as mothers, they will not be considered “serious scientists.”

Only a handful of the major research universities offer any paid leave for graduate students and postdocs, and some have no leave policy at all.

This story is not just true for women scientists. It appears to be true across the board for highly educated women who prepare for careers that were previously dominated by men. Law and medicine are the most populous and, one might argue, the most esteemed of the male-dominated professions. Women now attend law school and medical school in fairly equal numbers to men. They train for and enter these male enclaves of power and privilege in large numbers, but, like women scientists, most are not reaching leadership positions and lag behind men in salary.

All male-dominated fields show a similar pattern. Based on a male workplace model, they are most demanding of their new employees during the first years when they must prove that they have the “right stuff.” These testing years usually involve focused commitment and grueling hours. Since these professions require a fairly long training period after colleges, women are usually in their thirties, their prime child-bearing years during these same trial years.

Without support from their employer and the culture, they are far more likely than men to drop out or drop down to a less demanding level in the profession. For those who remain in the profession, their salaries are significantly lower: Female lawyers make 77 cents on the dollar of their male counterpoint, female doctors 59 cents.

Where Do We Go From Here?

While women have made tremendous progress in gaining access to all levels of education in the past 30 years, there remain several persistent problems that policymakers need to focus on in order to ensure that women have full access to all fields within education and to ensure that their education degrees will pay off:

* While women overall have dramatically increased their access to education, there are still some groups of women that lag far behind. Too few Hispanics, for example, are entering our four-year colleges. Hispanics represent only 7 percent of four-year college students compared to 16 percent of community college students.

* At all levels of postsecondary education, women are still highly concentrated in the low-paying “helping” professions of health and education and not encouraged to enter the high-paying fields of the future, including mathematics, engineering, and computer science.

* When women do receive degrees in fields that could lead to high-paying professions such as academia, law, or business, they face inflexible workplaces that do not allow them to combine work with family responsibilities, and thus too many of our highly educated women dropoff the career track for which they trained. When they do stay, they often earn less than their male counterparts because they are in less “prestigious” positions—they are primary care physicians instead of surgeons, biologists instead of physicists, and government attorneys instead of corporate law partners.

What can be done about these three persistent problems? Our government has already started to tackle the first two problems, which is heartening. Initiatives that work to address the high rate of high school dropouts and the lack of academic preparation for women who are underrepresented in education, particularly Hispanics, will go a long way. And our government has begun to focus real attention on increasing representation of women in all fields, particularly science, engineering, mathematics, and technology.

Congress has been investigating the problem and holding hearings on potential solutions. President Obama and others have urged equitable enforcement of Title IX as a tool to level the playing field for women in the sciences, just as it has done successfully for sports.

Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 prohibits discrimination based on sex in educational programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. Congress modeled Title IX based on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal funds. The law conditions federal funding “on a promise by the recipient not to discriminate, in what is essentially a contract between the government and the recipient of funds.”

Title IX has been used with great success to attract and retain women in athletic pursuits. Forty years ago it was assumed that more men participated in sports because women were disinterested. With the passage of Title IX, the number of women in high school sports grew 904 percent as these women saw an opportunity to participate competitively at the college level and perhaps even at a pro level. Of course, not all high school athletes achieve success in college, but even still, the number of women participating in sports at the college level increased 456 percent over the same period.

A Title IX strategy could be applied to the currently sex-segregated and sex-stereotyped patterns of education, beginning with high school education and continuing through community colleges all the way to advanced degrees. Title IX makes clear that gender stereotyping is prohibited, yet too few schools have the know-how or the resources to break down these historic patterns. And our government is only just beginning a serious effort to look at whether postsecondary education institutions are complying with Title IX when it comes to the science, technology, and math fields.

But Title IX isn’t the only answer. Women with family responsibilities need to be supported at all levels of education and once they enter the workforce. To support women scientists, federal agencies providing research grants, for example, could offer financial incentives to universities and colleges to include family accommodations, among them child care to attend conferences and paid family leave to encourage young graduate students in particular to continue their scientific careers.

Similarly, more should be done to replicate the good work of community colleges and four-year colleges providing family-friendly support and child care as well as flexible class scheduling so that women (and their partners) can attain successive levels of education to boost their earnings in today’s economy.

But the real answer may lay in the next chapter authored by Brad Harrington and Jamie Ladge on how businesses have and should respond to women’s entry into the workplace. Without businesses to support women’s rise to the top and support the everyday struggle of combining work and care, receiving a good education will never be enough.

Endnotes

1. National Center for Education Statistics, “Digest of Education Statistics 2007” (2007), Table 177. 2. Catherine Freeman, “Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women: 2004” (Washington: National Center for Education Statistics, 2004). 3. Michael Planty and others, “The Condition of Education 2008” (Washington: National Center for Education Statistics, 2008), Table 27-1. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Center for American Progress analysis of Center for Economic and Policy Research Extracts of the Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group files (2008). 7. 20 U.S.C. § 1681, et seq. 8. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Valerie Jarrett and Education Secretary Arne Duncan Hold White House Roundtable on Title IX” (June 23, 2009), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Valerie-Jarrett-and-Education-Secretary-Arne-Duncan-Hold-White-House-Roundtable-on-Title-IX/. See also Association for Women and Science and Society of Women Engineers, “Campaign Responses to Questions from the Association of Women in Science and the Society of Women Engineers” (October 13, 2008), available at http://www.researchresearch.com/media/pdf/Obama-McCain3080.pdf. 9. Laura Horn and Thomas Weko, “On Track to Complete? A Taxonomy of Beginning Community College Students and Their Outcomes 3 Years After Enrolling: 2003–04 Through 2006,” (Washington: National Center for Education Statistics, 2009). 10. Mary Lufkin, Mary Wiberg and others, “Gender Equity in Career and Technical Education.” In Susan Klein, ed., Handbook for Achieving Gender Equity Through Education, Second Edition (Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007). 11. National Center for Education Statistics, “Special Analysis 2008: Community Colleges” (Washington: 2008) p. 40. 12. Ibid. 13. Lutz Berkner, Shirley He, and Emily Forrest Cataldi, “Descriptive Summary of 1995–96 Beginning Postsecondary Students: Six Years Later” (Washington: National Center for Education Statistics, 2002). 14. Ibid at Table 2.1-C. 15. Linda M. Erickson, “Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States” (New York: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 342. 16. Miriam K. Chamberlain, “Women in Academe” (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), p. 366. 17. Marie Tessier, “Welfare + Education Leads to Jobs, Higher Pay,” Women’s eNews, September 17, 2009, available at http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/592. 18. Ibid. 19. Mary Gatta and Kevin McCabe, “The Poor Need Training that Works for Them,” The Star-Ledger, January 24, 2006, available at http://www.itwd.rutgers.edu/news/poor_need_training.htm. 20. Nolita Clark, Shannon Stanfield, and Vivyan Adair, “Remarkable Journeys: Poor, Single Mothers Accessing Higher Education,” On Campus With Women 33 (3–4) (Spring/Summer 2004), available at http://www.aacu.org/ocww/volume33_3/fromwhereisit.cfm?section=1. 21. Vivyan Adair, “The ACCESS Project at Hamilton College 2003 Year End Report” (Clinton, NY: Hamilton College, 2003). 22. Ibid. 23. National Center for Education Statistics, “Career/Technical Education Statistics” (2003–2004), Table P51. 24. U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, “Facts on Working Women: Women in High-Tech Jobs,” (2002), available at http://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/hitech02.htm. 25. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Career Guide to Industries, Health Care, 2008–09 Edition” (2008), available at http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs035.htm. 26. Anthony P. Carnevale and Donna M. Desrochers, “Help Wanted…Credentials Required: Community Colleges in the Knowledge Economy” (Annapolis, MD: Community College Press, 2001), p. 57. 27. Louis Soares and Christopher Mazzeo, “College Ready Students, Student Ready Colleges” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2008). 28. National Center for Education Statistics, “Special Analysis 2008: Community Colleges” (2008). 29. Christianne Corbett, Catherine Hill, and Andresse St. Rose, “Where the Girls Are: The Facts about Gender Equity in Education” (Washington: American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, 2008), p. 62. 30. Ibid., p. 60. 31. William T. Grant Foundation Commission on Work, Family and Citizenship, “The Forgotten Half: Non-College-Bound Youth in America” (1988); William T. Grant Foundation Commission on Work, Family and Citizenship, “The Forgotten Half: Pathway to Success for America’s Youth and Young Families” (1988). 32. Samuel Halperin, “The Forgotten Half Revisited: American Youth and Families, 1988–2008” (Washington: American Youth Policy Forum, 1998). 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2007” (Department of Labor, 2008) p. 5, chart 3. 36. Bureau of the Census, “Income, Earnings and Poverty Data from the 2007 American Communities Survey” (Department of Commerce, 2008), p. 15, table 7. 37. David Neumark and Donna Rothstein, “Do School-to-Work Programs Help the ‘Forgotten Half’?” Working Paper 11636 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005). 38. Davis Jenkins, “Career Pathways: Aligning Public Resources to Support Individual and Regional Economic Advancement in the Knowledge Economy” (New York: Workforce Strategy Center, 2006), available at http://www.workforcestrategy.org/publications/WSC_pathways8.17.06.pdf. 39. James W. Ainsworth and Vincent J. Roscigno, “Stratification, School-Work Linkages and Vocational Education,” Social Forces, 84 (1) (2005): 257–284. 40. James Kemple and Cynthia J. Willner, “Career Academies: Long-Term Impacts on Labor Market Outcomes, Educational Attainment, and Transitions to Adulthood” (New York: MDCR, 2008). 41. For example, for “low service students” where all ethnic/gender parings except Asian males are sufficiently represented, the persistent unemployment rate among the women students was 20.3 percent for white women, 45.8 percent for black women, 27.7 percent for Hispanic women, and 47.3 percent for Asian women. See Ainsworth and Roscigno, “Stratification, School-Work Linkages and Vocational Education.” 42. Ainsworth and Roscigno, “Stratification, School-Work Linkages and Vocational Education.” 43. National Women’s Law Center, “Title IX and Equal Opportunity in Vocational and Technical Education: A Promise Still Owed to the Nation’s Young Women” (2002). 44. Corbett, Hill and St. Rose, “Where the Girls Are,” p.62. 45. Michael Planty and others, “The Condition of Education 2008,” (Washington: National Center for Education Statistics, 2008), Table 27-1. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Martha West, John Curtis, “AAUP Faculty Gender Equity Indicators 2006,” (Washington: American Association of University Professors, 2006), p. 10. 53. American Institute of Physics, “New Report on Women in Physics and Astronomy” (2005), available at http://www.aip.org/fyi/2005/035.html. 54. American Institute of Physics, “New Report on Women in Physics and Astronomy” (2005), available at http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/women05.pdf. 55. National Center for Education Statistics, “Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, Completions Survey” (2008); Freeman, “Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women: 2004.” 56. National Center for Education Statistics, “Table A-11-2: Graduate and Professional Education,” available at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/section1/table-gre-2.asp (last accessed September 2009). 57. Michael Planty and others, “The Condition of Education 2008,” (Washington: National Center for Education Statistics, 2008), Table 27-1. 58. The National Academies, “Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty” (2009), p. 24. 59. Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden, “Do Babies Matter: The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women,” Academe 88 (6) (November–December 2002). 60. Marc Goulden, Karie Frasch, and Mary Ann Mason, “Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences” (University of California Berkeley Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security, forthcoming), p. 5. 61. Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden, “Do Babies Matter?” 62. Mary Ann Mason, Marc Goulden, and Karie Frasch, “Why Graduate Students Reject the Fast-Track,” Academe 95 (1) (January–February 2009), available at http://ucfamilyedge.berkeley.edu/Why%20Graduate%20Students%20Reject%20the%20Fast%20Track.pdf/. 63. Results from Mary Ann Mason, Marc Goulden, and Karie Frasch, “UC Postdoctoral Career Life Survey” (2008), available at http://ucfamilyedge.berkeley.edu/grad%20life%20survey.html. 64. Mason, Goulden, and Frasch, “Why Graduate Students Reject the Fast-Track.” 65. Goulden, Frasch and Mason, “Staying Competitive,” p. 7. 66. Goulden, Frasch and Mason, “Staying Competitive,” p. 25. 67. Goulden, Frasch and Mason, “Staying Competitive,” p. 25. 68. Mary Ann Mason, “Do Babies Matter in Science?” (2008), p. 20, available at http://sdbonline.org/Re-BootCamp09/Mason_ReBootSDB09.pdf. 69. Mason, “Do Babies Matter in Science?” p. 23, figure 11. 70. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2007” (October 2008), table 2, available at http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2007.pdf. 71. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Valerie Jarrett and Education Secretary Arne Duncan Hold White House Roundtable on Title IX” (June 23, 2009), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Valerie-Jarrett-and-Education-Secretary-Arne-Duncan-Hold-White-House-Roundtable-on-Title-IX/. See also Association for Women and Science and Society of Women Engineers, “Campaign Responses to Questions from the Association of Women in Science and the Society of Women Engineers” (October 13, 2008), available at http://www.researchresearch.com/media/pdf/Obama-McCain3080.pdf. 72. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681-88 (2006). 73. “Title IX Legal Manual,” available at http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/cor/coord/ixlegal.php (last accessed March 20, 2009). 74. Ibid. 75. Women’s Sports Foundation. “2008 Statistics- Gender Equity in High School and College Athletics: Most Recent Participation & Budget Statistics,” available at http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/Content/Articles/Issues/General/123/2008-Statistics--Gender%20Equity-in-High-School-and-College-Athletics-Most-Recent-Participation--Budge.aspx (last accessed August 2009). 76. United States Government Accountability Office, “Gender Issues: Women’s Participation in the Sciences has Increased, but Agencies Need to do More to Ensure Compliance with Title IX” (July 2004).

Not long ago I conducted an informal survey during a trip to East Africa, asking everyone I met how they view America. My interlocutors were from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. They were, in the main, educated and working in the private sector, the policy world, or government. Many of them hold dual passports.

Their answers were strikingly similar. Most of them said in one way or another that the “idea” of America has changed for the worse, and most asserted that they are less interested in traveling to, working in, or working with the United States now than in the past. But most disconcerting was the hope, expressed with striking consistency, that China would soon attain its full power so that American hegemony could be brought in check.

This was not for any love of China’s ideology or even the aggressive aid and investment strategies Beijing is deploying in the developing world. It was, as a young woman attorney explained, because “America used to be the champion for all of us, and now it is the champion only for itself.”

That much of the world has lost faith in America bodes ill for our national security because our role in the world is secured not simply by our military power or economic clout, but also by our ability to compel other nations to follow our lead. President Obama has the opportunity to craft a modern national security strategy that can equip the United States to lead a majority of capable, democratic states in pursuit of a global common good—a strategy that can guide a secure America that is the world’s “champion for all of us.”

But positioning America to lead in a 21st century world will take more than extending a hand to our allies, fixing a long list of misdirected policies, or crafting a new national security strategy that is tough but also smart. With globalization providing the immutable backdrop to our foreign policy, America is today competing on a global playing field that is more complex, dynamic, and interdependent and thus far less certain than in the past.

Leading in this new world will require a fundamental shift from our outdated notion of national security to a more modern concept of sustainable security—that is, our security as defined by the contours of a world gone global and shaped by our common humanity. Sustainable security combines three approaches:

• National security, or the safety of the United States
• Human security, or the well-being and safety of people
• Collective security, or the shared interests of the entire world

Sustainable security, in short, can shape our continued ability to simultaneously prevent or defend against real-time threats to America, reduce the sweeping human insecurity around the world, and manage long term threats to our collective, global security. This new approach takes into account the many (and ongoing) changes that have swept our planet since the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. To understand the efficacy of this new doctrine, though, requires a quick look at this new global landscape.

The New Realities of the 21st Century

During his presidency, Bill Clinton spoke often and passionately about our global interdependence and of positioning America to cross a “bridge to the 21st century.” Once across, however, the Bush administration took a sharp right turn. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the administration narrowly defined the quest for America’s security, distinct from and uninformed by the interests of the larger world we inhabit.

The challenge before us, President Bush asserted, was the struggle between good and evil, our strategy was to wage his so called “war on terror,” and our goal was to shape a “world without tyranny.” Our primary tool was a strong military backed by the resolve to use force without seeking a “permission slip” from the international community. And our object was the “axis of evil,” and the rest of the world was either “with us or against us.” Anyone who suggested that it might not be quite that simple was quickly and effectively discounted as “soft on terrorism.”

Despite ambitious rhetoric about the promotion of our core values—of leading “the long march to freedom” and pursuing the “non-negotiable demands of human dignity”—the Bush administration has culled its allies not from among those countries most committed to democracy, but from among those who have oil. The Bush administration had to leverage all of its diplomatic and economic clout to persuade the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” to participate at all in the invasion of Iraq. Then, the administration offered up not the shining example of an America where human and civil rights prevail, but an America where Guantanamo, Abu Gharaib, and illegal wire-tapping are justified by an elusive, greater purpose.

The United States has for the last five years defined America’s role in the world with near exclusive reference to the invasion of Iraq. The deaths of 4,000 American soldiers, maiming of tens of thousands more, and the expenditure of well over $400 billion, has failed to lay the foundations for either stability or democracy. And as defined by the Bush administration, the “War on Terror” has fared no better: Al Qaeda has not been defeated, and Osama bin Laden, its leader and the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, has yet to be captured.

Our losses, however, extend far beyond the edges of a failed Iraq policy or the shortcomings of an ill-defined “war on terror.” We have also lost precious time, and are well behind the curve in our now tardy efforts to tackle the global challenges that are already shaping our future—climate change, energy insecurity, growing resource scarcity, the proliferation of illegal syndicates moving people, arms, and money— all of them global challenges that have been steadfastly ignored and in some cases denied by an ideologically-driven Bush administration lodged firmly in its own distinct version of the here and now.

Perhaps most damaging, however, is this: We have lost our moral standing in the eyes of many who now believe that the United States has only its own national interests at heart, and has little understanding of or regard for either global security or our common humanity. Just as potent as the unsustainable federal budget deficit George W. Bush will leave in his wake is the unsustainable national security deficit that he will pass on to his successor. Whoever prevails in November will face a daunting list of real-time national security imperatives, among them:

• A spiraling crisis in Iraq
• Afghanistan’s steady implosion
• A fragile Pakistan
• An emboldened Iran
• A raging genocide in Sudan
• The growing insecurity of our oil supplies
• A nuclear North Korea
• An increasingly dangerous Arab–Israeli conflict

Just to name a few. But President Obama also faces looming and less tangible threats to our national security in a world where power has grown more diffuse and threats more potent—a world in which our security depends not only on the behavior of states, but also on a host of transnational threats that transcend national borders, such as terrorism, pandemics, money laundering, and the drug trade.

And finally, President Obama will be confronted by the more subtle but potent threats and moral challenges arising from sweeping human insecurity in a world divided by sharp disparities between rich and poor, between those nations actively engaged in fast-paced globalization and those left behind, and between people who have tangible reasons to believe in a secure and prosperous world and those who daily confront the evidence that violence is a more potent tool for change than is hope.

Sustainable Security Is the Answer

The world has changed profoundly during the last 50 years, but our concept of national security has not. The concept of national security came into being after World War II, and has had as its primary focus a world dominated by the nation state. In this new era of globalization, we continue to rely upon the narrow definition offered by George Kennan, who in 1948 described our national security as “the continued ability of the country to pursue the development of its internal life without serious interference, or threat of interference, from foreign powers.” While Kennan’s definition might have been relevant to the era of containment, it is insufficient in today’s integrated and interdependent world.

A modern concept of national security demands more than an ability to protect and defend the United States. It requires that we expand our goal to include the attainment of sustainable security.

The pursuit of sustainable security requires more than a reliance on our conventional power to deflect threats to the United States, but also that we maintain the moral authority to lead a global effort to overcome threats to our common security. With its global scope, sustainable security demands that we focus not only on the security of nation states, but also of people, on human security. An emerging concept borne of multidisciplinary analyses of international affairs, economics, development, and conflict, human security targets the fundamental freedoms—from want and from fear—that define human dignity.

National security and human security are compatible but distinct. National security focuses on the security of the state, and governments are its primary clients, while human security is centered on the security of individuals and thus on a diverse array of stakeholders. National security aims to ensure the ability of states to protect their citizens from external aggression; human security focuses on the management of threats and challenges that affect people everywhere— inside, outside, and across state borders.

A national security strategy is commonly crafted in real time and focused on tangible, proximate threats, while a human security strategy aimed at improving the human condition assumes a longer-term horizon. Sustainable security combines the two, thus allowing for a focus on the twin challenges of protecting the United States while also championing our global humanity—not simply because it is the right thing to do, but also because our security demands it.

For a majority of the world’s people, security is defined in the very personal terms of survival. The primary threats to this human security have far less to do with terrorism than with poverty and conflict, with governments that cannot deliver or turn on their own citizens, and with a global economy that offers differentiated access and opportunities to the powerful and the powerless. For literally billions of the world’s people, weapons of mass destruction are not nuclear bombs in the hands of Iran, but the proliferation of small arms. For them, freedom is not defined simply by the demise of dictators, but also by the rise of economic opportunity. Ensuring our security in today’s world, however, also requires a focus on collective security. Among the major challenges that the United States will face over the coming decades are climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity, and environmental degradation. These are challenges that will threaten the economic well-being and security of all countries on earth, and by dint of their global nature, their effects cannot be overcome unless we adopt a global perspective and strategy.

Take the example of the world food crisis that emerged in the spring of 2008. No single cause triggered the near doubling of world food prices. Indeed, the causes included the skyrocketing price of oil, the growth of the middle class in the developing world (and thus rising demand in China and India), droughts in Australia and Ukraine, a weak dollar, and the expansion of biofuels production in the United States and Europe.

The consequent rise in food prices triggered riots or protests in Europe, Mexico, Egypt, Afghanistan, and several other countries, and plunged millions in the developing world into abject poverty. In the United States, the number of Americans seeking assistance from food banks rose 20 percent to 25 percent.

Or consider “transnational threats,” such as money laundering, terrorism, and international drug and crime syndicates, all of which transcend state borders. These are threats that pose risks to the United States, but also to the well-being of our allies, to global stability, and to the world economy.

A national security approach seeks to prevent or reduce the effects of these trends and threats to the United States; a collective security approach, in contrast, assumes that the United States must act globally—in partnership with allies and in coordination with international institutions—to prevent or manage them.

Sustainable Security in Practice

Crafting a sustainable security strategy requires three fundamental steps. The first is to prioritize, integrate, and coordinate the global development policies and programs pursued by the United States. While our military power provides a critical and effective tool for managing our security, our support for the well-being of the world’s people will not only provide us with a moral foundation from which to lead but will also enhance our ability to manage effectively the range of threats and trends that shape the modern world.

Second, we must modernize our foreign aid system in order to allow the United States to make strategic investments in global economic development that can help us to build capable states, open societies, and a global economy that benefits the world’s majority. Third, we must re-enter the international arena, stepping up to the plate to lead the reform of international institutions that have not kept pace, and to create new institutions that are needed to manage our collective security.

(In this video below, Gayle Smith discusses the key concept of her new report, “In Search of Sustainable Security,” the first in a series of six reports that will provide analysis and recommendations for a new approach that combines national security, human security, and collective security.)

It is now dangerously upon us to act, and not hesitate any longer. Our destiny and national security depend on it. Here are some statistics and foreign aid restructuring suggestions from the Results organization, results.org.

Basic Facts: Reforming Foreign Aid to Help the Poorest

Because poverty reduction is not the guiding principle of the U.S. foreign assistance program, aid is often not directed to the poorest countries. Many of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid are selected for commercial, political, and security reasons unrelated to poverty. Foreign aid reform should establish country need as a clear criterion for assistance.

* While the U.S. is the largest international aid donor in absolute terms, it is not the leading donor relative to the size of its economy. The U.S. gives just one sixteenth of one percent (0.16%) of its national income to development assistance, well below the international target of one seventh of one percent (0.7%), and last among major donor countries.[2] A serious commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals will require a scale-up in aid dollars and a clear policy agenda to achieve them.

* Much of U.S. assistance is directed to strategic allies for political reasons, regardless of their economic and social need: just 5 percent of its foreign aid to the world’s 10 poorest countries combined.[4]

* The U.S. directs just 29 percent of its development assistance to the least developed and low-income countries.[5] On average, other major donor countries give over half of their aid to the poorest countries. Since 2003, the UK has maintained a policy of directing 90 percent of its aid to low-income countries.[6]

* Oxfam calculates that although “at least two of the world’s 10 poorest countries ... are now among the top 10 recipients of U.S. development aid, one of every three dollars of development aid goes to countries that are political allies in the ‘war on terror’ or the ‘war on drugs.’ In contrast, the U.S. spends just one out of every 16 dollars of development aid on the world’s 10 poorest countries (see table below). Another measure of this imbalance is that U.S. aid to sub-Saharan Africa between 1961 and 2005 was about half of what the U.S. government spent for military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007 alone (in constant 2005 US$).”

* Multilateral aid — funding given in cooperation with other contributing countries — allows for better coordination, reduces the burden on recipient countries of managing funds from multiple donors, and leverages contributions from other donors. Unfortunately, while other donor countries give about 28 percent of their aid through multilateral channels (like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria), the U.S. gives far less — as low as eight percent in 2005.[7]

Poverty-Focused Foreign Aid and the U.S. National Interest

* Improving living standards is critical to long-term development. Poverty leads to malnutrition and illness, which reduce incomes and economic productivity, thus exacerbating poverty because people cannot afford proper nutrition, health care, housing, to invest in their children’s education, or own a business.

* Poverty is a national security concern. Poverty and injustice breed hopelessness and instability. Our long-term security goals are undermined when we do not address the underlying factors that cause insecurity in poor countries.

* The 9/11 Commission Report stresses the link between strong U.S. leadership against extreme poverty and creating security: “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. America and Muslim friends can agree on respect for human dignity and opportunity. To Muslim parents, terrorists like Bin Laden have nothing to offer their children but visions of violence and death. America and its friends have a crucial advantage — we can offer these parents a vision that might give their children a better future.... That vision of the future should stress life over death: individual educational and economic opportunity.”[8]

* This link is also clear for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates: “What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security — diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development. We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the coming years.”[9]

The Playa Wire strongly urges you to join in speaking with one voice on this issue. Let your representatives know your opinions. Here are some possible steps to take.

1. Contact your representatives in the house and senate, and stress the timely and critical importance of doing what we can to reduce poverty, and improve our current system of foreign aid.

2. Ask them to weigh in on the foreign aid funding bill, known as the Foreign Operations Appropriations bill, encourage them to support Obama's International Affairs Budget. Ask them to write/speak with the Foreign Operations Subcommittee leadership about the crucial timeliness of these issues.

House: Chair Nita Lowey (D NY), ranking member Kay Granger (R TX) Senate: Chair Patrick Leahy (D VT), ranking member Judd Gregg (R NH)

You can also gain senatorial tweeting access at this link.

3. Support a charity of your choice that targets assisting the suffering.

4. Join a group, such as results.org, or one.org, that successfully target poverty reduction worldwide, and learn more about how you can make a difference.

In his 1953 speech, President Eisenhower was gravely concerned that our country’s finest minds and efforts would be spent on a perpetual state of war. He asked Americans, “Is there no other way the world may live?” The answer is “yes,” there is another way to live, but we must take the lead.

In Los Angeles, there are an estimated 73,000 homeless Americans – the largest homeless population in the country. With government social services bursting at the seams, private charities are more important then ever.  One such charity, The Giving Spirit (TGS), has served the homeless population since 1999.  Founded by Tom Bagamane, The Giving Spirit purchases goods in bulk from discount stores and collects donated items from generous distributors and manufacturers.

With the help of volunteers from The Giving Spirit, backpacks are filled with goods and distributed to the homeless throughout Los Angeles; this is what makes The Giving Spirit so unique, they deliver the aid directly to the homeless who are not able to travel long distances with all their possessions (or leave them unguarded).

The Giving Spirit actually started back in Washington D.C. when Tom and his sister noticed homeless people camping out in the front of our nation’s monuments and on federal government buildings’ steam grates in the dead of winter. They pooled their holiday gift money, gathered up food and blankets, and distributed them randomly to homeless Americans (while they were sleeping).  After moving to Los Angeles, Tom started The Giving Spirit as a 501 (c) (3) charitable organization.

Since 1999, The Giving Spirit has served more than 10,000 souls in the Greater Los Angeles area with food, blankets, clothing, toiletries, water, and, most importantly, hope. The homeless who are served often respond with: “Before you came, I had no idea where my next meal was coming from,” or  “Thanks for remembering us. Do you know what it’s like to be forgotten?” TGS has grown to two events a year. “Reach Out Saturday” is June 4th -5th this year. “TGS Week” is December 5th-12th.

If you want to donate funds, your giving is tax deductible. If you want to donate your time, volunteers are welcome.  Since 1999, The Giving Spirit has benefited from the efforts of over 5,000 volunteers. The Giving Spirit’s mandate, since day one, has been that 95 cents of every dollar donated goes directly to helping the homeless, but if you were to look at their financial statements, it is closer to 98.5%, says founder Tom Bagamane. To learn more, please go to TheGivingSpirit.org.

Waiting tables is not easy when six months pregnant, yet Mindy had no choice but to work the busy shifts at a local diner because she needed to contribute to the family income, and save for her new baby. She and her husband, a fellow restaurant worker with two jobs, had no health insurance through their employers, but luckily Mindy received pregnancy-specific insurance coverage through a state program.

Being on her feet most of the day, however, soon took its toll on Mindy’s health and the health of her baby. The hard work and stress of the job—many patrons don’t realize that restaurants are one of the most demanding service industries in the country—resulted in fatigue that complicated her pregnancy. Her doctor provided a note saying she needed regular breaks because Mindy’s body was stressed and her baby was showing signs of that stress, growing erratically instead of steadily in size. But that’s not how restaurants operate.

Mindy was forced to take early maternity leave because of her health problems but it was too little too late; she still needed a Caesarean section. Ultimately she had to quit her job to care for her own health and her new child and because the family couldn’t afford to pay child care costs. Without her income, the new family struggled to get by on her husband’s wages and tips, seeking government assistance to help purchase food.

The crux of the problem is this—women have taken on a greater share of breadwinning while maintaining their responsibilities as primary caregivers.

Mindy’s experience, as told to MomsRising.org co-founders Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner in their book, The Motherhood Manifesto: What America’s Moms Want—and What To Do About It, 1 is far too common in America today. As our country stands on the precipice of two historic societal shifts—women becoming half of U.S. workers for the first time in our history and the potential of extending affordable health care coverage to everyone living in America—we need to revisit old assumptions about how best to create access to health care and healthy working conditions.

The crux of the problem is simply this—women have taken on a greater share of breadwinning while maintaining their responsibilities as primary caregivers. But breadwinning has not always come with greater access to health benefits, and too often, women’s health has been compromised as women try to combine work and family responsibilities.

As with so many of our institutions, employer-sponsored health insurance was developed around the assumption that men are the breadwinners, women are the caregivers, everyone gets married, and all families are nuclear. For this reason alone, our health insurance system fails women in significant ways—a full quarter of women still receive health insurance through their husbands’ jobs, which makes them more vulnerable to losing coverage should something happen to him (he gets fired) or the relationship (they divorce). This is especially true now in the midst of the current recession. With men losing 73.6 percent of the jobs since the Great Recession began in December 2007, it should come as little surprise that 14,000 men, women, and children are losing their health insurance each day.2 And, when women seek to buy health insurance on the private market, too often they find that they are charged more than men and cannot get the essential health benefits they need, including maternity and reproductive health coverage.

Of particular importance to the complex work-health relationship, women are the most fertile in their 20s and therefore most likely to start their families while building their careers. Because women can postpone starting their families, it is now more common and easier for them to work than in the past. And because more women now work, they are more likely to have their children at older ages than they previously did.

The presence or absence of workplace policies that support women’s childbearing and child-rearing decisions can have multiple consequences for the health of working women, especially their reproductive health. For instance, a two-tier system that accommodates breastfeeding for professional mothers but ignores working-class moms can lead to health problems for the less-affluent women and their children.

A woman’s physical and social work environment can have a tremendous impact on her health and well-being. While this is true for men too, inequitable working conditions related to sexism and sex stereotyping create heightened risks to women’s health that have been overlooked for too long. For instance, whether working with hazardous chemicals in a hospital, a salon, or a laundry, women are regularly exposed to skin irritants, endocrine disruptors that interfere with fertility and reproduction, and even carcinogens.

Many of these jobs are just as or more risky than traditionally male jobs in sectors such as construction and mining, but they are rarely viewed in this light. And where women have tried to enter those male bastions, they often have been met with sexual harassment—itself a source of occupational stress—or protectionist policies that try to exclude them because of conditions that might threaten their fertility instead of efforts to make the workplace safer for everyone. The workplace also has failed to be a safe haven for employees who are dealing with domestic violence.

Social obstacles based on race, disability, and sexual orientation magnify this complex relationship between work and health. It is especially poor and low-income women, women of color, and immigrant women who are driven into the most hazardous and low-status jobs, who are given the least amount of flexibility in their schedules, and who are least likely to receive employer-provided benefits such as health care, sick leave, or family leave.

In addition, the competing demands of work and home often have greater adverse health effects on women than on men. Caregivers, the majority of whom are women, are almost twice as likely to report having chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or arthritis.3 Women also are more likely to suffer chronic stress that can lead to headaches, sleeplessness, irritability, and depression. Indeed, a recent poll showed that women are more likely than men to feel the psychological effects of the Great Recession and to report physical symptoms of stress.4

Women are more likely than men to feel the psychological effects of the Great Recession and to report physical symptoms of stress.

In this chapter we will examine specific shortcomings in our current health insurance system, followed by an exploration of the relationship between women’s reproductive health needs and their job opportunities. We then turn to the inequitable job conditions faced by women and the effects those conditions have on their physical and mental health. Sexual harassment, occupational segregation, sexism and racism, inadequate support for caregivers, and an atmosphere unresponsive to the ripple effects of domestic violence on the workplace all threaten the health and well-being of female employees.

We close out our chapter with three key suggestions on how we can redefine the relationship between health and work and restructure the workplace to recognize employees as whole human beings who have much to contribute to both economic and social life.

System failure

Employer-based health insurance leaves women vulnerable and the private market discriminates against women

Starla Darling was nearing the end of her pregnancy when she learned that the plant she worked for was shutting down. She was about to lose her job, and with it, her health insurance. She rushed to the hospital, had labor induced, and ended up needing a Caesarean section—all in the hope that giving birth while covered meant her insurance company would pay the bills. Even so, her insurance company denied the claim and left her with $17,000 in debt.5

Our health care system discriminates against women in numerous ways. While women are more likely than men to have health care because of government programs, employer-based coverage is structured in ways that commonly leave women out, make them more vulnerable to losing coverage, or fail to cover all of their health costs. When unregulated in the private market, insurers routinely charge women higher premiums than men and refuse to cover such basic care needs as contraception, Pap tests, and even maternity care. This discriminatory treatment and women’s heightened need for medical services mean that women spend more on health care than men, despite the fact that women typically earn less than men for the same work.

The employer-sponsored system, modeled as it is on outmoded notions of family structure and workforce participation, currently leaves out too many women and must be strengthened through reform. Because so few jobs offer the flexibility needed for the unpaid caregiving duties women often perform for their families, many women must reduce their working hours or stop working completely, making it hard for them to obtain or maintain health insurance. Women are more likely to work in the types of jobs that do not offer benefits—low-wage (think fast food), part-time (a department store), or for small businesses (a hair salon).6 Part-time jobs pay less than comparable full-time jobs, are concentrated in sectors that tend to be low-paying, and are often ineligible for the employer’s health insurance plan.7

The quarter of women who receive health insurance through their husbands are especially at risk of losing coverage as men’s jobs become less and less stable in our economy and with divorce rates remaining high.8 And receiving benefits through a spouse is not an option for unmarried women.

When we combine uninsured women with those who have purchased private insurance on the individual market, we find that almost one out of every four women is subject to the whims of this deeply inequitable marketplace. Here, insurance companies routinely charge women higher premiums than men of the same age and health status, a practice known as “gender rating.” Private policies also often deny coverage or increase premiums due to preexisting conditions that are either specific to women or disproportionately affect women. For instance, women may be excluded from general or specific coverage because they had a Caesarean section or are survivors of domestic violence.9 What’s more, private plans rarely include comprehensive maternity benefits, leaving women and their families to pick up the tab (an uncomplicated vaginal birth in a hospital averages approximately $7,500; Caesarean sections cost even more).10

The quarter of women who receive health insurance through their husbands are especially at risk of losing coverage as men’s jobs become less and less stable in our economy and with divorce rates remaining high.

Women who have insurance do not always have sufficient coverage for all of their health care needs. They typically have higher out-of-pocket costs than men with insurance, due to co-pays, deductibles, or other cost-sharing for chronic conditions, prescription medication, and routine gynecological care.11 Women ages 19 to 64 are more likely than their male counterparts to spend more than 10 percent of their income on out-of-pocket costs—an amount that officially classifies them as underinsured—and spend 68 percent more on their health care than men during their reproductive years.12 And women who suffer physical abuse spend 42 percent more on health care than non-abused women.13

Not surprisingly, more women than men skip seeking medical care or filling a prescription due to cost. In fact, according to a recent study, more than half of women surveyed had problems getting care because of costs, including forgoing tests, medicine, or other treatment.14 And this was before the recession began. In addition to cost barriers, women face workplace barriers to seeking care: Almost one in five women report delaying medical care because they could not get time off from work.15 For women of color in particular, distrust of the medical system because of historic medical abuse, different cultural mores, or limited English proficiency can create additional barriers to accessing appropriate medical care.16

Because women are paid less than men on average, their medical expenses eat up a greater share of their income and they are less able to afford premium hikes, larger co-pays, or supplemental coverage.17 Women also are less likely to be able to take advantage of employer benefits such as Health Savings Accounts, which are pre-tax medical savings accounts, and receive smaller contributions from their employers to such plans if contributions are pegged to their lower salaries.18

Moreover, the disparity in women’s earnings, savings, and benefits while working often leaves women with insufficient funds to meet their health care needs in their elder years. They have a greater need for long-term care, but are less likely to be able to afford it. Women over 65 are 7 percent less likely than men to have employer-sponsored insurance as a supplement to Medicare coverage. And they are twice as likely as men to receive supplemental insurance through Medicaid as a result of their higher rates of poverty.19

Higher medical costs combined with lower earnings add up to more medical bankruptcies for women.20 Although no data are currently available on lesbians who file for medical bankruptcy, it is likely that they are hit even harder. Gays and lesbians are almost twice as likely to be uninsured as heterosexuals21 because they have few employment protections and are less likely to qualify for coverage from a partner’s job. And lesbian couples have a higher poverty rate (6.9 percent) than heterosexual married couples (5.4 percent) and gay male couples (4.0 percent),22 possibly because they effectively face a double gender wage gap as well as multiple forms of discrimination.

The great irony is that women are the biggest consumers of health care. Women are more likely to suffer from chronic illnesses and disabilities than men, experience higher rates of mental health problems, and are 40 percent more likely to take prescription medication than men.23 And women tend to make most of the health care decisions for their families, which means they must access the health care system on behalf of others as well as themselves.

Production and Reproduction

Reproductive health care contributes to workforce productivity and workplace policies affect women’s reproductive health and options

Women have always participated in formal and informal economies, but a fundamental shift occurred in the second half of the 20th century. The introduction of a relatively safe, low-cost, and effective method of birth control, bolstered by the civil rights and women’s movements, paved the way for women to enter and stay in the workforce as they never had before. Yet 50 years later, we still haven’t figured out what to do with female employees who want to protect their fertility from workplace hazards or raise a family while working.

The Powerful Pill

In ways that differ significantly from men, a woman’s reproductive life is critically intertwined with her work life. To begin with, having the ability to control the timing and spacing of pregnancy and childbirth is essential for women to be able to participate fully in education and paid employment.

Perhaps one of the most significant factors facilitating women’s large-scale entry into the workforce (and especially professional careers) was the advent of modern contraception. As any mother knows, caring for a child can make up-front, time-intensive career investments extremely challenging. Greater access to an almost infallible, convenient, painless, and female-controlled contraceptive method in the form of the birth control pill provided women with much greater certainty about pregnancy and directly reduced the economic and social costs of making long-term career investments and delaying marriage.24

In “The Power of the Pill,” Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz chronicle how the greater availability of the birth control pill to young, unmarried women in the 1960s coincided with increased female college graduation, increased female professional school matriculation rates, and increased age at first marriage rates.25 Interestingly, the pill’s uptake also altered the marriage “market” by making marriage delay more acceptable and less costly for all women. Thus, the pill had the indirect effect of encouraging career investments even for women not using it.26

These factors, along with the feminist movement, the legalization of abortion, and sex discrimination legislation, resulted in seismic shifts in societal norms,27 the effects of which are still reverberating today. Indeed, women becoming primary breadwinners and half of all workers quite simply could not have occurred in the absence of pervasive access to modern contraception.

Fallowed Ground

At the same time that more affluent women started filling up college classrooms and moving onto boardrooms, a small number of working-class women slowly began to move into male bastions such as construction, mining, and manufacturing. Unfortunately, these traditionally male occupations failed to consider and protect against the effects of workplace exposures to hazardous chemicals on human reproductive systems. What’s more, female-dominated occupations such as nursing and cosmetology do no better.

Many of the chemicals, toxins, and other harmful agents to which women workers are exposed are hazards that affect their reproductive system, their fertility, and fetal development.28 Women employed in the health services profession are especially vulnerable owing to their contact with radiation, anesthetic gases, drugs, and viruses. But women working in shoe and textile manufacturing, printing, and facilities that produce pesticides and synthetic materials also absorb reproductive toxins daily. In addition, lead has long been known to cause infertility, reduced fertility, miscarriages, low birth weight, and developmental disorders.

At the same time that more affluent women started filling up college classrooms and moving onto boardrooms, a small number of working-class women slowly began to move into male bastions such as construction, mining, and manufacturing.

Employers sometimes respond to these reproductive hazards by excluding women from worksites deemed unsafe for them. Although male exposure to lead, radioactive sources, and other toxins can cause sterility and mutagenic effects, women have been the focus of exclusionary policies and men have been left unprotected.

A notorious example: Johnson Controls, Inc., a Wisconsin battery manufacturer, began to employ women in the 1970s, but because exposure to lead, a primary ingredient in battery manufacturing, is risky to workers’ health and to the health of a fetus, the company first instituted a policy requiring women job applicants to sign a statement that they had been advised of the risk of becoming pregnant while exposed to lead and later shifted to a policy of outright exclusion. The company barred all “women who are pregnant or who are capable of bearing children” from jobs involving lead exposure and required medical documentation of sterility from women who wanted these jobs.

The plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit challenging the fetal-protection policy as sex discrimination included a woman who was sterilized in order to keep her job, a divorced worker who lost wages when she was transferred from a position with lead exposure, and a man who was denied a leave of absence to lower his lead level when he intended to become a father. In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the remedy for reproductive hazards is not to restrict women’s employment opportunities but to make the workplace safe for all workers.29

Not Having It All

From a biological perspective, optimal fertility for women occurs between ages 20 and 35.30 Despite trends showing an increase in maternal age in this country, especially for professional women, the average age at which American women have their first child is 25.31 Thus, the age range for fertility happens to coincide with the period of time when employees are most likely to develop their educational and career skills and obtain greater responsibilities in their jobs. Yet most employers have not adjusted to this reality, which has ramifications for workplace equality, reproductive options, and the health and well-being of women and their families.

Workplace accommodations for pregnancy and childbearing affect women’s health and that of their newborn children. Sylvia Guendelman, a professor at the University of California Berkeley’s School of Public Health, shows that taking maternity leave before delivery can reduce Caesarean section rates fourfold and extended leave after childbirth can increase the successful establishment of breastfeeding among working mothers.32 Such improvements result, respectively, in a decrease of complications and recovery time for the mother and the risk of allergies, obesity, and sudden infant death syndrome for the child.33

While professional women are increasingly enjoying workplace accommodations for breastfeeding, few working-class women receive such flexibility or support.34 And pregnancy leave before childbirth is still rare in our society—it is used mostly for health problems, coping with stress and fatigue, or to mother young children rather than for health-promoting behavior. The failure to utilize such leave is likely due to economic deterrents and the desire to store up leave for the postnatal period.35

Take, for instance, what happened to Laura Walker, who worked at a Red Lobster restaurant. Instead of accommodating her need to pump breast milk on breaks, her managers responded to her nurse’s note by cutting her hours, assigning her the worst tables, and harassing her with milk-related teasing. Denied an environment where she could regularly pump, her milk ducts clogged and she contracted mastitis, a painful breast infection.36

This differential system where working-class moms have fewer breastfeeding options than their professional sisters (contrast Walker’s experience with that of Sarah Palin, who famously breastfed her son Trig while on conference calls) means that while 53 percent of college graduates still breastfeed their newborns after six months, only 29 percent of high school graduates do so.37 In the case of breastfeeding, such decisions have long-term consequences on children’s health as well.38

Given the continued obstacles for working mothers, some women, mostly with professional jobs, have followed traditional (read: male) workplace norms and tried to establish their careers before embarking on motherhood. From 1991 to 2001, the number of women becoming mothers for the first time between the ages of 35 and 39 jumped 36 percent and first-time mothers aged 40 to 44 spiked 70 percent.39

The age range for fertility happens to coincide with the period of time when employees are most likely to develop their educational and career skills and obtain greater responsibilities in their jobs.

But there are important health consequences to delayed childbearing. “Advanced maternal age,” as women are described when they become pregnant past age 35, increases health risks for women and children, including a heightened chance of Down’s Syndrome and other chromosomal disorders, high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, preterm birth, low birth weight, and miscarriage and stillbirth.40

Women over 35 also have lower fertility than women under 35 and may have trouble becoming pregnant in the first place. Some women have turned to fertility treatments, which carry their own health risks. Most notably, egg stimulation and retrieval for in vitro fertilization can trigger ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, the symptoms of which include nausea and vomiting, abdominal discomfort, shortness of breath, labored breathing, clotting disorders, renal failure, ovarian twisting, and occasionally death.41

Researchers Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden of the University of California Berkeley found that tenure-track and tenured faculty women at UC Berkeley were most likely to have their first biological child between the ages of 38 and 40—due in large part to career track pressures and what is known as the “time bind” (the phenomenon that women with children spend significantly more time engaged in professional, housework, and caregiving activities than men with children and than men and women without children).42 Given the increased health risks that come with advanced maternal age, this means that a failure to establish adequate “on and off ramps” and other policies that build flexibility into the academic career track can directly result in poorer health outcomes for mothers and babies.

Popular culture tends to blame women for “selfishly” focusing on their careers when they delay having children, but a complex set of incentives pressures white, affluent women to reproduce more and work less—among them the “opt-out” myth, the “mommy wars” debate, and the celebration of multiple births by white, married women—while pressuring low- and middle-income women and women of color to reproduce less and work more.43 Women of color in particular are concentrated in low-wage occupations at the bottom end of the labor market that intensify the work-family tension. The low-skilled jobs most commonly occupied by women offer few benefits, irregular hours, and minimal time off, rendering them the least conducive for caregiving.44

Hazardous to Your Health

The segregated workplace and inequitable job conditions pose physical and social risks to women’s health

Fannie Lou Hamer’s famous quotation about being sick and tired no doubt was a reference to her years toiling in the cotton fields while struggling to take care of her family.45 Most American women no longer work under the conditions experienced by Hamer, but the workplace still leaves many women sick and tired.

The interaction of both physical and social hazards created by inequitable job conditions makes employment especially dangerous for women. Women’s vulnerability does not result from biological difference so much as from occupational discrimination, including sex and race segregation.46

In addition, too many employers still treat matters of the home as private affairs with no bearing on the workplace. Ignoring the burdens of caregiving and the injury of domestic violence only serves to exacerbate threats to women’s health, safety, and well-being.

Separate and Unequal

In her bestselling expose, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover to investigate the impact of welfare reform on “unskilled” women workers.47 She takes jobs in low-wage occupations that are typically reserved for women—waitress, hotel maid, nursing home aide, house cleaner, and sales clerk—and discovers that all of them are risky and none of them pay enough to live on.

While working as a house cleaner for a large franchise, Ehrenreich’s co-worker Holly trips because of a hole in the ground, falling while carrying buckets, and screams in pain, “Something snapped.” But Holly, who can’t afford to miss a day of work, refuses to go to the emergency room and is soon cleaning the bathroom in the next customer’s house with a bad limp. Only after Ehrenreich pleads with their boss does he give Holly one day off.48

Employment in the United States has historically been segregated by race and gender. Women are concentrated in a relatively small number of occupations, such as teaching, clerical services, nursing, and domestic work. These jobs pay less, are less prestigious, and often have less favorable working conditions than those in male-dominated sectors.49

Longstanding racial discrimination in employment intersects with sex segregation to relegate women of color to the bottom of the occupational ladder.50 Only a tiny percentage of women of color occupy low health-risk professions such as professors, doctors, and corporate executives; most are employed in low-skilled clerical, manual, or service jobs.51 Some cases in point:

    * Women are increasingly hired as migrant farm workers, an occupation dominated by people of color and immigrants and characterized by very low wages, few legal protections, and high exposure to pesticides52

    * A majority of dry-cleaning employees are women, and over half of these women belong to minority or immigrant groups53

    * Forty-two percent of all nail salon technicians nationwide are Asian and an estimated 80 percent of those in California are Vietnamese immigrant women54

Although inadequately studied, their disproportionate exposure to workplace hazards plays a major role in the many health disparities experienced by women of color, who suffer higher death rates from childbirth, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, and other illnesses.55

The huge increase in women’s employment has lessened, but certainly not eliminated, job segregation, especially in female-dominated professions. The failure of men to integrate into women’s professions reflects the socially perceived inferior status and typically lower pay and benefits of these jobs.

Even though we think of the kinds of jobs that men tend to hold—such as construction worker, machinist, or firefighter—as more dangerous or onerous than the jobs that women tend to hold, this isn’t necessarily the case. Those women most at risk are typically the least informed about dangers and solutions and have the least resources to challenge hazards on the job. The underreporting of women’s injuries and health problems creates the false impression that women are in “safer” industries and that only male-dominated occupations such as construction, mining, and environmental cleanup involve high-risk work.

Women’s jobs carry particular health and safety risks because their working conditions are associated with stereotypically female personality traits and domestic roles.56 For example, women typically carry out tasks requiring less strength but more precise, repetitive, and speedy movements (though some jobs, such as nursing and home health aides, do require the lifting of heavy patients and equipment). Women are more likely to work as typists than construction workers, but typing rapidly all day can lead to carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive strain injuries that inflame nerves and muscles.57 Despite this, skeptics originally claimed such problems were the result of “psychosocial” problems and poor personal habits and successfully blocked ergonomics regulations in the mid-1990s.58

The failure of men to integrate into women’s professions reflects the socially perceived inferior status and typically lower pay and benefits of these jobs.

Women also are more likely than men to have jobs that mirror their roles as primary caregivers at home. Because they engage directly with children, kindergarten teachers and child care workers, who are almost all women, are exposed to more viruses, infections, and accidents than elementary school principals, who are more likely to be men. Caregiving jobs also tend to be less regulated and lack safety standard enforcement, in part because they are less likely to be unionized and thus have less bargaining and lobbying power. In addition, private employers who hire domestic workers to clean their homes, do their laundry, and care for their children and elderly parents often are not subject to safety regulations.

And consider the hospital-working environment, which presents inherent risks despite regulation. More than three-quarters of hospital workers are women, with nursing, record processing, and food services dominated by women. A large share of hospital injuries result from puncture wounds and musculoskeletal problems caused by handling of heavy loads and equipment. Women working in health care are exposed to harmful ionizing radiation from X-rays, laboratories, and radioactive drugs, as well as chemical hazards from anesthetic waste gases, drugs, and sanitation procedures.59 Nurses and aides spend far more time than doctors directly caring for patients, which exposes them to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, hepatitis B, and HIV and painful injuries from lifting incapacitated patients.

The cosmetology industry, including hairdressers and nail salon workers, also employs mostly women. The products they use daily in poorly ventilated salons expose them to numerous dangerous chemicals and toxins that have been linked to cancer, asthma and other respiratory ailments, skin allergies, and dermatitis. Indeed, the cosmetology industry uses more than 10,000 chemicals in its products such as nail polish, dyes, and hair sprays, most of which have not been tested for safety by any independent agency.60 Many workers also report carpal tunnel syndrome, vascular problems, and back pain from long hours of standing or uncomfortable body postures. So, too, women employed as cleaning or laundry workers are routinely exposed to harmful chemicals that cause burns and dermatitis from direct skin contact with irritating substances or respiratory problems from inhaling vapors and airborne micro-particles.

Women also have been entering professions previously closed to them in increasing numbers, but the workplace has been slow to respond to this change. Many traditionally male occupations have retained machinery, chemical safety levels, and protective wear that were designed with an all-male workforce in mind.61 Gender differences in workforce participation exacerbate these hazards to women’s health. Because women engage in more part-time and shift work, fewer are able to use employer safety services or engage in safety precautions and trainings.

Fear and Loathing

In addition to physical injuries and risks, workplace inequities produce “social hazards” that also jeopardize women’s health.62 Women can experience intense psychological stress and related disorders from occupying lower status positions in the workforce—from the devaluation of their work to lacking control over their working conditions, from strenuous tasks to hostility they often encounter when they break through gender barriers. Moreover, the shift work women often perform can cause disturbance of regular circadian-metabolic rhythm, which intensifies occupational stress. And another major source of occupational stress for women is sexual harassment.

Just about all of these hazards plagued women at Eveleth Mines in Minnesota. For its first 10 years of operation, the iron-ore mining and processing company employed only men in its hourly workforce.63 In the 1980s, women began to get jobs formerly reserved for men but made up less than 5 percent of the hourly employees. No woman had ever been promoted to foreman. Women workers earned much less than men because they were confined to the lower job classifications and worked fewer overtime hours.

Eveleth Mines was male-dominated not only in terms of who was in charge but also in terms of the sexualized atmosphere. Men plastered the walls and equipment with graphic graffiti, photos, and cartoons that depicted women as sex objects. They referred to women by their body parts and called their female co-workers degrading epithets, commented on the women’s sex lives, and openly described their own sexual exploits.

Some women were also subjected to sexual assault such as feigned sex acts and unwanted touching. The judge who presided over the class-action lawsuit against Eveleth Mines found that the sexualized workplace told the women in no uncertain terms “that they were perceived primarily as sexual objects and inferior to men, rather than as co-workers.”64 Ultimately, Eveleth settled with 15 women for $3.5 million.65

Unfortunately, sexual harassment persists today. In 2008, 13,867 charges of sexual harassment were reported to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with 15.9 percent filed by men.66 The pioneering work of legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon and others led to the recognition of sexual harassment in the workplace as a form of sex discrimination rather than “office romance.”67 Sexual harassment, however, is typically not considered an occupational health hazard. Yet numerous studies reveal that harassment on the job causes stress-related illness, lowers productivity, and increases absenteeism and job turnover, impeding women’s opportunities for advancement.68

Racial discrimination and racist sexual stereotypes compound the workplace harassment experienced by women of color.69 Heterosexism and homophobia also pervade the workplace. Women who have traditionally male jobs are often taunted as being lesbians and lesbians are often subjected to harassment on the basis of their sexual orientation.

A Woman’s Work is Never Done

According to the World Health Organization, depression is twice as prevalent in women as in men. Disproportionate caregiving responsibilities are among the gender-specific risk factors for common mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety (other factors include gender-based violence, socioeconomic disadvantage, income inequality and poverty, and subordinate social status).70

Caregivers are nearly twice as likely as non-caregivers to report a chronic condition, but they are less likely to have health insurance because they have had to reduce their working hours or leave the workforce altogether.71 Their lack of access to health care combined with the time they spend on caregiving means that they often fall behind in self-care. Caregivers are less likely to fill prescriptions for themselves or visit the doctor.72 In one study, 21 percent of female caregivers reported receiving mammograms less often than they did before they were caregivers.73

Studies have shown women’s disproportionate caregiving results in adverse mental health effects as well, especially chronic stress. Additional negative effects of caregiving include depression, feelings of helplessness, poor eating habits, disturbed sleep, strained relationships, anger and hostility, dissatisfaction, anxiety, and alcoholism.74 In a study of those providing care for stroke survivors, the ones who were employed full-time were at higher risk of depressive symptoms than those who were not working.75

Then there are the emotional costs of trying to work around the lack of institutional support for dual-career/dual-carer families. A more common solution among lower-income families is “tag-team” parenting, where parents work alternating schedules so that one parent watches the children while the other one works.76 It solves the problem of finding adequate and affordable child care but limits parents’ ability to spend time together or with the whole family.77

No Safe Space

Domestic violence is the number one cause of injury to women. Once thought of as a purely private matter, intimate violence is now recognized to have far-reaching public health and financial consequences that extend to the workplace. Perpetrators often try to threaten the stability of a survivor’s job, in order to further control her and make her more financially dependent on the perpetrator. Domestic violence contributes to a job loss for a quarter to half of all survivors.78

Perpetrators often carry out acts of violence at a survivor’s workplace because that is where they know they can find her. This places the survivors, their co-workers, and their customers or clients at heightened risk. Colleagues also must sometimes cover for an affected employee and protect that employee from harassing calls or visits.79

Each year, women suffer approximately 2 million injuries from intimate partner violence.80 As a result of this violence, employers lose $3 billion to $5 billion annually from the lost productivity of survivors, perpetrators, and colleagues.81 In addition, employers suffer the costs of covering absent employees on short notice, training replacement employees, property damage, medical costs, and insurance premiums, and occasionally public relations problems. Survivors also have sued employers for failing to keep the workplace safe or for firing them because of the abuse.82

Despite the devastating effects of domestic violence on the workplace and the apparent increase in intimate violence during this recession, few preventive workplace approaches have been implemented.83

Where Do We Go From Here?

Women need to be healthy in order to participate as equal and productive members of the workforce, but too often the workplace itself poses a hazard to women’s health and well-being. Although the barriers to health and equality outlined above may seem too numerous to tackle, the solutions are available, starting with engaging creative approaches from every sector of society.

Our social mores have changed so significantly we now take it for granted that most women will work in paid employment for at least some portion of their lives, often while raising young children at the same time. Imagine the cultural shifts yet to come if we are able to reform our health care system, implement workplace flexibility, and clean up our physical working environment.

Working together, we can find ways to meet the needs of our changing workforce, such as:

    * Making affordable, quality, comprehensive health care coverage available regardless of gender, employment status, or health

    * Removing the many employment barriers to building a family and a career at the same time

    * Addressing inequitable and unsafe working conditions to improve the work environment for everyone

As women’s work becomes more important than ever, it is incumbent on each of us to develop new ways to both value their labor and protect their health. Transforming our workforce from sick and tired to healthy and productive is a job we all must share.

Endnotes

   1. Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, The Motherhood Manifesto: What America’s Moms Want—and What To Do About It (New York: Nation Books, 2006).

   2. Center for American Progress Action Fund, “Health Care in Crisis: 14,000 Losing Coverage Each Day” (2009), available at http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2009/02/pdf/health_care_crisis.pdf.

   3. Alice Ho and others, “A Look at Working-Age Caregivers’ Roles, Health Concerns, and Need for Support” (New York: The Commonwealth Fund, August 2005), available at http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications Family Caregiver Alliance, National Center on Caregiving, “Fact Sheet: Caregiver Health” (2006), available at http://www.caregiver.org/caregiver/jsp/content_node.jsp?nodeid=1822#52.

   4. American Psychological Association, “APA Poll Finds Women Bear Brunt of Nation’s Stress, Financial Downturn” (October 2008), available at http://www.apa.org/releases/women-stress1008.html.

   5. Robert Pear, “When a Job Disappears, So Does the Health Care,” The New York Times, December 6, 2008, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/us/07uninsured.html?pagewanted=1&_r=5&sq=When%20a%20job%20disappears,%20so%20does%20th.

   6. Heather Boushey and Joseph Wright, “Workers Receiving Employer-Provided Health Insurance” (Washington: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2004), available at http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/health_insurance_3_2004_04.pdf.

   7. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008/2009 (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2008).

   8. The flip side to this is that while women are more vulnerable to losing coverage they have through their spouse, they are less likely to lose their own employer-sponsored insurance when they have it. Because men have lost more jobs recently and were more likely to have insurance through their own job, four times as many men as women have lost their employer-provided coverage in this recession. See Nayla Kazzi, “More Americans Losing Health Insurance Every Day” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2009), available at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/insurance_loss.html.

   9. National Women’s Law Center, “Nowhere to Turn: How the Individual Health Insurance Market Fails Women” (September 2008), available at http://action.nwlc.org/site/PageNavigator/nowheretoturn_Report.

  10. Ibid.

  11. National Women’s Law Center, “Fact Sheet: Addressing the Health Care Crisis” (August 2008), available at http://www.nwlc.org/pdf/AddressingtheHealthCareCrisisAug08.pdf.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ohio State University, “Physical Abuse Raises Women’s Health Costs over 40 Percent,” Science Daily, March 24, 2009, available at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090323110454.htm.

  14. Kathleen Doheny, “Most Women Struggle With Rising Health Care Costs,” U.S. News & World Report, May 11, 2009, available at http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2009/05/11/most-women-struggle-with-rising-health care-costs.html.

  15. Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “Women and Health Care: A National Profile” (2005), available at http://www.kff.org/womenshealth/7336.cfm.

  16. Courtney Chappell, “Reclaiming Choice, Broadening the Movement” (Washington: National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, 2005), available at www.napawf.org/file/issues/RJPolicy_Agenda.pdf; Office on Women’s Health, “Minorities Distrust Medical System More” (Department of Health and Human Services, 2009), available at http://www.womanshealth.gov/news/english/623856.htm; Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).

  17. National Women’s Law Center, “Addressing the Health Care Crisis.”

  18. Center for American Progress Action Fund and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, “Worse for Women” (2008), available at http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2008/womens_health_mccain.html.

  19. Alina Salganicoff, “Health Coverage and Concerns Facing Older Women” (Washington: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2009), available at http://nwlc.org/reformmatters/pdf/HealthCoverageandConcernsFacingOlderWomen.pdf.

  20. Brigette Courtot, “Health Reform Can’t Come Soon Enough: New Findings on Medical Bankruptcy,” available at http://www.womenstake.org/2009/06/health-reform-cant-come-soon-enough-new-findings-on-medical-bankruptcy.html.

  21. “Nearly One in Four Gay and Lesbian Adults Lack Health Insurance,” available at http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NEWS/allnewsbydate.asp?NewsID=1307.

  22. Randy Albelda and others, “Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community” (Los Angeles: The Williams Institute, March 2009), available at http://www.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/pdf/LGBPovertyReport.pdf.

  23. National Women’s Law Center, “Addressing the Health Care Crisis.”

  24. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions,” Journal of Political Economy 110 (4) (2002): 730–770.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid.

  28. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and Centers for Disease Control, “The Effects of Workplace Hazards on Female Reproductive Health” (1999), available at http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/99-104/.

  29. International Union v. Johnson Controls, 499 U.S. 187 (1991); See also International Labour Organization, “Gender Issues in Occupational Safety and Health” (1999), § 3, available at http://actrav.itcilo.org/english/calendar/2001/a3_2387/resource/Gender_and_OSH.htm.

  30. Jeremy Laurance, “The Big Question: So Is There an Optimum Age for a Woman to Have a Baby?” The Independent, October 26, 2006, available at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-big-question-so-is-there-an-optimum-age-for-a-woman-to-have-a-baby-421597.html.

  31. Tallese D. Johnson, “Maternity Leave and Employment Patterns of First-Time Mothers: 1961–2003” (Washington: Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, 2008), available at http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p70-113.pdf.

  32. Sylvia Guendelman and others, “Maternity Leave in the Ninth Month of Pregnancy and Birth Outcomes Among Working Women,” Women’s Health Issues 19 (1) (2009): 30–37, available at http://www.ijgo.org/article/S1049-3867%2808%2900102-3/abstract; Sylvia Guendelman and others, “Juggling Work and Breastfeeding: Effects of Maternity Leave and Occupational Characteristics,” Pediatrics 123 (1) (2009): e38–46, available at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/123/1/e38.

  33. Guendelman and others, “Maternity Leave”; Guendelman and others, “Juggling Work”; Jill Tucker, “Pre-birth maternity leave aids babies, moms,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 8, 2009, p. B1, available at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/08/BAC51540IG.DTL.

  34. Jodi Kantor, “On the Job, Nursing Mothers Find a 2-Class System,” The New York Times, September 1, 2006, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/health/01nurse.html?pagewanted=print.

  35. Sylvia Guendelman and others, “Utilization of Pay in Antenatal Leave among Working Women in Southern California,” Maternal and Child Health Journal 10 (1) (2006): 63–73; Tucker, “Pre-birth maternity leave.”

  36. Kantor, “On the Job.”

  37. Ibid.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Linda J. Heffner, “Advanced Maternal Age—How Old Is Too Old?” New England Journal of Medicine 351 (19) (2004): 1927–1929, available at http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/351/19/1927.

  40. March of Dimes, “Quick Reference: Pregnancy After 35,” available at http://www.marchofdimes.com/professionals/14332_1155.asp.

  41. Reproductive Health Technologies Project, “Ovarian Stimulation and Egg Retrieval: Overview and Issues to Consider” (Washington, 2009), available at http://www.rhtp.org/documents/RHTP-OvarianStimulationandEggRetrievalPaperUpdated.pdf.

  42. Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden, “Marriage and Baby Blues: Redefining Gender Equity in the Academy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 596 (1) (2004): 86–103, available at http://ucfamilyedge.berkeley.edu/marriagebabyblues.pdf.

  43. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, pp. 269–70.

  44. Dorothy E. Roberts, “Welfare Reform and Economic Freedom: Low-Income Mothers’ Decisions about Work at Home and in the Market,” Santa Clara Law Review 44 (4) (2004): 1029–1063.

  45. Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Plume, 1993).

  46. Alice Abel Kemp and Pamela Jenkins, “Gender and Technological Hazards: Women at Risk in Hospital Settings,” Industrial Crisis Quarterly 6 (2) (1992): 137–152; International Labour Organization, “Gender Issues,” §§ 2-3.

  47. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Metropolitan, 2001).

  48. Ibid.

  49. Paula England, “Gender Inequality in Labor Markets: The Role of Motherhood and Segregation,” Social Politics 12 (2)(2005): 264–288, at 266.

  50. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

  51. Annette Dula, S. Kurtz, and M.L. Samper, “Occupational and Environmental Reproductive Hazards Education and Resources for Communities of Color,” Environmental Health Perspectives Supplements 101 (2) (1993): 181–189, available at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1519960.

  52. “Migrant Tomato Workers Face Chronic Abuses,” available at http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jps?aid=308.

  53. Centers for Disease Control and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “Occupational Health Disparities: Outcomes” (2009), available at http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/programs/ohd/outcomes.html.

  54. National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, “Issue Brief: The Nail Salon Industry: The Impact of Environmental Toxins on API Women’s Reproductive Health” (2006), available at www.napawf.org/file/issues/issues-Nail_Salon.pdf.

  55. Kemp and Jenkins, “Gender and Technological Hazards”; Dula, Kurtz, and Samper, “Reproductive Hazards.”

  56. International Labour Organization, “Gender Issues,” § 2; International Labour Organization, “Gender Equality at the Heart of Decent Work” (2009), § 5.1.3, available at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_norm/---re/conf/documents/meetingdocument/5S]partI:wcms_105119.pdf; European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, “Gender Issues in Safety and Health at Work–A Review” (2003), pp. 32–34, available at http://osha.europa.eu/en/publications/reports/209.

  57. Maurits van Tulder, Antti Malmivaara, and Bart Koes, “Repetitive Strain Injury,” Lancet 369 (9575) (2007): 1815–22.

  58. Barnaby J. Feder, “A Spreading Pain, and Cries for Justice,” The New York Times, June 5, 1994, available at http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/05/business/a-spreading-pain-and-cries-for-justice.html; Steve Lohr, “Administration Balks at New Job Standards on Repetitive Strain,” The New York Times, June 12, 1995, available at http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/12/business/administration-balks-at-new-job-standards-on-repetitive-strain.html.

  59. Kemp and Jenkins, “Gender and Technological Hazards.”

  60. National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, “The Nail Salon Industry”; United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Protecting the Health of Nail Salon Workers” (2007), available at www.epa.gov/dfe/pubs/projects/salon/nailsalonguide.pdf; Sian Wu, “Health Risks to Vietnamese Nail Salon Workers: Are They Being Glossed Over?” International Examiner 34 (7) (2007), available at http://www.modernsolutionsinc.com/archives291.

  61. International Labour Organization, “Gender Issues,” § 2; International Labour Organization, “Providing Safe and Healthy Workplaces for Both Women and Men” (2009), p. 4, available at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---gender/documents/publication/wcms_105060.pdf.

  62. Kemp and Jenkins, “Gender and Technological Hazards,” pp. 143–44.

  63. Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co., 824 F. Supp. 847 (D. Minn. 1993).

  64. Ibid. at 885.

  65. Sexual Harassment Support, “Jenson vs. Eveleth Mines Timeline,” available at http://www.sexualharassmentsupport.org/JensonVsEvelethTimeline.html.

  66. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “Sexual Harassment,” available at www.eeoc.gov/types/sexual_harassment.html.

  67. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

  68. Kemp and Jenkins, “Gender and Technological Hazards,” p. 144; “Effects of Sexual Harassment,” available at www.stopvaw.org/Effects_of_Sexual_Harassment.html (last accessed June 2009).

  69. Tanya Kateri Hernandez, “The Racism of Sexual Harassment.” In Catharine A. MacKinnon and Reva B. Siegel, eds., Directions in Sexual Harassment Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

  70. World Health Organization, “Gender Disparities and Mental Health: The Facts,” available at http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en.

  71. Family Caregiver Alliance, “Caregiver Health.”

  72. Ibid.

  73. Evercare and National Alliance for Caregiving, “Evercare® Study of Caregivers in Decline: A Close-up Look at the Health Risks of Caring for a Loved One” (2006), available at http://www.caregiving.org/data/Caregivers%20in%20Decline%20Study-FINAL_lowres.pdf.

  74. “Women’s Unpaid Caregiving and Stress,” available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qu4118/is_200604/ai_n17174924/; Evercare and National Alliance for Caregiving, “Caregivers in Decline.”

  75. Jean Y. Ko, Dawn M. Aycock, and Patricia C. Clark, “A Comparison of Working Versus Nonworking Family Caregivers of Stroke Survivors,” Journal of Neuroscience Nursing 39 (4) (August 2007): 217–225, available at http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/167894726.html.

  76. Heather Boushey, “Tag-Team Parenting” (Washington: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006), available at http://www.cepr.net/documents/work_schedules_2006_08.pdf.

  77. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997); Arlie Russell Hochschild and Anne Machung, The Second Shift (New York: Penguin USA, 2003); Blanche Grosswald, “The Effects of Shift Work on Family Satisfaction,” Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services 85 (3) (2004): 413–423.

  78. Marcy L. Karin, “Changing Federal Statutory Proposals to Address Domestic Violence at Work,” Brooklyn Law Review 74 (2) (2009): 377–428, available at www.brooklaw.edu/students/journals/blr/74.2%2003Karin.pdf.

  79. Ibid.

  80. Family Violence Prevention Fund, “Get the Facts: The Facts on Domestic, Dating and Sexual Violence,” available at http://endabuse.org/content/action_center/detail/754.

  81. Karin, “Domestic Violence at Work.”

  82. Ibid.

  83. Ibid.; Associated Press, “Domestic Abuse on the Rise as Economy Sinks,” April 10, 2009, available at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30156918.

Where is the United States in relation to other countries on clean-energy investments? How will the United States' lack of action on clean energy affect our economy? What can we do to get back ahead of the pack on clean energy?

Because I’m deeply interested in cause and effect in philanthropy, I’m fascinated with the butterfly effect in social change – even with all its ambiguity. I often wonder who was behind the major events of human history. Not obviously and immediately, but three or four steps behind, especially the indirect and obscure role of philanthropy in seeding unexplained social change.

For example, I was surprised to learn recently that in the 1950s my friend and colleague Cora Weiss, of the Samuel Ruben Foundation, had an unsuspecting hand in determining the course of a Kenyan student’s life. In 1959, Barack Obama Sr. received a scholarship from the African American Students Foundation (AASF), whose executive director Cora then was, to attend the University of Hawaii. Would the United States have a black president today if the AASF had not provided that initial small grant to his father? Would most foundations today be able to predict the most unlikely ‘butterfly effect’ of one of their grants? Probably not, but unlikely things still happen.

Building Resilience

But the butterfly effect potential is not the only advantage of small grants. More important is the predictable slow, adaptive process of building resilience in the complex social system that drives social change. The work of the Resilience Alliance, and books like Panarchy and Frances Westley’s Getting To Maybe: How the world is changed [1] are making real progress in translating the lessons of resilient ecosystems in nature to the complex adaptive systems in society.

What initially looks like a catastrophic failure in natural ecosystems − a forest fire, for example − eventually serves to strengthen the resilience of the overall system (soil, hydrologic and forest) by restoring biodiversity at all levels. The same is true for social systems. If they become too dominated by one species or set of ideals, they become vulnerable. Social movements attempt to stimulate social adaptation by uncovering hidden weaknesses before they lead to total system failure. They are the wildfires that restore resilience to social systems in danger of collapse.

For example, the non-violent movement against the military coup in Honduras last year initially alarmed some people who feared that it would make matters worse, but it quickly gained popular support because it aimed to restore the democratically elected government. This spontaneous uprising of ‘people power’ then inspired the Greengrants’ Central America Advisory Board to shift resources from local environmental projects like community forestry to further bolster this broader effort to stabilize society.

Paul Hawken’s renowned book "Blessed Unrest" likens this process of building resilience to that of the human immune system – a self-organizing complex, adaptive biological system that can learn from its mistakes to anticipate threats that don’t yet exist.

Global Greengrants Fund has developed a small grants strategy, led by local activist advisers, to help the global environmental movement build social resilience slowly and patiently, so that it evolves with confidence. It is effective both as a search for the elusive ‘magic bullet’ of the butterfly effect and as a strategy for social change rooted in an understanding of three interrelated and coevolving bodies of thinking about social change: resilience science, social network analysis and social movement and collective behavior theory.

Small Grants as a Strategy

First of all, ‘small’ grants are often, and wrongly, defined from the perspective of the donor rather than the recipient. For some funders, small grants can be as large as $100,000. Unfortunately, the average-sized international grant is much too large to trickle down effectively to the community level, where absorptive capacity is limited. Grants of all sizes are needed, but the most overlooked part of the spectrum is small grants. This is where the greatest potential for leveraged growth is.

At Greengrants, we believe that in the developing world a grant must be under $5,000 to be considered a small grant. We think of our small grants as roughly equivalent to one full-time equivalent annual salary for a community organizer in the developing countries in which we make grants, where a little goes a long way.

Too often, foundation leaders incorrectly assume that small grants are not strategic, but an expedient for small foundations with small assets and small staff capacity. This issue of Alliance dispels that idea and shows how a well-conceived small grants strategy can have a huge impact when executed with discipline on a visionary scale.

"In Resilience Thinking," Brian Walker and David Salt describe how ‘landscapes and communities absorb disturbance and maintain function’ in a continuous ‘cycle of resilience’. An understanding of the four phases of the cycle of resilience (exploitation, conservation, release and reorganization) helps Greengrants’ advisers realize how and when to release resources to support the social movements that enable change.

Social movement organizations – like those that Greengrants supports – are spread through the four phases of the cycle, but the majority are clustered in the ‘reorganization’ phase because they tend to emerge during or immediately after a disturbance to some part of the dominant system (like rapid growth of the movement to democratize the World Trade Organization following the ‘Battle of Seattle’ riots in 1999). In social movement theory, such a moment would be a ‘political opportunity’ – the unexpected weakness of the opponent to change, and therefore a fertile time for successful movement advancement.

Social Movement Dynamics

Global Greengrants Fund makes small grants to grassroots environmental movement groups in developing countries because we have found that it is the best way to deal comprehensively with the vast array of environmental conservation and social justice problems facing the world today without merely moving them from one location to another. But we have to manage transaction costs carefully – which is another reason why our distribution network of 125 insightful advisers is crucial.

NGO Source estimates that the fixed cost for each foreign grant made by US foundations is $5,000 to $10,000 or even more. As a result, very few US foundations can justify grants of less than $10,000 – even when the empirical evidence is clear that smaller grants often provide a better social change return on investment. Consequently, very few foundations make grants small enough to be absorbed by local grassroots groups.

We aim to plug that gap. Greengrants’ average grant size is consistently about $4,000, and our fixed ‘transaction cost’ is about $2,000 – even with our volunteer network. But we are responding to the call to ‘think globally and act locally’ by making hundreds of small grants across the globe simultaneously. This year, we will make about 750 grants under $5,000, totaling about $3.8 million.

Most social change grant making strategies – coincidentally or deliberately – seem to align around some combination of the four dominant theories of social change that have emerged among social science scholars researching the dependant variables in social movement success:

    * Mobilizing structures (institutions, NGOs, think-tanks, policy institutes, churches, unions, networks)

    * Resource mobilization (financial, human, material)

    * Framing (public and media relations, policy alternatives)

    * Political process and unexpected opportunity (shifting alliances among political elites that can create           unexpected weaknesses to exploit)

Funding the Unanticipated

Putting grant-making authority in the hands of a global network of local social movement leaders seems like the best way to mobilize resources and to enable people to respond successfully to the rare and fleeting unanticipated political opportunity. The ability to make such a response depends on several things – profound understanding of the dominant culture and the relationship with a movement subculture, rich personal experience in the movement itself, and, most importantly, ‘intuition’.

Most philanthropists lack these qualities, so at Greengrants we have harnessed the existing global network of environmental and social movement leaders who have this combination of skills to serve as the decision-makers and distribution network for our grants in 120 of the least developed countries.

Funding unexpected opportunities implies an ability to act quickly. In April 2000, our China coordinator Wen Bo notified us that Central Chinese TV had allocated a slot to show a one-hour documentary about the environment on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. But Wen Bo needed a $500 grant to pay a fee to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation within 24 hours so it could be translated. We contacted CBC and paid the fee the same day. We don’t know how many Chinese people saw the program, but with a population of 1.3 billion and only one TV network in China, the potential leverage for a quick $500 is huge. Opportunities like that don’t come along often, but when they do donors must be prepared.

Mastery and Intuition in Grant Making

As in chess, philanthropy and social movements have their ‘masters’. In social movements, they are the local leaders who seem to have an uncanny strategic sense of what to do next and how their opponent will respond. They have the resilience that comes only from a lifetime of learning and recovery from repeated failure – what is called ‘system disturbance’ in resilience theory. They evolve rapid feedback loops that unconsciously guide them to ‘see around corners’. This intuition enables them to recognize weaknesses in dominant social and political patterns that constitute the opportunity for movements. However, they seldom have instant access to the extra resources that can bring success when they do hit upon a potentially decisive opportunity.

Social Networks – Structural Trust for Political Purpose

The Greengrants global network of local activist advisers emerged out of necessity in the mid-1990s when we wanted to make small grants, quickly and cheaply, in some of the most remote places on earth – the Amazon, Siberia and the Russian Far East, and the Indonesian archipelago. So we went first to Rainforest Action Network, whom we already knew we could trust, and soon after created a hive of loosely linked global activist networks including Pesticide Action Network, International Rivers Network, Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute – five medium-sized global campaign-oriented networks who together began to distribute about half a million dollars a year for us.

After several years of growing success with the model, these five networks then suggested that we expand the distribution network to include local leaders on the more distant fringes of their networks by creating regional advisory boards in Brazil and Russia, and eventually around the world in 13 regions from West Africa to China to the Pacific Islands.

What makes the Greengrants network of grant making advisers especially robust, says Harald Katzmier of FAS Research, is a culture of peer accountability and structural trust, which further enhances the pre-existing social capital among these networks. Moreover, the network is characterized by extreme generosity where those who need money for their own work (the advisers) will freely share their insight to help the money pass them by to benefit others further downstream who need it even more. According to Katzmier, this unique structural trust helps stabilize the network from the core (100 donors) to the semi-periphery (150 staff and advisers) to the periphery (5,000 grantees) into a sustainable virtuous circle.

Several interconnected global networks of intermediary grant making funds like Global Greengrants Fund have emerged in the last 20 years to provide support to several global movements simultaneously. These include the International Network of Women’s Funds, Global Fund for Women, the emerging Greengrants Alliance of Funds (CASA in Brazil, Samdhana Institute in South East Asia, and FASOL in Mexico), and an informal network of human rights funds supported by the Ford Foundation’s $100 million International Initiative to Strengthen Philanthropy. Although not explicitly set up to make small grants, many of these funds are aware of the value of small grants because they understand that grant size matters in supporting social movements.

Our assumption at Global Greengrants Fund is that we know very little for certain about how social change – the irreversible shift in social norms – actually happens because the variables are too complex and dynamic. But we do know that social movements have historically played a strikingly important role. Furthermore, community organizing for social movements has traditionally been the only tool available to the powerless. We therefore focus on what the evidence suggests does make social movements successful: putting financial resources in the hands of the master strategists of social movements – the self-empowered leaders that can take full advantage of unexpected political opportunity when they sense it, even if they cannot fully explain it.

Defining ‘Small’ Grants – How Much is Enough?

These variables are always important at every level, on every issue, but this is increasingly recognized at the global scale. Nicky McIntyre and Annie Hillar of Mama Cash explain Mama Cash’s new strategy to make fewer but larger grants partly in terms of conserving resources that can then be reallocated to other factors such as technical assistance to strengthen mobilizing structures, issues framing and responding to political processes. Their argument is persuasive, but the new approach is not certain to work any better than the small grants strategy that emerged for Mama Cash by responding to the needs of the global women’s movement over the last three decades.

Nonette Royo of the Samdhana Institute in the Philippines describes the advantage of small grants in ‘building a trusted repository of local knowledge’ to help increase the odds of success of the rapidly expanding climate change strategy called REDD – Reducing Emissions from forest Degradation and Deforestation. ‘Time and time again, small grants have been proven to be the crucial element for those activities to also have impact,’ she argues.

Assessing the Impact

Maya Ajmera of the Global Fund for Children maintains that a metrics model must include both quantitative and qualitative data, in implicit recognition of Einstein’s observation that ‘not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted’. As I said earlier, we don’t understand the complex adaptive systems of society well enough to know what philanthropy should do to shift social norms on a global scale to solve intractable problems such as violence, poverty and injustice.

If we don’t know what to do, it’s especially challenging to measure impact and compare results. But we must still try – with an open mind and the humility that result from self-confidently acknowledging our ignorance of social processes. If we don’t measure, we can’t learn. But we must avoid overemphasizing metrics that might unintentionally inhibit creativity, innovation and risk taking. Furthermore, evaluation costs money so we always need to ask: are we learning enough to justify the cost, or are we only reaffirming things that are already obvious or irrelevant? We should strive to do as the technology analyst Ester Dyson says, ‘always make new mistakes.’

One More Thing

There is an unmistakable relationship emerging between three interdependent trends in philanthropy – donors who make flexible small grants to the leaders of social movements, investors who make micro-loans to develop livelihoods, and those who specialize in prizes, awards and fellowships to individual social entrepreneurs. All three approaches seek to identify, leverage and scale the efforts of those who have the ability to see around corners – those with the sustained dedication, effort and insight that reflect a mastery of social change. We all want to support the kind of people whose good work would not stop if you paid them to quit. That’s what small grants can do best.

Recently I received an email regarding the need for teachers to mentor students on academic probation and those retaking the ISTEP test in March. The total of both was 30 students. The purpose of the email was to ask teachers/staff to volunteer to work one on one with one of these students. Within 4 days, all students were assigned a teacher or staff member. These teachers do not receive extra pay for helping, but are committed to each student. In a society that truly promotes the philosophy of "me-ism,� what takes place at Dwenger is very anti-cultural.

Most of this extra help is done after school because that is the only time the two can get together. It is humbling to work with such generous adults who truly care about young people and are dedicated to helping each child at Dwenger achieve success.

You can also see these efforts on a daily basis throughout the building- teachers working with individual students in the hallways, classrooms and in the cafeteria. In addition, all of the teachers and staff assigned to the Resource Room are indefatigable workers who are always assisting the students with their work. It is very easy to say that we care, but the proof is in the pudding. The pudding is all of the people who try to give their best to our students each day. We are truly blessed to have so many who truly believe in the maxim that it is only giving that we receive.

The presence of immigrant men standing on street corners looking for work too often serves as the flashpoint for confrontation in communities across the country. Anti-immigrant groups, but also just concerned residents, focus on the perceived health and safety risks posed by the “eyesore” of day laborers and agitate for “controlling illegal immigration.”

Yet these very same people easily walk or drive by other immigrants (both documented and undocumented) who are present in public spaces: the nannies taking care of children and the elderly, maids entering families’ homes, laborers working on farms, or cleaners working in office buildings at night.

Immigrant women are seen in communities across the country pushing strollers, feeding children, and playing in city playgrounds. An Asian face, a Caribbean accent, or the echo of Spanish reveals that millions of Americans entrust their most precious treasures—their children—to immigrants who are often undocumented.

Many Americans entrust these same women, who sometimes have limited training and difficult-to-understand accents, with the care of their aging parents.2 They entrust their homes as well—thousands of housekeepers take public transportation across the country to dust, clean, and sweep for working individuals and families who are too exhausted to handle the burden of cleaning their own homes.

Immigrants also make up a substantial part of the countless workers who harvest fruits and vegetables across the country, who ensure a steady supply of milk and dairy products, and who slaughter chickens and cows for nightly dinner tables.

A significant number of those workers are immigrant women, who often risk sexual harassment from male supervisors and endure arduous physical labor in an effort to provide for their own families.4 Many are indigenous people, able to communicate more easily in Mixtec than in Spanish. And then there are the countless office cleaners who descend upon downtown buildings in cities across the country, ensuring that all the crumbs from a lunch eaten over the keyboard are vacuumed up and the trash can is empty when office workers return in the morning.

What is it about this work—child and parental care, home maintenance, food production, cleaning—that allows society to treat the workers in these occupations as invisible, or at least less important than the software developer, insurance adjustor, or any of the countless other occupations that have greater status in our society? If we measure status, or the lack thereof, by income, working conditions, benefits, and simple respect, then the above-described occupations clearly have very little.7 Is it that nurturing children and maintaining homes has been undervalued for decades, if not centuries?

The critical role that child care providers and housekeepers play in maintaining or enhancing many middle-class families’ quality of life has been greatly overlooked.

In a society where knowledge workers are the most highly compensated, it is not surprising that those who work with their hands or engage in physical labor are undervalued. Or was the work once valued, but now easier to underappreciate or ignore since it is increasingly performed by immigrants, legal and otherwise? Such an attitude ignores their significant role in the American labor force—the increase in the American workforce over that past decade is due to the levels of immigration, legal and otherwise.

Each of these occupations is essential to a well-functioning society. Take, for example, all those nannies. One area not fully explored in the raging economic debate over immigrants’ cost and contributions to the U.S. economy, particularly of those not authorized to work in this country, is the extent to which the availability of low-cost child care and housekeeping services has allowed middle- and upper-middle-income people, especially women, to participate in the workforce. Women today, including married women with children, have the highest workforce participation in our nation’s history. That is possible only because of invisible workers.

The critical role that child care providers and housekeepers play in maintaining or enhancing many middle-class families’ quality of life has been greatly overlooked. Why is it that work as critical as the care of children should be so undervalued?

We should also consider that these workers are mothers, wives, and working women themselves. The lack of affordable child care impacts these families as well. Immigrant women are on average both younger than the native born and have higher birth rates. Who is minding their children? The lack of health insurance for these women and their families, for example, means that critical preventative care is being delayed or ignored, and when problems occur, the local emergency room becomes the family’s health care provider, at greater cost to taxpayers and local communities.

Our 21st-century economy is increasingly based on a growing service sector economy, which is why we need to challenge ourselves to value the work of women, and especially the work of immigrant women.

Even now, in the debate over health care reform, many lawmakers propose excluding both documented and undocumented immigrants from any government subsidies. Their exclusion from national health care reform, if enacted, will make it that much harder to reduce health care costs, including those stemming from preventable diseases.

The U.S. economy over the past several decades has experienced the flight of millions of manufacturing jobs with good benefit packages overseas—many of which are unlikely to come back. Our 21st-century economy is increasingly based on a growing service sector economy, which is why we need to challenge ourselves to value the work of women, and especially the work of immigrant women. Such work will still be necessary regardless of how high tech our economy becomes. It must not remain invisible.

Endnotes

1. Delia Furtado and Heinrich Hoch, “Immigrant Labor, Child Care Services, and the Work-Fertility Trade Off in the United States” (Bonn, Germany: Institute for the Study of Labor, 2008), available at http://ftp.iza.org/dp3506.pdf.
2. See, for example, MetLife Foundation and Schmieding Center, “Caregiving in America” (2007). This study describes a “caregiving crisis” in the growing need for elder and other long-term care in the United States. More than 12 million people in the United States, including 6 million people over 65, need long-term care; the need for long-term care is expected to grow as much as 56 percent between 2004 and 2014. Low-wage workers, almost always women and often immigrants, are filling this gap in caregiving. Ninety percent of nursing home aides and home care aides are women. Immigrants officially account for 21.8 percent of home care aides and just over 12 percent each for home care aides and hospital aides. These numbers exclude undocumented immigrants and so are undoubtedly artificially low, especially for home care aides.
3. Seventy-eight percent of hired farm workers in the United States are foreign-born. See Department of Labor, “National Agricultural Workers Survey” (2002), available at http://www.doleta.gov/agworker/report9/toc.cfm.
4. Ninety percent of farm worker women in California cite sexual harassment as a major work problem. See “Harvesting Justice: The Bandana Project” (2009), available at http://www.harvestingjustice.org/index.php/farmworkers-in-the-us (last accessed August 2009).
5. Department of Labor, “National Agricultural Workers Survey” (2002), available at http://www.doleta.gov/agworker/report9/toc.cfm.
6. Seventeen percent of all workers employed in cleaning and 22 percent of maids and other household workers are unauthorized migrants. However, this does not account for authorized migrant laborers in these professions. See Jeffery Passel, “The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S.” (Washington: Pew Hispanic Center, 2006), available at http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/61.pdf.

People regularly ask me, “Why would anyone want to live to be 100 years old? Or even 90?” It is no wonder that we have such poor resolve to live longer, as we often suffer with low energy, a cloudy-head, and digestive distress created by indigestible foods and toxins we’ve accumulated.

In that toxic state, of course, we don’t want to live to see our 90’s or 100’s because we see little hope of healthy aging. I’m driven by my mission to help people add more life to their years and years to their lives in order to remove the pessimism that dampens our spirit. This is why I’m hosting the Longevity Conference, March 26-28th in Costa Mesa, California.

At the Longevity Conference, we will hear from scientists, doctors, and researchers who are at the forefront of an entirely new and sophisticated wellness revolution that is bringing hope back to the Western world. We get to discover the research and strategies of people like Donna Gates who healed her own life-threatening candida condition by changing the inner ecology of her body with what she now calls The Body Ecology Diet.

We also get to learn from Paul Stamets, North America’s foremost medicinal mushroom expert, who has innovated medicinal mushroom formulas that advance one’s immunity better than anything else previously discovered. And we’ll also be hearing from Dr. Joe Mercola, whose web-based health network single-handedly dissuaded hundreds of thousands of Americans from taking untested H1N1 vaccines and whose web-based health outreach has assisted millions of people around the world to achieve better health.

This is just a small sampling of the health experts we’ll be hearing from over the weekend. If you were to go looking for all these experts’ research and life stories on your own, you’d be spending all of your free time over many months just on research. The Longevity Conference does all the legwork for you, bringing together what I believe to be the most innovative and effective life-promoting ideas and technologies available.

Together, this information gives you a wide array of options, because different products or programs will work well for different people. 

Maybe you are really interested in learning about phospholipid-rich phytoplankton to help heal one’s nervous system; perhaps you want to learn how to blend natural herbal anti-inflammatory tonics together and create your own health elixirs; maybe you want physical fitness tips from celebrity trainer T.R. Goodman; or you may be interested in the latest breakthroughs in fighting calcification (arthritis, coronary plaque, etc).

At the Longevity Conference you’ll find good company. The people who attend these conferences are an inspiration. These are people just like you who have chosen to take out a real insurance policy on their health, one that actually works for them, by way of educating themselves about the latest discoveries in wellness. People tell me about what they’ve been through. They’ve been fighting cancer, lupus, chronic fatigue, depression, inflammation, and just about everything else, trying to be good patients and do what the experts in conventional pharmacology tell them to do. But it’s not working. The medications in most cases do more long-term harm than good, and never address the underlying causes.

Now with the latest insights in longevity science we’re all taking our power back, getting smarter, and becoming healthier so we can have both more life in our years and more years of our life. We’ve got innovative thinkers and scientists as well as Internet breakthroughs to thank for all this new technology.

By learning protocols for cleansing toxic materials (pesticides, heavy metals, etc.) and organisms out of our bodies; by eating organic, nutrient-rich foods, superfoods, superherbs; drinking living water; taking probiotics and the best supplements available; and all the other things we are going to learn about at the Longevity Conference we are empowered with cutting edge knowledge to live our dreams and more deeply enjoy our lives. Now is the best time ever to take action to claim your right to the best health ever.

longevityconference.com

There, conventional chemical-dependant agricultural practices are linked to terms like 'suicide belt' and 'cancer trains' represent serious environmental degradation; these practices are literally contributing to the deaths of farmers and their land. The current situation is deplorable, yet there is hope. Thanks to the work of local organizations, and with support from Greengrants, organic farming movements are empowering people to build better livelihoods and safer environments.

The not-so-'Green' Revolution

In 1943, four million people died from starvation in India during the Bengal Famine, one of the worst in the 20th century. Over the next two decades India subsisted by importing grain to feed its hungry population, becoming highly dependent on foreign aid and failing to resolve food deficiencies in rural regions.

The end of the 1960s ushered in a new era. The introduction of high-yield seeds, under the banner of the Green Revolution, more than doubled grain production in less than 20 years. Previously marginalized regions of rural India became breadbaskets, producing enough wheat and rice to export a surplus. Farmers adopted techniques of monoculture (growing only one cash crop) and double-cropping (harvesting twice a year by generating a second 'rainy season' through irrigation), increasing their yields enormously.

The movement was seen as a great success, and the fundamental changes in agricultural technique were mere side notes. The new high-yield seed variety and double-cropping required more water, but it was easy to tap into the then-rich water tables. And, as monoculture and multiple crop seasons leached nutrients from the soil, using more and more fertilizers was an obvious remedy. When the loss of crop diversity made plants vulnerable to insects, farmers were advised to spray pesticides, but of course there was no proper education on usage and dangers.

In the excitement of changing from a country plagued with famine to a major grain exporter, these temporary fixes were worth the risk. Yet, four decades later, it's clear that this specious resolution to Indian food scarcity has had dire consequences for farmers and their families.

From Surplus to Suicide

The harmful effects of intensive monoculture and its necessary inputs have spared few rural Indian communities. Farmers who once grew as many as 30 different crops in their field now cultivate only a single cash crop, stripping regions of their biodiversity. Methods of high-yield double-cropping, which use non-native seeds and require extensive irrigation, have caused steep drops in water tables and severe land degradation. What was once nutrient-rich soil has become anemic, salinized, and dangerously expensive to maintain.

Environmental damages have translated into social problems as the cost of inputs has left thousands of farmers indebted beyond relief. To yield the same harvest, degraded fields now require as much as three times more fertilizer than when intensive farming began. The drop in water levels has also forced farmers to invest in heavy drilling machinery to keep their crops irrigated. These costly inputs, including pesticides and annual seed purchases, have left already marginalized farmers deeply indebted to informal money lenders, without hope of a way out. In turn, suicide rates in India's farming regions are reported to be as high as 17,000 people per year, according to The New York Times.

Mortality rates are compounded by the striking increase in cancer victims in some small villages. The pesticides necessary to protect large monocrops include toxic chemicals that are banned in the United States, notably DDT, and are sold without regard for proper, safe usage. Although more studies are needed to find a conclusive link between the high influx of toxic pesticides and the increase in cancer rates, the stories are disturbing. For more information on this and the 'cancer train' in Punjab, India, read this article from NPR.

Back to Basics

The fundamental difference between sustainable organic farming and intensive agriculture is simple: embrace the yield of the farm, not just the crop. Ardhendu Chatterjee, coordinator of Greengrants' India Advisory Board, has worked extensively in developing education and training programs in rural India to revive this more integrated style.

"Organic farming is not simply a matter of inputs; it is a design approach; a way to consider soil, sunlight, water, and wind in designing the garden as a whole," explains Ardhendu. "It is about using holistic planning to design a system that is adjusted to the local climate and soil, according to environmental and social needs, rather than what is selling at the highest price."

According to Ardhendu, this is hardly a new concept for Indian farmers. "In the past, integrated rice-fish-duck-tree farming was a common practice in wetlands. This does not only meet peoples' food, fodder and fuel wood needs, but it provides superior energy-protein output to that obtained from today's monoculture practice of growing high-yielding varieties." ("Grains of Delusion")

Organic farming is poised to resolve many of the manufactured problems created by intensive agriculture. It embraces heirloom seeds and diversified gardens, which replenish the soil and the nutrient-poor diets of farming communities. It involves composting and pest control through natural insect-repelling plants, like turmeric, instead of costly fertilizers and dangerous pesticides. It means planting more drought-tolerant crops where rainfall is scarce, thereby preserving the declining water tables.

While it may not be a cure-all, organic foods are becoming much more than a healthful option in our supermarkets. Even the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations determined organic agriculture to positively contribute to food security, climate change, water security and quality, agrobiodiversity, nutritional adequacy, and rural development, (Report on the International Conference on Organic Agriculture and Food Security, May 2007).

Recognizing these benefits and their relevance to India's poorest communities, the Greengrants India Advisory Board has been supporting organic agriculture in the country for close to ten years. The Board has made it a priority to support groups working with women and marginalized communities to promote food security and rural development in particularly hard-hit regions. Over the years, they have assisted in the emergence of a growing movement that is offering new hope for India's farmers.

Educate, Train, Decide

With two grants from Greengrants in 2008, and almost $20,000 in grants over the last five years, the Development Research Communication and Services Center (DRCSC) is improving the state of agriculture in West Bengal and surrounding states in northeastern India. Focusing on education and capacity building as major strategies for change, the DRCSC supports organic farming as a means to ensure food and livelihood security for India's rural poor. This citizen-run organization has built school gardens, organized workshops, created nurseries and seed centers, and even produced a documentary, each emphasizing the benefits of organic farming to community stakeholders.

The DRCSC's work has been so successful that some organic farmers are actually producing more than their community needs. According to Ardhendu, the next step may involve creating an organization to market and negotiate fair prices for these surpluses, signaling a new hope for expanding the organic movement beyond subsistence farming. The progress has created considerable momentum, and has even begun to work its way into the mainstream.

"Even government policy is considering organic terms, but their scope is limited. To them it is about not using fertilizers or pesticides, but it is really so much more. 'Organic' is access to water, biodiversity, clean soil.” It is a whole new context for the industry." Although the movement has seen small successes, Ardhendu warns, it will be challenging to reshape the agricultural paradigm of an entire country.

Yet, for the small-scale Indian farmer, the organic choice is simple: either adopt more wholesome, healthful means of farming, or continue monoculture methods that endanger human, social, and environmental health. While the answer seems obvious, there are enormous obstacles to gathering accurate information and funding, and to building capacity and political will. Thankfully, with your help, Greengrants grantee DRCSC and many others are breaking down these barriers, building a momentous organic movement, and making the choice easier for dozens of Indian communities.

This article was first published by Global GreenGrants.

As the nation struggles to recover from one of the worst economic recessions in decades, unemployment has recently shown some marginal improvement, falling below 10 percent in January. But for workers in the construction and construction-related manufacturing sectors, there is little relief as jobless rates remain at near-Depression levels.




Total construction payroll employment has fallen by 2.1 million since 2006, with residential construction jobs down 38 percent and the jobless rate among experienced construction workers stuck at nearly 25 percent. Overall manufacturing employment has dropped 16 percent since the recession began in December 2007, but for manufacturing tied to construction the numbers are far worse: 30 percent in wood products, 22 percent in items such as window glass and fiberglass insulation, and 19 percent in fabricated metals and heating, ventilating, and air conditioning equipment. With credit still tight and the housing industry still in the doldrums, waiting for market forces to spur a recovery in construction could condemn hundreds of thousands of American families to years of continued economic struggle.

Fortunately, help is on the horizon. This week a bill establishing a HOME STAR program of consumer rebates for home energy efficiency retrofits will be introduced in the Senate thanks to the leadership of Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), among others. Concerned members of Congress, with the Obama administration’s support, have crafted an incentive program to make millions of U.S. homes more energy efficient, swiftly create 168,000 jobs in construction and manufacturing among other industries, save homeowners nearly $10 billion over a decade through lower energy costs, and make a dent in global warming pollution.

The proposal for a $6 billion HOME STAR program enjoys broad and bipartisan support. It is backed by the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and is part of a jobs agenda endorsed by some Senate Democratic leaders. A large and broad coalition including major corporations, organized labor, and energy nonprofits supports the initiative as well.

In President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address he said that rebates for Americans who retrofit their homes should be part of a clean-energy agenda. “We should put more Americans to work building clean-energy facilities, and give rebates to Americans who make their homes more energy efficient, which supports clean-energy jobs,” he said. The Senate will soon consider jobs legislation and HOME STAR should be a key component.

HOME STAR, sometimes called “cash for caulkers,” is a proposal that makes sense. It makes economic sense because it can provide a quick employment stimulus putting 168,000 people to work—the overwhelming majority of them in jobs that can’t be outsourced overseas. It makes sense for homeowners who will be able to afford home improvements that will pay real dollar dividends for many years by reducing their energy bills 20 percent or more forever.

It makes sense for businesses who will see demand for their products increase. And it makes sense for a more secure energy future since increasing the number of homes with energy efficient retrofits from 200,000 a year to 3 million a year will cut global warming pollution by the equivalent of taking 615,000 cars off the road or decommissioning four 300-megawatt power plants.

As important as these energy benefits are, however, HOME STAR is clearly a job creator and the right medicine for the economy.

The program will be simple, streamlined, speedy, and effective. It will use the market to build demand for the construction industry by offering homeowners rebates for installing appliances, mechanical systems, and products that cut energy use—everything from simple duct sealing to whole-house retrofits. Administration of the program will involve a minimum of new government bureaucracy and will rely to a great extent on existing state programs.

Quality assurance of work performed will be a priority to make sure that the savings promised to homeowners are realized. It will take advantage of skilled labor that is now sitting on the sidelines and eager for work. And it won’t strain manufacturing facilities, many of which are now operating at near half of their capacity because of the economic downturn.

Consumer Incentives

The program gives homeowners a choice of incentives: the SILVER STAR and GOLD STAR paths.

The SILVER STAR incentive provides rebates for purchasing and properly installing specific energy-saving equipment such as furnaces and water heaters, or changes to a building’s envelope such as insulation and duct sealing. Rebate amounts are up to $1,500 per qualified installed measure, capped at 50 percent of project costs or $3,000—whichever is less.

The GOLD STAR incentive goes a step further and rewards whole-home or office building retrofits. This performanceâ€�based incentive is based on predicted energy savings determined by a thorough energy audit performed before the work begins. The auditor tests the home’s energy performance using proven building science methods, designs a customized retrofit plan in consultation with the homeowner, and calculates the energy savings that will result from the recommended measures.

Homeowners can receive $3,000 for modeled savings of 20 percent, plus $1,500 for each additional 5 percent of modeled energy savings, with total incentives of up to $8,000, not to exceed 50 percent of total project costs. This will encourage homeowners to invest in the most cost-effective technologies, which are often the simplest and most labor-intensive investments.

Economic Benefits

HOME STAR will create 168,000 jobs according to independent analysis by Climate Works using respected economic models from REMI and McKinsey & Co. Those jobs will be heavily concentrated in the hard-hit construction and manufacturing sectors of the U.S. economy and will benefit every state and both urban and rural communities.

The program will help create long-term construction industry careers by increasing demand for home energy retrofits roughly 15 times, rising from current rates of 200,000 homes a year to close to 3 million retrofits annually.

It will also provide much-needed help to the retail sector where overall jobs have fallen 7.5 percent since December 2007 but 10.4 percent for building materials and garden supply stores. Jobs in the wholesale sector have declined 22.5 percent for construction supplies compared to 8.1 percent overall.

The HOME STAR program dedicates $200 million to increase consumer access to financing, which further boosts job creation by leveraging additional private capital investments, and helps homeowners overcome upfront cost barriers to paying for these energy-saving home improvements.

What’s more, HOME STAR investments are cost effective, creating an additional economic benefit by saving homeowners as much as $9.4 billion over 10 years. HOME STAR will also affordably reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 4 million tons per year, or 40 million tons by 2020. That helps the economy by reducing our vulnerability to energy price shocks and getting a head start on driving down the production of greenhouse gases—changes we know we need to make anyway.

Good Jobs Here at Home

One of the most exciting things about a recovery plan built on home energy retrofits is what it does for American jobs. HOME STAR supports domestic job creation by investing in skilled construction, which results in good American jobs that can’t be outsourced. But it can have tremendous benefits for other hard-hit sectors of the U.S. economy, too, especially manufacturing industries.

The majority of manufactured goods used in HOME STAR retrofits are already made in the United States, averaging well over 90 percent domestic production in most major goods, with all categories included in the Senate HOME STAR bill reporting above the national average for domestic production. A focus on home energy retrofits will therefore by its very nature disproportionately support American industries and target its benefits to help American workers.

Table 1 shows data from the International Trade Commission and NAICS on the share of domestic production for products used in energy efficiency retrofits. For many of these products the share is over 90 percent.

Plenty of Capacity

American construction and manufacturing companies can rapidly absorb large amounts of new demand because current manufacturing capacity has fallen so low. Capacity utilization—the level at which a factory is operating compared to its potential—for all U.S. manufacturing plants is already low across the board, with the average U.S. plant only working at 66.6 percent. Put differently, fully one-third of all U.S. manufacturing capacity is sitting idle today. But in construction-based industries the situation is even worse, with many building materials manufacturers operating at less than 50 percent of their capacity.

As a result, these firms will rapidly absorb any new demand for their products by putting people back on the job. This means that investments in construction, building materials, and manufactured systems are all well-targeted strategies for rapidly creating domestic jobs in impacted industries.

HOME STAR focuses on an area of tremendous unmet need with over 1.7 million members of the construction trades and supporting industries unemployed since 2007. The current proposal for HOME STAR is an important step toward putting America back to work, and it invests in building a sustained market for energy-related home construction jobs that will keep producing economic benefits well into the future.

Quality Work

The installation of energy efficient measures would be backed by a quality assurance program that would guarantee sound work and offer an additional incentive to contractors that invest in a trained and certified workforce. HOME STAR requires appropriate licensing and certification for all participating contractors, and a percentage of all jobs will be inspected by a third party within 30 days of completion to verify proper installation. This safeguards against fraud and improves consumer confidence that a HOME STAR seal is backed by quality work.

The quality assurance program can involve labor unions and other training providers to ensure a well-trained and certified workforce as the foundation of quality work. It will involve the financial industry in making sure high-quality work backs up the consumer financing they offer to further reduce upfront payments for homeowners.

And it will create a standards-based industry so when people buy an energy-efficient home retrofit in the future they can be confident they'll be saving money, saving energy, and cutting pollution for years to come. Everyone benefits

In addition to all of the real jobs benefits mentioned here, energy efficiency retrofits are a proven and cost-effective way to reduce the household energy use that accounts for one-fifth of U.S. carbon emissions—roughly twice the global warming pollution produced by passenger cars. Basic efficiency improvements can cut energy waste and carbon emissions by 20 percent to 40 percent, while actually saving money instead of costing the economy.

HOME STAR would be effective if all it did was save energy and cut global warming pollution. But the economic case for HOME STAR is just as compelling because it will quickly create tens of thousands of jobs and breathe new life into struggling manufacturing and retail sectors.

“Retrofitting America’s 128 million homes will be the work of private companies, but market forces alone will not move fast enough to avert the crisis at hand,” wrote Matt Golden, founder of a San Francisco home energy retrofitting company, in a recent commentary in Forbes.

“The legions of unemployed contractors and factory workers desperately need jobs now to pay their mortgages and feed their families. While the private sector is ready to step up and invest in long-term growth, near-term incentives will generate immediate demand and allow private businesses to start hiring again, right away.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Four decades ago, President Richard Nixon famously declared that universal childcare would have “family-weakening implications” that “would commit the vast moral authority of the federal government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over the family-centered approach.” Wielding his veto pen, he blocked what became the last best chance for decades for the federal government to support working moms and dads trying to raise their children and earn a living at the same time.

Back in the early 1970s, Nixon and Congress looked at the 52 percent of so-called “traditional” families in the country (families with children still at home consisting of a married couple in which only the husband works outside the home) and saw decidedly different social and economic forces at work. As women entered the workforce in droves during the 1970s, the number of “traditional” families immediately began to plummet—by 1975, it was already down to 45 percent of families with children.

Today, there’s no mistaking the trend—only 21 percent of families with children at home are “traditional” families. How do the other 79 percent of families working and raising children—the so-called “juggler families”—handle child care? How do these families cope with sick children and relatives or elderly parents in need of care?

Well, ask just about any mom or dad and they will tell you they mix and match caring and earning as best they can in workplaces designed decades ago around a worker who relied on a full-time homemaker to care for the young and the infirm and had no responsibility for caring for family members. This is no way to run an economy and to care for the next generation of Americans and those who built what our country is today.

Political leaders talk about “family values,” but too often real reforms are set aside when it comes time to draw up the federal budget or do the heavy legislative lifting to ensure that women and men can raise their children, care for their elders, and continue to earn the incomes they need to survive and thrive in today’s economy. Women, of course, are no longer the sole providers of care for the family, just as men are no longer the sole providers of the family income. Yet the federal government has not updated its policies to aid families in navigating this new reality.

Too many of our government policies—from our basic labor standards to our social insurance system—are still rooted in the fundamental assumption that families typically rely on a single breadwinner and that there is someone available to care for the young, the aged, and the infirm while the breadwinner is at work. But now that there are decidedly fewer “traditional families” and women comprise half of the workers on U.S. payrolls, we need to reevaluate the values and assumptions underlying our nation’s workplace policies to ensure that they reflect the actual—not outdated or imagined—ways that families work and care today.

Up until now, government policymakers focused on supporting women’s entry into a male-oriented workforce on par with men—a workplace where policies on hours, pay, benefits, and leave time were designed around male breadwinners with presumably no family care giving responsibilities. Seeking equal opportunity in this workplace was critical, of course.

Women could have never become half of all workers and entered previously male-dominated professions without Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited sex discrimination in employment, and was amended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 to ensure that a woman couldn’t be fired simply because she was having a child. And while women still have a long way to go to receive equal pay for equal work, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 certainly helped narrow the wage gap and increase women’s economic stability.

Nearly all of our government policies—from our basic labor standards to our social insurance system—are still rooted in the fundamental assumption that families typically rely on a single breadwinner.

But allowing women to play by the same rules as the single male breadwinner worker of yore is not enough. Too many workers—especially women and low-wage workers—today simply cannot work in the way the breadwinner once worked with a steady job and lifelong marriage with a wife at home. Today, not only are half of all U.S. workers female, but our families are no longer static. The marriage rate is currently at the lowest point in its recorded history.4 And while the divorce rate is down, it is still significant.

More than one in three families with children is headed by a single parent.6 There are approximately 770,000 same-sex couples living in the United States, 20 percent of whom are raising children. Yet there has been limited action at the federal level to update our workplace policies or create new policies to help working parents and their varied families—and not for lack of debate (see box “Plenty of study, few results”).

The notable exception is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, but even it only allows 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected family or medical leave to approximately half of all workers in the United States. Our federal government does not require employers to offer a minimum number of paid days off. Nor does it require or even incentivize employers to provide flexible work arrangements.

Our child care assistance is mostly aimed at the poor and even that assistance reaches too few families. Both our basic labor standards and our social insurance system are still based on supporting “traditional” workers and families and so do not accord protection to workers who must cut back on work to care for family members.

Tackling these challenges isn’t going to be easy. For some, acknowledging that most women work challenges deeply held beliefs about what it means to be family and the “appropriate” roles for men and women. In a recent congressional debate over whether the federal government should provide paid parental leave to all new parents, Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) implied that men do not need additional paid time off for family leave and that only mothers do immediately after the birth of a child, even though fathers report that they want to spend more time with their children and that they are experiencing high levels of work-family conflict.

This report demonstrates that women becoming half of all workers and mothers becoming breadwinners is not a woman’s issue—it’s an issue that affects our entire society. This chapter suggests that a fruitful way for government to address this new economic and social reality would be to reform our existing laws by:

• Updating our basic labor standards to include family-friendly employee benefits
• Reforming our anti-discrimination laws so that employers cannot discriminate against or disproportionately exclude women when offering workplace benefits
• Updating our social insurance system to the reality of varied families and new family responsibilities, including the need for paid family leave and social security retirement benefits that take into account time spent out of the workforce caring for children and other relatives
• Increasing support to families for child care, early education, and elder care to help working parents cope with their dual responsibilities

Updating these government policies so that they account for the reality of the overwhelming majority of today’s workers and families is the challenge we address in the pages that follow.

Needed: Family Time

The United States is the only industrialized country without any requirement that employers provide paid family leave and without nationwide government-sponsored paid family leave. The U.S. government offers no federal subsidy for employers who provide family and medical leave—unlike existing government tax subsidies for employer-provided health care and pension savings programs.19 As a result, 74 percent of all civilian workers have access to health benefits and 71 percent have access to retirement benefits, but only 9 percent of all civilian workers have access to dedicated paid family leave.20

To a limited degree, the government has used the tax code to incentivize employers to provide assistance to employees for child care expenses and information, but these provisions do not come close to reaching the levels of support needed (the government also uses the tax code and subsidies to provide child care support directly to families, which we discuss below). The tax code allows employees to pay for health and dependent care expenses using pre-tax dollars if their employers offer Flexible Spending Accounts, but this allows working families to set aside only up to $5,000 per year for dependent care expenses.

This benefit is limited to workers whose employers choose to participate and it is worth far more to families at higher income levels. In 2006, only 30 percent of families had access to dependent care savings accounts. And only 2 to 6 percent of all eligible employees are using flexible spending accounts to defray childcare costs.

The United States is the only industrialized country without any requirement that employers provide paid family leave.

Similarly, in 2001 the government began providing a federal employer tax credit for employers who either provide on-site child care, contribute to off-site care for their employees, or pay for resource and referral services that help employees locate quality child care in their community.24 Despite this incentive, employers have not increased the child care subsidies or services offered to employees. From 2000 to 2008, the provision of assistance to employees for either on-site or off-site child care remained at 6 percent of all employees in the United States, and there has been a slight decrease in the provision of child care resource and referral services from 13.8 percent in June 2000 to 11 percent of employees in the United States receiving such support.

In addition, the major government subsidized benefits—health care and pensions—disadvantage workers who take part-time or temp jobs or who start their own businesses so that they can pick up their kids from child care or have the flexibility to care for an aging parent. They often sacrifice employer-provided health and pension coverage—and the tax subsidy—as well. This is a seldom-mentioned argument for health care and pension reform.

To date, however, the federal government has failed to make a serious investment to encourage employers to offer new or update existing employee benefits to keep up with the changing face of the American worker and the American family structure.

Require Employers to Offer Employer-Sponsored Benefits Equally to All Workers

Instead of providing incentives to employers to offer updated benefits aligned with the needs of today’s families, the government has focused its effort on ensuring that all workers have “equal access” to the benefits that are provided by employers. The groundbreaking Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a central part of this story. Title VII made it unlawful for employers with more than 15 employees “to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s…sex.”

This is obviously important. Title VII is used today as a tool to combat discrimination against pregnant women and against men and women who are denied access to employment benefits because of gender stereotypes associated with care giving. But Title VII is an extremely limited tool in helping employees take the leave and receive the flexibility they need to mix work with pregnancy or mix and match work and family responsibilities.

The reason: The law does not require employers to adjust to an employee’s pregnancy or care giving needs. Rather, it requires employers to offer benefits to all employees on the same terms, even if those benefits were not designed with pregnancy or care giving in mind.

One major set of employer benefits voluntarily offered by some employers today is paid leave benefits—sick leave, vacation leave, holidays, disability leave, and family leave. Paid sick leave and disability benefits were traditionally offered by employers to provide a level of security for breadwinners and their families if the breadwinner was temporarily ill or disabled.

Vacation and holiday pay were offered to provide workers with a period of restoration and revitalization. Because there is no federal requirement that employers offer vacation, sick, or holiday leave, paid or unpaid, access to paid time off is widely unequal across groups of workers.

This means that the needs of women workers—whether for pregnancy or for family responsibilities—have to fit into leave benefits that were previously designed to serve male breadwinners. Because only 9 percent of all employees have access to dedicated paid family leave, the vast majority of workers have to fit their family leave needs into a patchwork of sick and vacation leave, where an employer offers the time and allows it to be used for this purpose, and then forfeit the true purposes of those days off, for healing or relaxing.

Pregnant workers often have to take either disability or sick leave if their employer offers it in order to receive pay while on leave to give birth. Male workers who now have more care giving responsibilities than ever before face the same inflexible access to employer-provided leave benefits.

Male workers who now have more care giving responsibilities than ever before face the same inflexible access to employer-provided leave benefits.

This access to existing leave benefits may be equal but it is outdated, for it fails to match benefits with workers’ new roles in the family or our society. Let’s consider the limitations of the law with regard to pregnancy and care giving.

Pregnancy Leave

Upon passage and implementation of Title VII, one of the first questions for pregnant women in the workplace was whether private employers violated Title VII if they offered health insurance or disability leave that did not include pregnancy. Early on, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took the position that excluding maternity coverage was not discrimination.28 But in the 1970s the EEOC reversed course.29

The Supreme Court, however, in 1976 ruled in Gilbert v. General Electric Co. that an employer’s disability plan covering non-work-related disabilities was not in violation of Title VII’s prohibition against sex discrimination just because it did not cover disabilities arising from pregnancy.30 Congress swiftly reacted, passing the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which amended Title VII to clarify that the prohibition against sex discrimination in private employment included a prohibition against discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act had a tremendous impact on professional women employed in workplaces that already had disability or robust sick-leave policies on the book. The PDA meant these women would have equal access to those policies for the purposes of pregnancy and childbirth. But if a worker’s employer did not offer disability or sick-leave benefits to any workers, then the PDA would not help them gain access to these benefits. Thus, the new law disproportionately benefited workers in high-waged occupations.

For women with a college education or more, access to paid maternity leave rose from 14 percent in 1961 to 59 percent in 1981 after the passage of the PDA and continued to climb, settling at 60 percent in 2003, the last year for which complete data are available. Women with less than a high school diploma, however, experienced only a 3 percentage point increase in access to paid maternity leave over that same period, from 19 percent in 1961 to 22 percent in 2003 (see Figure 2).31 One of the only reasons that less-educated workers have any access to pregnancy leave is because labor unions historically and continuously have negotiated for such leave in collective bargaining agreements covering low-wage workers.

Most Americans believe it is illegal today for employers to fire a pregnant worker, but that is not the case. Unfortunately, there are many lawful reasons an employer in the United States can fire a pregnant worker and these reasons often disproportionately harm lower-wage workers. First, employers with fewer than 15 employees are not covered by Title VII and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and are therefore under no obligation to treat all workers equally. This means 15 percent of the workforce is automatically excluded.32

Most Americans believe it is illegal today for employers to fire a pregnant worker, but that is not the case.

Second, a number of federal courts have interpreted the PDA to mean that employers that do not allow workers any leave or extremely limited leave to recover from an illness or a disability are under no obligation to provide leave to pregnant workers.33 This prohibition mainly affects low-wage workers who work for companies that offer no or limited leave to their employees for any reason. Nearly 80 percent of private-sector workers in the lowest quartile have no access to short-term paid disability leave; two-thirds have no access to paid sick days and nearly half receive no paid vacation days.34 With no access to leave, women who by necessity must be away from work to give birth may lose their jobs.

Third, if a pregnant worker is told by her doctor that she should not lift heavy weights or needs to stay off her feet in order to avoid negative health consequences for herself or her baby, then her employer is under no obligation to transfer her to work to accommodate these restrictions. Instead, the employer can legally fire the pregnant worker. Sound heartless and improbable? Tell that to Amanda Reeves, a truck driver who asked to be switched to light-duty work upon instruction of her physician, only to find that her employer’s policy of giving light-duty assignments only to workers injured on the job didn’t violate the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.35

Finally, women who are pregnant or on maternity leave certainly have no greater right to keep their jobs when layoffs occur, although if they are targeted because they are pregnant or on maternity leave that is unlawful.36 In recent recessions, claims of pregnancy discrimination have consistently gone up, meaning women are filing claims at a greater rate, suggesting that they are being fired because they are pregnant. These women aren’t just imagining discrimination—the percentage of these cases to be found to have merit remains at approximately 50 percent during highs and lows—so more women are found to have valid pregnancy discrimination claims in recessions than at other times.37

For women breadwinners, these gaps in the coverage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act leave them vulnerable in a way that male breadwinners never were and never will be.

Protecting Those With Family Responsibilities

Title VII also is used to combat workplace policies that treat men and women differently based on their marital status or their status as a parent or caregiver. In fact, the first Title VII case ever to reach the Supreme Court was a case in which a woman was denied a job because the employer had a blanket policy that women (but not men) with preschool-age children were prohibited from applying.38 The Supreme Court ruled that such a policy was illegal, opening up the doors for women with children who were faced with such blatant and stark prohibitions against their participation in work.

The use of Title VII to combat caregiver discrimination in more subtle forms has increased in recent years because of the work of Joan Williams at the Center for WorkLife Law. Williams coined the phrase “family responsibility discrimination” to describe differential treatment of men or women because of their care giving responsibilities for children, elderly parents, or sick relatives. In 2007, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidance to employers on caregiver discrimination39 that focused on the prohibition against gender stereotypes related to care giving.

But using Title VII, including the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, to create policies to aid workers in combining work and family responsibilities has serious limitations. Equal protection laws are only as good as the nature and quantity of benefits the employer provides to other workers. Too often, most low- and many moderate-wage workers cannot access even the minimum benefits provided to more highly paid workers—paid sick days and paid maternity leave, for example.

Setting a Minimum Floor for Employer-Sponsored Family Leave

Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 in response to the failures of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to provide full protection to pregnant workers and the inability of both men and women to access needed leave for family responsibilities.

Congress recognized at the time that providing access to equitable employment benefits was not enough to ensure that workers had the right to take leave from their jobs for the birth or adoption of a new child, family care giving, or even one’s own ill health. This was an important step by Congress, but as we’ll demonstrate, more is needed to provide economic security to dual-income, dual-care giving parents or single parents—especially in low- and middle-income families.

The Family and Medical Leave Act amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to guarantee unpaid leave for at least some workers, regardless of gender, to care for family or medical needs. FMLA provides qualified employees with the right to take up to 12 weeks each year of job-protected unpaid leave for the birth or care of the employee’s child, care of an immediate family member with a serious health condition, or for an employee’s own serious health condition.

Thanks to FMLA, millions of workers now have legal protections ensuring that they no longer have to fear losing their jobs and employer-provided health insurance during family or medical leave.

This law was the first of its kind—a law providing accommodation to workers based on the real needs of workers as caregivers regardless of gender. Thanks to FMLA, millions of workers now have legal protections ensuring that they no longer have to fear losing their jobs and employer-provided health insurance during family or medical leave. A low-wage pregnant woman who is covered by FMLA but cannot afford to take 12 weeks of leave can at least be assured that if she needs to take leave from work to give birth, she will still have her job when she is able to return.42 The same can be said of a man or woman who needs time away to care for a seriously ill family member.

While applicable only to employers with 50 or more employees, an increasing number of employers not covered by FMLA have changed their practices to provide family and medical leave to their employees.43 What’s more, the new law provides guaranteed unpaid leave to men who wish to take paternity leave, a job benefit often not provided to men prior to the passage of FMLA.44

Despite these positive changes, about half of all workers are not covered by FMLA because they work for a small business with fewer than 50 employees, haven’t worked for their employer for a year, or haven’t worked enough hours to qualify for protection under the act.45 These exemptions disproportionately exclude low-wage and younger workers who are less likely to remain employed by the same employer for a year, who are more likely to work for a small business, and who are more likely to work part time.46

But the biggest problem, of course, is that any leave granted under FMLA is unpaid, which means many workers cannot afford to take advantage of it because they cannot afford the loss of family income. In practice, the law favors families with one parent who makes less money (still more often the woman) providing care while the other higher-paid parent continues to support the family at work.

FMLA was a step in the right direction, but workers in our country today have extremely limited protections against the day-to-day stresses and strains of combining work with family care.

Needed: Flexibility and Compensation

Our federal and state labor-law requirements on employers’ ability to dictate their employees’ working hours have not been updated to allow workers to effectively combine work and care. Many Americans may presume that workers are protected from being overworked by their employers because of 40-hour workweeks and overtime pay requirements.

The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay covered workers one and a half times their regular pay for hours worked in excess of 40 hours,47 but the law does not put an actual limit on the number of hours an employer can require an employee to work. Nor does it prohibit mandatory overtime or unpredictable, constantly changing workplace schedules.

Americans are not protected from being overworked by their employers because of 40-hour work weeks and overtime pay requirements.

To be sure, premium pay for overtime provides greater economic security to workers able to work overtime, but even the existing requirement leaves out many workers. First, the law excludes a disproportionate number of women of color who provide care to the “aged or infirm” or who work as a live-in domestic workers.

Second, salaried workers are exempt from the overtime provisions and, in 2004, federal regulatory changes greatly expanded the definition of “executive, administrative, and professional” workers. At the time, analysts estimated this redefinition would remove an added 8 million workers (about 6 percent of the total employed workforce) from eligibility for overtime pay.

The upshot: While they do provide some added economic security, our wage and hour laws leave workers with little control over how many hours they can be required to work and when they can be required to put in those hours.

In addition, mandatory overtime is a problem for workers with family responsibilities, particularly for registered nurses (92 percent of whom are women), and, more recently, for state and local government workers (more than 50 percent of whom are women).50 Registered nurses are in short supply, which prompts employers to require the nurses they employ to work mandatory overtime—never mind whether these workers have care giving responsibilities at home.

Similarly, state and local governments today are instituting widespread hiring freezes to cope with falling tax revenues due to the Great Recession and falling real estate values, which means existing workers are being required to make up the work through mandatory overtime.52 Labor unions have had some success in passing state laws (12 to date) restricting mandatory overtime for nurses, and bills continue to be introduced in Congress to address the impact on the nursing profession, but there has been no broader push for restrictions on mandatory (and often unscheduled) overtime for government employees or private-sector workers.

A majority of workers have no ability to control the time that they start and end their workdays, no ability to work from a different location, and no ability to reduce the hours they work.

The Fair Labor Standards Act also does not address flexible, predictable work schedules. The law currently allows for flexibility within the context of a 40-hour workweek, such as a compressed workweek or daily schedules with differing work hours, but this flexibility is left at the discretion and is in the sole control of the employer.54 The result is that a majority of workers have no ability to control the time that they start and end their workdays, no ability to work from a different location, and no ability to reduce the hours they work.55

Only about a quarter of employees report that they have some kind of flexibility, though a much larger share of employers, anywhere from about half to most of them, report offering some kind of flexibility.56 Whatever the case, workers with the least access to flexible and predictable work schedules are low-wage workers.57 One study found that higher-earning employees have access to flexible daily schedules at more than double the rate of low-wage workers.58 And as Heather Boushey points out in her chapter, the weight of the 24-hour economy often falls on the backs of our low-skilled, immigrant workers who have the least control over their schedules.

Needed: Social Insurance That Protects Caregivers

“We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-stricken old age.”

– President Franklin D. Roosevelt, August 14, 1935, upon signing the Social Security Act of 1935

In the first half of the 20th century, the government created the backbone of the U.S. social insurance system by enacting the Social Security Act of 1935, which included retirement benefits, unemployment insurance, and aid to dependent children. Over the years it was expanded to include disability insurance, as well as Medicare and Medicaid. The aim of the combined programs in the Social Security Act is to protect workers and families against drops in family income resulting from old age, disability resulting in the inability to work, death of the breadwinner, or cyclical downturns in the economy.

The problem: Our national system of social insurance has never been updated to provide financial support to families who have a drop in income because a worker cuts back on work or needs to temporarily leave the workforce to provide care to a child or a sick or elderly relative. In recent years, there have been positive steps to update state social insurance systems to meet the needs of today’s workers: California and New Jersey have enacted paid family leave as part of their state’s temporary disability insurance program.59

But at the national level, social insurance reform is needed. We are in the process of debating health insurance reform—and the president has proposed pension reform—which would increase family economic security. With only 21 percent of families consisting of mothers still at home,60 additional reform is needed to meet the needs of today’s families.

Take basic Social Security, the retirement benefits that workers and their spouses receive in old age. Eligibility for Social Security benefits is based on an individual’s work history, specifically how many “credits” a worker earns over his or her lifetime. Workers can earn a maximum of four credits per year; in 2009 a worker earned one credit for each $1,090 of earnings.

To qualify for retirement benefits, workers need at least 40 credits (10 years of work) over their lifetimes, meaning that any workers with 10 years in which they earned at least $4,360 qualify for retirement benefits in their own names.

Back in the 1930s, however, President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that the Social Security Act protect the worker and his family. As a result, wives and widows were granted the right to collect retirement benefits based on their husbands’ earnings.

Spousal benefits allow dependent spouses (now wives or husbands) to collect 50 percent of the retirement benefits earned by the breadwinning spouse—on top of his benefit—so that married couples receive 150 percent of the benefits of a single worker with the same earnings. If both spouses work, then the lower-earning spouse can choose between receiving her own benefit based on her own work history or the spousal benefit, whichever is higher.

In 2005, 51 percent of women received benefits based on their husbands’ earnings (nearly 36 percent of women in retirement choose receipt of their spousal benefit over their own earnings record and another 15 percent qualified only for a spousal benefit, having no earnings record of their own).63 Even with an increasing percentage of women currently carrying the title of breadwinner in their family, in 2008, an overwhelming 98 percent of spousal benefits were collected by women.64

These family-friendly provisions of Social Security are clearly laudable, but as the portion of traditional families has diminished the inequities in the system have become more apparent. When most families were married-for-life couples with a breadwinner and homemaker, basing benefits on one earner’s employment history but providing benefits to the breadwinner’s “dependents” might have made sense.

But today the basic structure of the Social Security retirement program leads certain families to lose out. These are usually “juggler families” in which both workers combine work and care giving—with women more likely to dip in and out of the labor market depending on family needs—and families headed by single parents (most often single mothers, whether never married or divorced).

Workers who take time out of the workplace to care for family members not only sacrifice earnings and job security, but also Social Security retirement savings.

In short, workers who take time out of the workplace to care for family members not only sacrifice earnings and job security, but also Social Security retirement savings.

There are three main problems with Social Security’s underlying design for today’s varied families. First, a worker is expected to have a continuous record of full-time employment throughout his or her life, which is just not the case for all workers that combine work and care giving. Many will take extended time off—while others will work part time or turn down a full-time job, sacrificing earnings and future benefits.

Second, there is no minimum retirement benefit that all Americans receive based on reaching retirement. It is all tied to work history—either your own or your spouse’s. This means that there is no basic level of security for all individuals regardless of marriage or work history.

Third, the spousal benefit is based purely on marriage, not on an individual’s care giving responsibilities. This means caregivers who take time out of the workplace or limit their hours (and therefore earnings) to care for family members get no credit toward retirement for their care giving directly but only as a derivative of their spouse’s earnings. This is not only demeaning, it means they lose out if they divorce, are widowed before age 60, or are otherwise single parents. These rules play out differently for varying family types.

Even for traditional families, the benefits are not all that they seem. If the breadwinning spouse dies after the children are grown but before the wife reaches age 60, then the homemaker receives no survivors’ benefits until she turns 60, and then she receives only partial benefits until she reaches the full retirement age of 66.65 This “widow’s gap” leaves homemakers, who often have few labor market skills, with little support in the intervening years before they reach retirement age.

Divorce—so common in our country today, even if the rate is falling—reveals the problem with making caregivers’ benefits derivative of a spouse’s benefits. If a couple divorces before 10 years of marriage, then the lower earner is entitled to no spousal benefits. This predominantly affects women since they are far more likely to be earning less in those first 10 years due to pregnancy and child raising, and may certainly earn less as single parents. If a couple divorces after 10 years of marriage, then the lower-earning spouse (if she needs to elect to take a spousal benefit because her own earnings were so low) receives only the incremental spousal benefit, or half of what her former spouse receives.

Divorce—so common in our country today, even if the rate is falling—reveals the problem with making caregivers’ benefits derivative of a spouse’s benefits.

The structure of benefits is not entirely an accident; they reflect the realities and the biases of the time in which the program was created. Participants in the debate at the time argued that a woman living alone could survive on less than a man, with one participant declaring that a woman could do her own housekeeping while a man would have to eat in restaurants.

Sadly, this outdated notion remains in today’s payout of benefits. Consider what these rules mean for dual-earner families. Both spouses must pay payroll taxes, yet the combination of the two benefits may be less than what a single-earner family receives. Eugene Steuerle, vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and one of the nation’s foremost Social Security and tax experts, estimates that a couple with a single earner who earns twice the average wage would take home $100,000 more in Social Security benefits over a lifetime than a couple with dual earners who both earn the average wage.

For same-sex couples, Social Security provides no benefit at all to the family unit, only to each individual as though he or she were single. The Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 explicitly prohibits the recognition of same-sex couples as married for the purposes of Social Security even if states recognize the marriage.68 Thus a lesbian mother who dedicates several years to care for her child not only forgoes building up credits to her own Social Security, but also will receive no spousal benefit for the work her breadwinning partner contributes to the family.

For unmarried women, the difficulty is twofold. Single women with children have the lowest annual earnings in our country and thus can save less for retirement. In addition, they earn less in Social Security benefits. For single moms, this double whammy at retirement threatens a life of poverty in old age.

Half of today’s workers are female, divorce is common, more than one in three families with children is headed by a single mother, and more than a quarter of a million children are being raised by gay or lesbian parents who have no legal right to marry under the law of the federal government. How do we structure a system that is fair to all of these family types? How do we revise and update our Social Security system to value and reward taking time away from paid employment to rear children and care for aging parents, and still recognize that women are in the workforce to stay?

Changing the rules is more complicated than it seems. While the Social Security spousal benefit is overly broad in assuming that all spouses are mothers and overly narrow in assuming that all mothers are spouses, it keeps millions of women out of poverty in their retirement years and does act as a proxy, albeit a far from perfect proxy, for the unpaid work many married women invest in their families and our economy. Today, more than half of all female beneficiaries still receive retirement benefits on the basis of the spousal benefit.

But with more women as breadwinners, fewer women will collect spousal benefits in the future, relying instead on their own earnings. With more women in the labor force and more women as breadwinners, some may say that the simple answer would be to eliminate the spousal benefit and transform the benefit to one solely based on workforce attachment. But this cannot be done without addressing the different ways men and women work.

Needed: Time to Care

This chapter focuses primarily on the government’s role in encouraging or requiring employers to offer some basic labor standards, and in updating our social insurance system. But the government has other critical roles to play—providing direct subsidies to families to hire childcare and elder care providers, and encouraging equity not only in the workplace, but also in the home.

Childcare and elder care expenses take both an emotional and economic toll on today’s single parent and dual-earner families. Child care represents the second greatest expense after housing for married-couple families with children between ages 3 and 5.69 Families providing informal care to aging parents or other sick relatives spend on average $200 per month and must make adjustments to their work schedules, which often means forgoing income.

The emotional and financial toll can be even greater for adult children who are helping a parent or other loved one suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Of those providing support to a relative with Alzheimer’s, the vast majority (88 percent) provide emotional support, while more than half (52 percent) provide care giving, averaging 16 hours a month, and more than 1 in 10 caregivers (14 percent) is providing financial support.

The federal government has played only a modest role in supporting families with childcare expenses and almost no role at all in supporting families with elder care responsibilities.

Yet the federal government has played only a modest role in supporting families with childcare expenses and almost no role at all in supporting families with elder care responsibilities. The government provides some relief on child care expenses through the Dependent Care Tax Credit, which allows taxpayers to take a credit for employment-related child care expenses, but only up to $3,000 per year for one child and $6,000 per year for two. With childcare expenses often averaging more than the tuition at a state college, this relief is incredibly modest.

And the tax relief, while designed to aid lower-income families by allowing them to cover a greater percentage of their child care expenses, doesn’t reach our lowest-income families because it is not available to low-income families who owe no federal taxes because they make so little income.

The government supports our lowest-income families by providing direct child care aid through welfare funding, the Child Care and Development Block Grant, and through publicly funded early education and preschool programs such as Head Start. But even these investments reach only a fraction of those eligible for the assistance.

President Obama’s economic recovery package included a serious investment in childcare and early education, targeting funding to low-income families. It provided more than $5 billion in child care and early-education funding that went directly into the hands of families to purchase child care, and directly to communities to improve their child care and preschool programs. Nonetheless, childcare and early-education funding are still far from universally available, even to the families who need it the most.

To meet the needs of all low- and middle-income families, the government would have to invest even more and rededicate itself to solving the childcare problem that Nixon swept under the rug with the stroke of a pen back in 1971.

Finally, there are no dedicated federal programs to help working families deal with care for the elderly. States offer some support in the form of in-home caregivers, but recent state budget cuts have seen these programs take massive hits. Once again, the main problem is a lack of recognition that there is no longer anyone at home who can care for free for our children, our ill family members, and our elders.

In addition, we as a nation must address the fact that reducing the penalty workers pay (in lost salary, benefits, child care costs, and government payments) for care giving would not only increase women’s economic security but also reduce the disincentive on men to take on more of the care giving responsibilities. Updating government programs can help encourage more equitable sharing of responsibility at home—which is necessary if women and men are going to successfully mix and match work and family responsibilities.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Our current laws and government programs are woefully out of date to help families cope with the rapidly changing economic and social realities of the 21st century. Programs that seem “neutral” between men and women actually cater to traditional male working patterns, which today are represented in the overwhelming minority of today’s families. With women as half of workers in the United States and making vital contributions to the family income, the government needs to reform its incentives for employers to help their employees cope with work and family responsibilities as well as the requirements employers must meet in support of their employees in these dual responsibilities.

To do so, government policymakers should start a national conversation on how best to:

• Update our basic labor standards to include family-friendly employee benefits. It is possible to spur businesses to update their social benefits to support the new workforce without increasing burdens on them. Requiring paid sick days would ensure a healthy and productive workforce. Expanding the percentage of the workforce covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act would help employers reduce expensive turnover rates. And a “Right to Request Flexibility” law would help spark conversations in workplaces across the country about how employers and employees can better meet each other’s needs.72
• Reform our antidiscrimination laws so that employers cannot discriminate or disproportionately exclude women when offering workplace benefits. Our antidiscrimination laws are long overdue for an overhaul to ensure that policies that disproportionately exclude women are considered illegal, including policies allowing employers to have a no-leave policy even when that means pregnant women will surely lose their jobs. There is still no way to be at work when you are in labor.
• Update our social insurance system to reflect the reality of varied families and new family responsibilities. In addition to health insurance and pension reform, this update should include the need for paid family leave and social security retirement benefits that take into account time spent out of the workforce caring for children and other relatives. If Social Security reform is debated, it will be essential that the reforms account for the new realities of a workplace and a nation in which women are now breadwinners.
• Increase support to families for childcare, early education and elder care to help working parents cope with their multiple responsibilities. The efforts in the 1970s to enact universal childcare should not be forgotten. All families need real support when there is no longer a wife at home to provide these services free of charge. And our government should not stop at solving the childcare crisis: Families also need real support and aid in providing elder care.
• Ensure that workforce and childcare policies fully include men and respect their desire to be more involved in family life. More and more, men are expressing a frustration with a lack of support of work-life demands on men. Our policies should be structured to fully support men’s abilities to take time away from the labor force to provide care and support for their families.

Understanding that men and women work differently when women—and men— are breadwinners as well as caregivers requires a shift in thinking. But such a shift is necessary if policies, business practices, and community attitudes are to be changed. In fact, it is necessary in the daily negotiations among workers and employers, between spouses, and among parents and community institutions.

Public leaders can help increase understanding as well as respond to it. In addition to speeches and events, they can take a number of steps, including ensuring government serves as a role model. It can do this by improving its own policies and the policies of federal contractors, working with private sector leaders to encourage a new appreciation of the new challenges facing the workforce, and collecting and disseminating relevant data to highlight just how different the American workforce is today. It’s time for family-friendly policies that meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Endnotes

1. President Richard Nixon, “Veto of the Economic Opportunity Amendments of 1971” (December 9, 1971), available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3251.
2. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Number and Percent of Households Headed by a Married Couple with One or More Own Kids, in Which the Husband is in the Labor Force but the Wife is Not (‘Traditional’ Households), 1970–2002” (2003), available at http://www.prb.org/Source/a-MARR_Traditional_Families1.xls; U.S. Census Bureau, “Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1971” (1971), table 48, p. 39, available at http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1971-02.pdf.
3. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Characteristics of Families in 2008” (2009), available at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf.
4. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21(2) (2007): 29.
5. See chapter by Coontz, p. 370.
6. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Characteristics of Families in 2008” (2009), available at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf.
7. Adam Romero and others, “Census Snapshot, United States” (Los Angeles: The Williams Institute, December 2007), available at http://www.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/publications/USCensusSnapshot.pdf.
8. President’s Commission on the Status of Women, “American Women” (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1963).
9. White House Conference on Families, “Listening to America’s Families: Action for the 80’s” (October 1980), available at http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/37/b0/bf.pdf.
10. Steven K. Wisensale, “The White House and Congress on Child Care and Family Leave Policy: From Carter to Clinton,” Policy Studies Journal 25 (1) (1997): 75–86.
11. White House Working Group on the Family, “The Family: Preserving America’s Future, A Report to the President from the White House Working Group on the Family” (December 1986), p. 32, available at http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/20/03/b8.pdf.
12. Wisensale, “The White House and Congress on Child Care and Family Leave Policy,” pp. 78–80.
13. National Commission on Children, “Beyond Rhetoric: A New American Agenda for Children and Families, Final Report of the National Commission on Children” (1991), available at http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/23/24/71.pdf.
14. Jane Waldfogel, “Family and Medical Leave: Evidence from the 2000 Surveys,” Monthly Labor Review 124 (9) (2001): 19–20.
15. Ibid.
16. See Randy Albelda and Heather Boushey, “Bridging the Gaps: A Study of How Work Supports Work in Ten States” (Washington and Boston: Center for Economic Policy Research and Center for Social Policy, University of Massachusetts Boston, October 2007), p. 1, available at http://www.bridgingthegaps.org/publications/nationalreport.pdf. Fewer than 25 percent of those eligible for child care and housing assistance actually receive it.
17. Congressional Record, daily ed. June 4, 2009, pp. H6223–H6240.
18. Ellen Galinsky, Kerstin Aumann, and James T. Bond, “Times are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home” (New York: Families and Work Institute, 2008), pp. 18–20.
19. Rebecca Ray, Janet Gornick, and John Schmitt, “Parental Leave Policies in 21 Countries: Assessing Generosity and Gender Equality” (Washington: Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 2008), available at http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/parental-leave-policies-in-21-countries-assessing-generosity-and-gender-equality.
20. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2009,” Tables 1 & 2, National Compensation Survey, U.S. Department of Labor (March 2009), available at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ebs2.pdf; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employee Benefits Survey,” Table 21, National Compensation Survey, U.S. Department of Labor (March 2008), available at http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2008/ownership/civilian/table21a.htm.
21. 26 U.S.C. §§ 106, 125 (2006); “Information About Your FSAFEDS Choices,” available at https://www.fsafeds.com/FSAFEDS/Popup/OpenSeason.asp.
22. Eli Stoltzfus, “Pretax Benefits: Access to Section 125 Cafeteria Benefits and Health Savings Accounts in the United States, Private Industry” (Washington: Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 2007), available at http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/cm20070321ar01p1.htm.
23. Paula A. Calimafde and Deborah A. Cohn, “Small Business and the Cafeteria Plan.” In New York University Review of Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation (New York: New York University and Matthew Bender & Co., 2002).
24. U.S. Economic Growth and Reconciliation Act of 2001, 26 U.S.C. § 45F (2006).
25. Jerome E. King and Cathy A. Baker, “Childcare Benefits Continue to Evolve” (Washington: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2001), table 1, available at http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/archive/summer2001art1.pdf; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Quality of Life Benefits: Access, Civilian Workers” (March 2008), available at http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2008/ownership/civilian/table24a.pdf.
26. Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e–2 (2006).
27. Vicky Lovell, “No Time to Be Sick: Who Suffers When Workers Don’t Have Sick Leave” (Washington: Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2004).
28. General Electric Company v. Gilbert, 429 U.S. 125, 142–43 (1976), which cites two opinion letters issued by the General Counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1966 stating that pregnancy could be excluded from an employer’s long-term salary continuation plan and that an insurance or other benefit may simply exclude pregnancy as a covered risk.
29. Ann O’Leary, “How Family Leave Laws Left Out Low-Wage Workers,” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 28 (1) (2007): 20–21 (citing EEOC opinions reversing course).
30. General Electric Company v. Gilbert, 429 U.S. 125 (1976).
31. Tallese D. Johnson, “Maternity Leave and Employment Patterns of First-Time Mothers: 1961–2003” (Washington: Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, 2008).
32. U.S. Small Business Administration, “Employer Firms, Establishments, Employment, and Annual Payroll, Small Firm Size Classes, 2006” (2006), available at http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/data_uspdf.xls.
33. For a description of courts’ interpretation of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the circuit split on the issue of whether a no-leave policy creates a disparate impact, see Ann O’Leary, “How Family Leave Laws Left Out Low-Wage Workers,” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 28 (1) (2007): 30–35.
34. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Life, Short-Term Disability, and Long-Term Disability Insurance Benefits, March 2008” (2008), table 12, available at http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2008/ownership/private/table12a.pdf; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Selected Paid Leave Benefits: Access” (July 2009), available at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs2.t06.htm.
35. Reeves v. Swift Transportation Co., 446 F. 3d 637 (6th Cir., 2006).
36. Lesley Alderman, “When the Stork Carries a Pink Slip,” The New York Times, March 27, 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/health/28patient.html.
37. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “Pregnancy Discrimination Charges EEOC & FEPAs Combined: FY 1997–FY 2008,” available at http://www.eeoc.gov/stats/pregnanc.html.
38. Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corporation, 400 U.S. 542 (1971).
39. “Enforcement Guidance: Unlawful Disparate Treatment of Workers with Care giving Responsibilities,” available at http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/caregiving.html.
40. Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, 29 U.S.C. §§ 2601–2654 (2006).
41. Ibid.
42. See U.S. Department of Labor, “Balancing the Needs of Families and Employers: The Family and Medical Leave Surveys, 2000 Update” (2001), tables A2-2.6, A2-2.15. In fact, a significantly greater percentage of women (17.7 percent) with a family income of less than $20,000 reported that maternity leave was the primary reason they used the FMLA than did women in the higher income categories (8.8 percent of women with an annual family income of $75,000 to $100,000 reported maternity leave as the primary reason).
43. See U.S. Department of Labor, “Balancing the Needs of Families and Employers: The Family and Medical Leave Surveys, 2000 Update” (2001), section 5-5. The proportion of all establishments reporting policies consistent with the FMLA’s leave provisions has increased from 27.9 percent in the 1995 survey to 39.1 percent in the 2000 survey.
44. See U.S. Department of Labor, “Balancing the Needs of Families and Employers: The Family and Medical Leave Surveys, 2000 Update” (2001), section 4-16. Approximately 34 percent of men with young children took leave under the FMLA, and of these male leave-takers, 75 percent took leave to care for a newborn or newly adopted child. Also see Nevada Department of Human Resources. v. Hibbs, 538 U.S. 721 (2003), which documents the gender gap in the provision of family leave prior to the passage of the FMLA.
45. Jane Waldfogel, “Family and Medical Leave: Evidence from the 2000 Surveys,” Monthly Labor Review 124 (9) (2001): 19–20.
46. Ann O’Leary, “How Family Leave Laws Left Out Low-Wage Workers,” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 28 (1) (2007): 1–62.
47. Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. §207 (2006).
48. 29 U.S.C. § 213(a)(15) (2006) Long Island Care at Home, Ltd. v. Coke, 551 U.S. 158, 162 (2007).
49. Heather Boushey and Chris Tilly, “The Limits of Work-Based Social Support in the United States,” Challenge 52 (2) (March/April 2009), p. 90.
50. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation and Sex, 2007 Annual Averages” (2008), available at http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-table11-2008.pdf; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Table 16: Employed and Unemployed Full- and Part-time Workers by Class of Workers, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity, Annual Average 2008” (2009), unpublished analysis, Current Population Survey 2008, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor (available by request from author).
51. Katherine Kany, “Mandatory Overtime: New Developments in the Campaign,” American Journal of Nursing 101 (5) (2001): 67–70, available at http://journals.lww.com/ajnonline/Fulltext/2001/05000/Mandatory_Overtime__New_developments_in_the.26.aspx.
52. Examples from Colorado and Illinois: Ed Sealover, “Colorado State Employees Make Pitch for Pay,” Denver Business Journal, June 22, 2009, available at http://denver.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2009/06/22/daily11.html; Dan Carden, “Would Massive State Layoffs Make Recession Worse?” Daily Herald, June 17, 2009, available at http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=300857.
53. Gregg Blesch, “Doing More with More? Hospitals Face Renewed Calls for Staffing Mandates While Dealing with Recession-Related Workforce Cuts,” Modern Healthcare 39 (21) (May 2009): 26–7, 30.
54. William G. Whittaker, “The Fair Labor Standards Act: Overtime Pay Issues in the 108th Congress” (Washington: Congressional Research Service, 2005); Workplace Flexibility 2010, “Public Policy Platform on Flexible Work Arrangements” (2009), available at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/workplaceflexibility2010/definition/documents/PublicPolicyPlatformonFlexibleWorkArrangements.pdf.
55. Jodie Levin-Epstein, “Getting Punched: The Job and Family Clock … It’s Time for Flexible Work for Workers of All Wages” (Washington: Center for Law and Social Policy, 2006).
56. Lonnie Golden, “Flexibility Gaps: Differential Access to Flexible Work Schedules and Location in the U.S.” Paper presented at: ISWT 2004. Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Working Time, 2004 Feb 26-28; Paris, France; Also see Ellen Galinsky, James T. Bond and E. Jeffrey Hill, “When Work Works: A Status Report on Workplace Flexibility” (New York: Families and Work Institute, 2004), p. 5.
57. Galinsky, Bond, and Hill, “When Work Works”; Urban Institute, “Lower-Wage Workers and Flexible Work Arrangements,” available at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/workplaceflexibility2010/definition/documents/Lower-WageWorkersandFWAs.pdf.
58. James T. Bond and Ellen Galinsky, “What Workplace Flexibility is Available to Entry-Level, Hourly Employees?” Table 1, Research Brief No. 3 (New York: Families and Work Institute, 2006), available at http://familiesandwork.org/site/research/reports/brief3.pdf.
59. California Paid Family Leave Act, S.B. 1661, 2002 Cal. Stat. Ch. 901 (Cal. 2002) (effective July 1, 2004); New Jersey Family Leave Act, N.J.S.A. 34:11B-1, et seq. (law became effective January 1, 2009 and beneficiaries could begin collective benefits on July 1, 2009).
60. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Characteristics of Families in 2008” (May 27, 2009), available at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf.
61. Social Security Administration, “How You Earn Credits” (2009), available at http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/10072.pdf.
62. Ibid.
63. Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “Women and Social Security: Benefit Types and Eligibility” (June 2005), available at http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/D463.pdf.
64. Social Security Administration, “Annual Statistical Supplement to the Social Security Bulletin, 2008,” table 5.G1, (2009), available at http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/supplement/2008/supplement08.pdf.
65. Goodwin Liu, “Social Security and the Treatment of Marriage: Spousal Benefits, Earnings Sharing, and The Challenge Of Reform,” Wisconsin Law Review 1 (1999): 17–18.
66. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 137.
67. Eugene Steuerle, Christopher Spiro, and Adam Carasso, “Does Social Security Treat Spouses Fairly?” (Washington: Urban Institute, November 1999), available at http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/Straight12.pdf.
68. 1 U.S.C § 7 (2006); 28 U.S.C § 1738C (2006).
69. Mark Lino, “Expenditures on Children by Families, 2006” (Department of Agriculture, Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, 2007), p.18, available at http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/CRC/crc2006.pdf.
70. The MetLife Foundation and Schmieding Center, “Care giving in America” (2007), p. 21, available at http://www.schmiedingcenter.org/pdf/caregiving_in_america.pdf.
71. Harris Interactive, “HBO Alzheimer’s Project/Harris Interactive Census: Examining the Impact of Alzheimer’s Disease in America” (2009), p. 2, available at http://www.hbo.com/events/alzheimers/documents/Census.pdf.
72. Karen Kornbluh, “The Joy of Flex,” Washington Monthly, December 2005, available at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0512.kornbluh.html. 

• Watergy Greenhouse, submitted by Martin Buchholz
• Aclima: A system for creating and harnessing collective eco-intelligence for cleaner air and reduced climate change emissions, submitted by Greg Niemeyer & Team
• Barefoot Women Solar Engineers of Africa, Asia and Latin America, submitted by Bunker Roy & Team
• GrowTown: It's for Everyone - It's Sustainable - It Starts Now, submitted by Kenneth Weikal & Team
• Operation Hope - Permanent Water and Food Security for AfricaÕs Impoverished Millions, submitted by Allan Savory on behalf of Africa Centre for Holistic Management Trustees and staff
• Jaaga, submitted by Freeman Murray & Team
• Tibet is the High Ground - 3rd Variation, submitted by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison
• The Acceleration Of Innovation, submitted by Jeff Rose, Full Belly Project
• Seed-Scale: A Universal Process for Community Change, submitted by Daniel Taylor, Future Generations
• Sheltering U.S. Persons Unsheltered: Creating Legally Conforming, Economically Sustainable Emergency and Transitional Shelter, submitted by Bruce LeBel, World Shelters
• LIFT, submitted by Prithula Prosun
• Sustainable Disaster Response, submitted by Scott Gibson & Team
• Synchronicity 2: Public Water Purification Island, submitted by Jakub Szczesny
• ColaLife, submitted by Simon Berry
• Plastic Island, submitted by Mr. F.K.R. Eilander & Team
• Fighting SAM (Severe Acute Malnutrition) in India, submitted by Compatible Technology International
• GoodBank - a high transparency design for ethical banking, submitted by Bruce Cahan, President Urban Logic
• Resources, submitted by Elizabeth Damon
• CITY SINK, submitted by Cindy Hoffman Brandt
• MicroEnergy Credits, submitted by April Allderdice
• Living Building ChallengeJason F. McLennan
• Eco-Boulevards, submitted by Martin Felson
• The Green Initiative: Self-Sufficiency for NGOs through Clean Energy, submitted by Dr. Basil Stamos & Team
• New York City (Steady) State (book, research, web project), submitted by Terreform
• Light For All, submitted by Sameer Hajee
• The Green Island Project, submitted by Skip Staats, EcoSoul
• The S.A.T. Project, 3D transportation, submitted by Serrano + Pecarari Architects
• A Call to Farm: FarmShare, submitted by BK Farmyards
• Samasource: Microwork for the Developing World, submitted by Leila C. Janah
• STRUCTURES FOR WAVE ENERGY ABSORPTION AND COLONIZATION OF MANGROVES, submitted by Mourad Zeghal

To learn more about each project visit the Semi-Finalists summary page or contact: JenJoy Roybal, Tel: 718.290.9283. To view entries to the 2008 and 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, visit BFI’s Idea Index - a web-based publishing system created to enhance the opportunity for proposals to receive support and get implemented. 

The USA Swimming Foundation was established in 2004 to help address this national problem.  The Foundation’s mission is to save lives and introduce children to a lifelong fitness activity by giving every child the opportunity to learn how to swim.

The Foundation’s primary programming initiative is called Make a Splash.  This program seeks to shine a bright light on the problem and provide a solution.  Under the banner of Make a Splash, the USA Swimming Foundation organizes and promotes partnerships with local programming partners in order to expand the reach of learn-to-swim opportunities.  The Foundation’s efforts are particularly focused on reaching those children who are most at-risk to drowning accidents.

To date, the Make a Splash program has more than 150 Local Partners in 35 states; more than 188,000 children have participated and almost 13,000 of these children have been provided with free or low-cost swimming lessons. 

Information about the USA Swimming Foundation and the Make a Splash program can be found at swimfoundation.org. 

I edit about 40 different teen’s articles every month and I always look forward to it. The passion behind these teens’ words is inspiring; the stories, tips and advice that they give often helps me! The whole idea of the site is to build better relationships between parents and their teens and tweens by giving the kids a voice.

Do you really remember what it felt like to get dumped at prom? How about the stresses of final exams? Or things that you couldn’t possibly relate to: growing up online, dependency on cell phones and the obsession with vampire stories?

The reason it makes sense for me to work for a parenting site is, that at my age, I sit right between child and parent, a perfect way to bridge the gap. That’s what Vanessa Van Petten, founder of RadicalParenting.com, has figured out. Those teenage years are some of the toughest growing up. And we aren’t too far off to have forgotten all of those growing pains.

But we’re also adults, with self-awareness and self-reflection, able to act as mediators between the two perspectives. As tween and teens, there are so many changes, from the physical to the emotional. And often times, somewhere along the way, things get lost in translation from child to parent. Communication is key. RadicalParenting provides this open platform for the very vital communication needed to build and maintain healthy relationships between parents and their kids.

Part of what RadicalParenting is built on, the importance of giving kids a voice, is the main reason I started keeping a journal when I was 12-years-old. I specifically remember having the thought that I needed to write all my experiences down, in irrevocable ink, so that I wouldn’t forget by the time I had children of my own. And it was important that it was in ink—so I couldn’t deny anything.

Even now, on the rare occasion that I go back to one of the 14 completed journals I have thus far, I cringe at some of the things I wrote. Did I really feel that way? Was that really such a big deal to me? But it was! In a sense, RadicalParenting serves as this collective journal of kids all across the nation.

It shows parents that, yes, most kids do want family time, but, no, they don’t want you breathing down their necks whenever they’re online, but they do want your advice on how to deal with the latest drama between their circle of friends, and so on.

I believe it is so important to treat children as equals. To treat their hopes, dreams and fears as important as ours. We do not have to talk down to them in order to pass on our wisdom. And in being more aware and better listeners, we may just learn a thing or two from them as well.

For a brief moment in American history, women during World War II accounted for more than one-third of the U.S. workforce as men streamed into the armed forces to defeat our fascist enemies. This phenomenal transformation of the U.S. economy was brief but its influence was enduring. So many Americans can share “Rosie the Riveter” stories akin to President Obama’s memories of tales about his grandmother working in an arms manufacturing plant while his grandfather served in Europe with General George Patton.

Today, the movement of women into the labor force is not just enduring but certifiably revolutionary—perhaps the greatest social transformation of our time. Women are more likely to work outside the home and their earnings are more important to family well-being than ever before in our nation’s history. This transformation changes everything. At the most profound level, it changes the rules of what it means to be a woman—and what it means to be a man.

Women are now increasingly sharing the role of breadwinner, as well as the role of caregiver, with the men in their lives. Even so, we have yet to come to terms with what it means to live in a nation where both men and women typically work outside the home and what we need to do to make this new reality workable for families who have child care and elder care responsibilities through most of their working lives.

Indeed, the transformation in how women spend their days affects nearly every aspect of our daily lives. As women move into the labor force, their earnings are increasingly important to families and women more and more become the major breadwinner—even though women continue to be paid 23 cents less than men for every dollar earned in our economy.

Nearly 4 in 10 mothers (39.3 percent) are primary breadwinners, bringing home the majority of the family’s earnings, and nearly two-thirds (62.8 percent) are breadwinners or co-breadwinners, bringing home at least a quarter of the family’s earnings. What’s more, women are now much more likely to head families on their own.

Most women today are providing for their families by working outside the home—and still earningless than men—while providing more than their fair share of care giving responsibilities at home.

These gains are by no means an unqualified victory for women in the workforce and in society, or for their families. Most women today are providing for their families by working outside the home—and still earning less than men—while providing more than their fair share of care giving responsibilities inside the home, an increasingly impossible task. At home, families cope with this day-to-day time squeeze in a variety of unsatisfactory ways.

In most families today, there’s no one who stays at home all day and so there’s no one with the time to prepare dinner, be home when the kids get back from school, or deal with the little things of everyday life, such as accepting a UPS package or getting the refrigerator repaired. Instead of having Mom at home keeping her eye on the children after school, families face the challenge of watching over their latchkey kids from afar and worry about what their teenagers are doing after school.

Yet the flip side is this: The presence of women is now commonplace in all kinds of workplaces and many are in positions of authority. Millions of workers now have a female boss and the more collaborative management styles that many women bring to the workplace are improving the bottom line. Increasingly, businesses are recognizing that most of their labor force has some kind of family care responsibility, and therefore are creating flexible workplace policies to deal with this reality. Many of the fastest-growing jobs replace the work that women used to do for free in the home. The demand for home health aides, childcare workers, and food service workers, for instance, has increased sharply.

Social patterns also are changing, and rapidly so. With women now half of all workers on U.S. payrolls, there is no longer a standard timeline for marriage and raising a family—if women even choose to marry or have children.

The assisted reproductive technologies industry has blossomed as women—especially professional women—invest in their careers and delay motherhood into their 30s and 40s. And the share of women who are unmarried has skyrocketed: 40 percent of women over age 25 are now unmarried and a record 40 percent of children born in 2007 had an unmarried mother.3 While divorce rates have fallen, many women delay and some never even enter marriage.

This transformation also boasts profound implications for communities around the nation. In schools and religious and community organizations, women are now less available to volunteer during the work week and have less time to devote to leading community organizations. The transformation affects our health care system, too, since health care providers have to cope with the fact that there is not likely to be someone to provide free, at-home care for a recovering patient.

And it affects our quality of life. Many retail stores, restaurants, and consumer support lines are now open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which meets the needs of families with 9-to-5 work hours. But this has meant that millions of other families—disproportionately immigrants and lower-income families—have workers employed during nonstandard hours, affecting their marriages and their ability to access child care and other supports not generally available at nonstandard times.

Quite simply, as women go to work, everything changes. Yet, we, as a nation, have not yet digested what this all means and what changes are still to be made. But change we must, especially as the current recession amplifies and accelerates these trends throughout our economy and society. The Great Recession led to massive job losses, especially within male-dominated industries. Since the recession began in December 2007, men have accounted for three out of every four jobs lost (73.6 percent) and now 2 million wives are supporting their families while their unemployed husbands seek work.

Women now, for the first time, make up half (49.9 percent as of July 2009) of all workers on U.S. payrolls. This is a dramatic change from just over a generation ago: In 1969, women made up only a third of the workforce (35.3 percent).

Many American women have always worked, of course, but as more women joined the ranks of the employed and laws prohibiting outright discrimination came into effect, a wider array of opportunities opened up to women. By 2008, a working mother is no longer revolutionary and is in fact now common: Only one in five families with children (20.7 percent) are the traditional male breadwinner, female homemaker, compared to 44.7 percent in 1975.7 That year, 4 in 10 mothers with a child under age 6 (39.6 percent) worked outside the home, but by 2008, that share had risen to two-thirds (64.3 percent).

To understand what it means for women to become breadwinners, this chapter focuses on who’s gone to work, where women are working, why they are working, and what this means for the economic well-being of women and their families. While women have made great strides and are now more likely to be economically responsible for themselves and their families, there is still a long way to go. Equity in the workplace has not yet been achieved, even as families need women’s equality now more than ever.

Women’s earnings making all the difference

One thing is very clear: The added earnings of women have made all the difference for families. There are more women living alone and raising children on their own, and within married-couple families, women’s earnings have become more important.

Consider first the dramatic rise in women raising children on their own. Between 1973 and 2006, the share of all families headed by an unmarried woman rose to one in five, or 18.4 percent, from 1 in 10 (10 percent). These families rely almost exclusively on a woman’s wage. Only 4 in 10 custodial mothers (41.7 percent) receive any child support and only half (47.3 percent) of those awarded child support actually receive their full award.10 Further, the incomes of families headed by unmarried women have not kept pace with those of dual-earner families. Between 1973 and 2006, families headed by a single woman saw their incomes rise by 25.5 percent, while dual-earner families saw their incomes rise by 37.1 percent.11

While single women bring home the bacon for their families, wives’ earnings are typically no longer ancillaries to the family’s budget. Since the early 1970s, it has been the earnings of wives that have made the difference between families seeing no income growth and some income growth (see Figure 1). Today, married-couple families with a wife who doesn’t work have inflation-adjusted incomes that are no higher than similar families in the early 1970s.

Researchers Katherine Bradbury and Jane Katz at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that families in which wives worked, worked longer hours, or had higher pay compared to families without such wives were more likely to move up the income ladder or maintain their position rather than fall down the ladder.

Compared to their parents and grandparents, today’s families put in more hours at work, but see fewer gains. They increasingly need two incomes just to cover the basics—the mortgage, the car, and health insurance.13 This is a sharp reversal from the period after World War II through the early 1970s when both families with a wife in paid employment and those without saw their incomes rise year after year and both at about the same pace.

Clearly, the days of Ozzie and Harriet are long gone. Within married-couple families, the typical working wife now brings home 42.2 percent of her family’s earnings. And women increasingly are the primary breadwinners. In 2008, nearly 4 in 10 mothers (39.3 percent) were the primary breadwinner in their family—either because they were a single, working parent or because they earned as much as or more than their spouse. An additional quarter (24.0 percent) of mothers are co-breadwinners—that is, a working wife bringing home at least 25 percent of her family’s total earnings (see Figure 2 and Table 1). 15

Women are becoming breadwinners among all kinds of married-couple families, by income, education, and race. Specifically:

By income

    * Just under a third (30.1 percent) of working wives in families with incomes in the top 20 percent of all families (not just married-couple families) brought home as much or more than their husbands did in 2008, compared to only one in eight (12.6 percent) in 1967. The trend is similar even among families with a child under age 6 in which nearly a third (28.0 percent) of working wives in the families in the top fifth bring home as much as or more than their husbands in 2008.

    * In the bottom 20 percent of income distribution of all families, over two-thirds (67.7 percent) of working wives brought home as much as or more than their husbands in 2008, up from 44 percent in 1967, while in the next 20 percent of income distribution half (49.2 percent) of working wives now bring home as much or more than their husbands, up from 28.3 percent in 1967.

By education

    * In families where the wife has only a high school diploma, the share of working wives earning as much as or more than their spouses stood at 36.6 percent in 2008 compared to 14.5 percent in 1967, while among working wives with a college degree 41.1 percent earned as much as or more than their spouses compared to 30.8 percent over the same period.

By race

    * Among white families, over a third (36.9 percent) of working wives earned as much as or more than their husbands in 2008, compared to one in five (21.1 percent) in 1975. Over that same time period, among African American families, the share rose to 51.5 percent from 28.7 percent, and among Hispanic families, the share rose from 23.6 to 35.8 percent

And, of course, lesbian couples have always relied on the earnings of just women. Recent research shows that lesbian families are more likely than heterosexual couples to end up in poverty.16 Since women on average earn less than men, lesbian couples have two lower-paid earners, and are doubly discriminated against because of continued heterosexist employment discrimination, on top of the discrimination that lesbians experience as women, mothers, or people of color.

Where women work matters

Part of the reason that women’s earnings have become more important to family well-being is that women are now found in all kinds of jobs. Equal opportunity legislation made it possible for women to take nearly any job. But even though women now constitute half of all workers, they do not make up half of every kind of job. Continued sex segregation in employment is one of the primary factors explaining the wage gap between men and women.

Table 2 lists the top 20 occupations for men and women in 2008. The list tends to confirm gendered stereotypes about who does what and documents that many of the jobs most commonly held by women (and men!) require little or no higher education. The most common occupations for women are secretaries and administrative assistants, nurses, and schoolteachers. Of the top 20 jobs for women, only nurses and schoolteachers required advanced degrees. Men most commonly work as drivers, managers, and retail supervisors.

This table also confirms that men and women continue to work in highly segregated workplaces. There are only four occupations that appear on the list of the 20 most commonly held jobs for both men and women: retail salesperson (2.5 percent of women and 2.0 percent of men), first-line supervisors of retail stores (2.3 percent of women and 2.6 percent of men), all other managers (1.9 percent of women and 2.9 percent of men), and cooks (1.1 percent of women and 1.5 percent of men). This is only slight progress from a few generations ago. In 1979, half of women (51.7 percent) were employed in just 20 occupations, while the top 20 occupations employed 40.6 percent of men.17

Even though sex segregation continues to define the U.S. workplace, there has been some progress in women entering nontraditional fields. Women now constitute just over a third of engineers (35.9 percent in 2008) and lawyers and judges (36.5 percent), under a third of physicians and surgeons (31.8 percent), and nearly 4 in 10 managers (38.2 percent).

Still, women remain the dominant workers in traditional female occupations, making up 97.8 percent of all preschool and kindergarten teachers, 97.3 percent of dental hygienists, 96.3 percent of all secretaries and administrative assistants, and 95.5 percent of all child care workers. And men still dominate in construction and building trades, making up 97.5 percent of all construction and extraction workers and 96.1 percent of all installation, repair, and maintenance jobs.

Looking forward, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ projection of future job growth shows a pattern that is similar to the jobs of today. Figure 4 shows that over the next decade, the occupations projected to have the largest number of new jobs are in services. Many have a caring aspect to them, such as nursing or home health aides, that replace the work that women historically did without pay in the home in the decades before women entered the labor force in great numbers.

Most of these jobs require little higher education and most pay low wages (see Table 3). Currently, these occupations tend to be dominated by women, who make up more than two-thirds of the employees in all but five of the 15 occupations with largest projected job growth.

Why women work

Women becoming breadwinners is the direct result of more women seeking employment in the first place. But as women became a larger share of those employed and took advantage of economic opportunities opening up to them, more of them have begun to be a family’s lead earner. The trend toward more women working occurred among all kinds of women, although it is the women in the middle and top of income distribution in our country as well as mothers (both married and single) who have seen the starkest changes in their employment patterns over the past half-century.

But why did women enter employment in great numbers? Was it the desire to be a career woman that pulled so many women into the labor force? Was it the increase in women remaining (or becoming) unmarried that pushed women to believe that they needed to be bringing in their own incomes? The answer is a little of both. Women are in the labor force because they need to be, but also because many want to work and are taking advantage of expanded opportunities.

For starters, the world changed and technology marched forward in ways that freed women from work inside the home and from some of the constraints of biology. The post-World War II years saw technological improvements that reduced the time necessary for home production (although some research shows that this only upped the cleanliness standards). And the introduction of the pill and, more importantly, its increased availability for single women, gave women the opportunity to invest in their education and their careers because they were able to plan when they would have their children.20

As a result of the women's movement—alongside structural changes in the economy away from manufacturing toward services that disproportionately employ women—women fanned out into a variety of occupations that had hitherto been closed to them.

At the same time, the rules changed. Even as late as the early 1970s, women were kept out of jobs by “marriage employment bans” or were fired upon telling their boss they were pregnant. Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York tells her story this way: In the early 1970s, when she asked her human resources office about its maternity leave policy, she was told there was no policy since “most women just leave.”21 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to fire a woman once she married and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 made it illegal to fire a woman just because she was pregnant; but neither required that a women be granted maternity leave.

These rules didn’t change on their own. The women’s movement helped women pursue jobs outside the home and become economically independent, including in “men’s” jobs. They fought for—and won—landmark pieces of legislation that created real progress in reducing gender discrimination and helping millions of women break through the glass ceiling. As a result of their efforts—alongside structural changes in the economy away from manufacturing toward services that disproportionately employ women—women fanned out into a variety of occupations that had hitherto been closed to them.

During the 1980s, married middle-income and upper-income women rapidly entered the job market. This was at least partially attributable to the fact that for middle- and upper-income women, the career opportunities that opened up were more appealing than traditional female jobs. Furthermore, as women increased their educational attainment, they were able to enter jobs with higher career paths.

Economists Chinhui Juhn and Kevin Murphy confirmed through econometric analysis that over the 1970s and 1980s changes in women’s wages—that is, increases in women’s own economic opportunities—led women into the labor market and economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that this trend continued through 2000.

On top of this, middle- and upper-income women’s families could afford to replace their household labor by employing nannies, placing their children in high-quality child care, or hiring other household help, which lower-income families could not do. Without public support for working families, lower-income families continue to disproportionately rely on the unpaid work of women to address the problems of how to care for children, the aged, or infirm.

Without public support for working families, lower-income families continue to disproportionately rely on the unpaid work of women to address the problems of how to care for children, the aged, or infirm.

But it wasn’t just these wealthier, better-educated women who entered the workforce in droves in recent decades. In the mid-1990s, policy changes also led more low-income women to seek employment. Welfare reform required low-income mothers to be employed, while other policies, such as the rise in the minimum wage, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the increased funding for the Child Care Development Block Grant, and the introduction of the State Child Health Insurance Program, encouraged them to do so by boosting the take-home pay of those working at low-wage jobs. These pieces of legislation were passed in the middle of the strongest labor market in decades—especially for low-wage work—and were followed by sharp increases in the employment of unmarried mothers.

Today, women are likely to work outside the home regardless of their status as mothers. In the early 1980s, mothers had employment rates that were about 20 percentage points lower than non-mothers, all else equal. But the pull of children keeping women out of the workplace has grown weaker over time, leveling off in the 2000s at about 12 percentage points—just over half as large as just a few decades ago. This means that mothers are now about 12 percentage points less likely to work than non-mothers, all else equal.

Many women have always worked

The news today is that women make up half of all workers, but it’s always been the case that some women have worked outside the home. The remarkable changes in women’s employment gloss over the reality that for some groups of women, becoming a breadwinner is nothing new.

African American women have historically been more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to work outside the home. In 1920, the labor force participation rate of black women was 38.9 percent, twice as large as any other racial or ethnic group except Japanese women, of whom 25.9 percent worked.24 But as the 20th century marched forward, women of all racial groups began working in greater numbers. By 2007, labor force participation rates had risen to nearly 60 percent in all racial groups of women—African Americans the highest at 61.1 percent, white women next at 59 percent, followed by Asians at 58.6 percent and Hispanics at 56.5 percent.25

A century ago, a substantial percentage of employed women worked as domestics in other people’s homes and this was fairly consistent across racial and ethnic groups. In 1900, among working women, about a third of Asians and whites and a higher share (43.5 percent) of African Americans held private household service jobs.26 While many women have fanned out into a much larger array of occupations, recent immigrant women—mostly from Mexico and Central America—are now those most likely to do domestic labor.27 These jobs tend not only to have low wages, but they are often “under the table” and do not provide workers with the same level of unemployment and Social Security benefits as other kinds of work.

It is important to note, though, that not every woman has gone into paid employment and one in five families with children have a stay-at-home mother and breadwinner father. But even among women at home today, the overwhelming majority will work outside the home at some point in their lives.29 Still, most workers do not have any workplace flexibility, nearly half do not have the right to a paid sick day to care for an ill child or family member, and most do not have access to paid family leave.

Which women work

Not all women seek to work in the same way or to the same degree over their working lives for obviously very different and very personal reasons. But there are patterns evident among different groups of working women, among them of course those women who have always worked (see box “Many women have always worked”). Let’s examine several of those patterns.

Historically, married women were less likely than unmarried women to work outside the home, not just because of tradition but also due to legally sanctioned discrimination by employers that kept wives out of the workplace. In 1963, 37 percent of wives were in the labor force, compared to 65.5 percent of unmarried women.

Since the mid- to late 1990s, however, labor force participation rates for married women have remained relatively stable, while rising for unmarried women: By 2008, 70.0 percent of wives and 72.5 percent of unmarried women were in the labor force during the year. The recession may lead more women—especially wives—to seek employment in 2009 and beyond as men face high numbers of layoffs and have difficulty finding new jobs.

Mothers have typically been less likely than non-mothers to work outside the home. Since the late 1990s, the employment rates of unmarried mothers have begun to converge with those of women without children, but the employment rates of married mothers continue to be far below that of other women.32

Education also traditionally affects employment patterns. The highest educated women have always been more likely than other women to work, even once they became mothers. In 1963, 62.2 percent of college-educated women were in the labor force, compared to 46.5 percent of those with a high school degree. By 2008, among women with a college degree, 80.7 percent were in the labor force, compared to 73.2 percent of those with some college, 67.6 percent of those with a high school diploma, and 47.0 percent of those without. Highly educated women continue to have high labor-force participation rates even once they become mothers: 77.9 percent in 2008.

The march toward greater employment has occurred at both ends of the age distribution. The recession is pulling older women into employment, either because their husbands have lost their jobs or because they are concerned about their retirement security. With falling home values alongside falling pension values and companies abdicating their responsibilities to their pensioners, many older women will need to work longer than in recent decades.34 We are already seeing this in the data as the unemployment rate among workers 55 and over is at post-World War II historic highs.35

Historically, married women were less likely than unmarried women to work outside the home, not just because of tradition but also due to legally sanctioned discrimination by employers that kept wives out of the workplace.

As more women—especially professional and upper-middle-class women—have taken jobs outside the home in recent decades, the need for domestic labor both inside the home, as well as labor reproducing what women used to do, such as preparing meals, has increased.36 Demand for domestic labor rose in the halcyon days of the late 1990s and 2000s, but as the Great Recession works its way through the economy, many middle-class and professional families will no longer be able to afford this luxury and we may see changes in the labor patterns of recent immigrant workers.

Should all women work?

The increase in women’s labor force participation has made it near impossible to say that particular groups of women can’t work just because they’re women or because they have children. Even so, there have been long-simmering debates over whether women should work outside the home—or even if they really want to. The reality is that mothers have taken up paid employment in great—and ever rising—numbers, yet the public discourse often remains mired in controversy over whether mothers should work, rarely appreciating the ship-has-sailed reality that most simply just go to work each day.

Two recent examples of this kind of discourse are the debate over welfare reform in the mid-1990s and the opt-out debate of the mid-2000s. The first pitted stay-at-home poor single mothers against employed mothers in blue-collar families by insisting that poor mothers should also be employed. The second was over whether professional women should stay home with their children and whether or not they were “opting out” in the early- to middle-2000s. Both debates helped define the cultural divides that the Great Recession may well put to rest simply because more and more women want to work and need to work. But both debates are worth a quick review for what they reveal about our society today.

The federal welfare program was established in 1935 as a part of the Social Security Act to provide cash assistance to widowed mothers. At that time, the expectation was that a widow could not support her family on her own. Fast forward to the early 1990s and we enter a world where a nearly a quarter of children were being raised by single mothers and most married-couple families were struggling to figure out how to have both mom and dad in the labor force and make it all work at home.37 By the time President Clinton said in 1992 that he would “end welfare as we know it,” there was no longer consensus that an unmarried mother should receive cash assistance.

Those pushing for the end of welfare often couched their arguments in ways that were designed to appeal to working middle-income and lower-middle-income families who were struggling to make ends meet and facing the stresses—the “time bind,” the “second shift”—that accompany dual-earner families. Never mind that women in both types of families faced similar problems, among them the lack of affordable childcare and low wages.

The rhetoric, though, had a perverse element of truth. Even though both groups needed assistance, only poor families could qualify for admittedly meager benefits and Medicaid or child care subsidies, while working families qualified for little to none of these kinds of benefits and were left to do it all on their own. Of course, such rhetoric was also about marshaling resentment of the poor to push social policy down to the lowest (assistance-free) common denominator rather than appealing to a more inspirational and unifying higher standard for all families.

In the end, the 1996 welfare reform package included carrots and sticks designed to encourage single mothers to avoid cash assistance and instead rely on their earnings. But welfare reform did not address the more fundamental policy gap. Poor, working- and middle-class families alike are struggling to cope with the challenges of being unable to afford a stay-at-home parent yet are unable to afford decent alternatives to pay for care for their children or ailing family members.

And this gap leaves them with little to no workplace flexibility to give their day-to-day lives some much-needed sanity. Welfare reform offered some of these kinds of benefits to very low-income families, but the low-income cut-offs—and five-year waiting periods for immigrant families—mean that millions of working families are ineligible, even though they cannot afford these kinds of services at market rates.

A decade later, this culture debate over whether women should work turned to the other end of the income spectrum. Was it really possible—or desirable—for a woman to be both a professional and a mother? A spate of news articles claimed that professional women were opting out of employment in favor of motherhood. The message from this media maelstrom was that women couldn’t be professionals and mothers, and what’s more, they did not want to.

Mothers have taken up paid employment in great—and ever rising—numbers, yet the public discourse often remains mired in controversy over whether mothers should work, rarely appreciating the ship-has-sailed reality that most simply just go to work each day.

But just as with the welfare reform debates, reality did not confirm this tale. The overwhelming majority of professional mothers do work, more so than any other mothers, and there is no evidence that they were opting out in favor of motherhood.40 There is evidence, however, that many have been pushed out by inflexible workplaces.

While the headlines were that highly educated women were choosing motherhood over work, the stories themselves told a tale of workplaces that were hostile toward working mothers and pushed them out of employment. In an analysis of the opt-out media maelstrom, Joan Williams, director of the Center for Work Life Law, and her colleagues found that the claim that it’s the “pull of family life” rather than the push of inflexible jobs is not even evident in the quotes journalists took from mothers who left their jobs to be full-time mothers.

Their findings are consistent with the research of sociologists Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy, who interviewed professional women who had left the labor force and found that nearly all—86 percent—reported workplace factors such as inflexible jobs as a critical reason they left their jobs.42 This sounds more like pushed out, rather than opted out.

Just as importantly, there is absolutely no empirical evidence that women were increasingly not employed because they had children at home. The fact is that over the 2000s, the share of women—both mothers and non-mothers—and men with jobs flattened. But the evidence pointed toward the weak economic recovery of the early 2000s leading to a lack of job gains among all kinds of workers—moms and non-moms alike—rather than a story of mothers increasingly dropping out because of the pull of motherhood.

Quite simply, the opt-out trend was no trend at all. Like the debate over welfare reform, the opt-out story glossed over reality. Indeed, much of this hysteria seemed grounded in the neo-traditional romanticized yearnings such as those found in Judd Apatow’s movie comedies, where women fulfill raunchy male sexual desires of the post-women’s lib era while also being resigned to the economic status of the pre-women’s lib era. Or conversely, in arch-feminist overreactions to these same yearnings, rather than a measured examination of empirical trends.

Equal opportunity, unequal outcomes

Although women may make up half of all workers, they have by no means achieved equality in the workplace. The typical full-time, full-year woman worker brings home 77 cents on the dollar, compared to her male colleagues. And, for specific groups of women—such as women of color or disabled workers—the gap with respect to the wages of white men is larger than for white women. And undocumented immigrant workers often fail to receive even minimum wage, as employment practices for these populations go under the radar.

Much of the gap is attributable to the fact that men and women work in different jobs, but a significant chunk (41.1 percent!) cannot be explained by characteristics of women or their jobs. Over time, the gender gap has narrowed—it was 59 cents on the dollar in the early 1970s—but the pace of convergence has slowed to a crawl in recent years.44 The most significant compression in the gender pay gap occurred during the 1980s, but this was because men’s wages fell, rather than because women’s wages rose.

The upshot? Even though there may be 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, it remains firmly in place for millions of U.S. women.

Economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn do a detailed analysis of what accounts for the gender pay gap, which in their data is 20.3 percent. Figure 6 shows that of that gap, 10.5 percent can be explained by differences between men and women in their work experience, which captures time out of the labor force for care giving or any other activity.

Almost half of the gap (49.3 percent) can be explained by the kinds of jobs women and men hold in terms of industry and occupation, another 2.4 percent can be explained by race, and another 3.5 percent can be explained by men’s greater likelihood of being in a union. When combined with the positive effects of women’s educational attainment, which closes the gap by 6.7 percent, this leaves 41.1 percent of the wage gap as “unexplainable.”

The segregation of men and women into different jobs explains the single-largest portion of the gender pay gap (49.3 percent). This may seem innocuous, but in reality, many jobs that women have historically held by women are underpaid, relative to men’s jobs that require similar levels of skill. Bowling Green State University political scientist Ellen Frankel Paul, for example, points out that zookeepers—a traditionally male job—earn more than workers caring for children—a traditionally female job.45 It’s not that zookeepers have a much higher level of skills than child care workers, but that our society values these jobs differently and this is a choice we make. Women’s jobs have been systemically undervalued for so long, we think it’s natural, but in fact this is an ongoing legacy of past discrimination.

A woman who goes to the same kind of school, gets the same grades,has the same major, makes the same kind of job and has the same personal characteristics as her male colleague earns 5 percent less the first year out of school.

Differences in men’s and women’s work histories explain the second largest chunk—10.5 percent—of the gender wage gap. It’s important to note, however, that the gender pay gap emerges as soon as women graduate, at a point in their lives when differences in work experience between them and their male colleagues should not play a large role in determining pay.

The American Association of University Women examined the pay gap between college-educated men and women and found that a woman who goes to the same kind of school, gets the same grades, has the same major, takes the same kind of job with similar workplace flexibility perks, and has the same personal characteristics—such as marital status, race, and number of children—as her male colleague earns 5 percent less the first year out of school.46 Ten years later, even if she keeps pace with the men around her, this research found that she’ll earn 12 percent less. This gap is not about the “choices” a woman makes, as the model compares men and women who have made nearly identical choices.

How do we explain the “unexplained gap” to young women? After all, as women have taken their careers more seriously they have worked hard to get more education and that is paying off in terms of narrowing the gender pay gap, even if it hasn’t fully eliminated it. Women now are more likely than men to graduate from high school as well as college, even though among women ages 25 to 45, it remains the case that only a quarter have a college degree, and this is similar for men as well.

Then there’s the “maternal wall.” New research focuses on the role of motherhood in accounting for at least some—if not most—of the unexplained pay gap. In groundbreaking work, Cornell University sociologists Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik used a laboratory experiment to find out whether being a mother means being paid less, all else equal. Study participants evaluated application materials for a pair of job candidates that were explicitly equally qualified—equal levels of education and work experience at similarly ranked schools—but one person was identified as a parent and the other was not.

Their findings are astonishing: Even though the job candidates identified as mothers had the same credentials as the non-mothers, they were perceived to be less competent, less promo table, less likely to be recommended for management, less likely to be recommended for hire, and had lower recommended starting salaries. The job candidates, identified as fathers, were not penalized in the same way, and often saw a boost. Study participants also held mothers to higher standards than all men and women without children by requiring a higher score on a management exam and significantly fewer times of being late to work before being considered hirable or promo table.

Job candidates, identified as mothers, were perceived to be less competent, less promotable, less likely to be recommended for management, less likely to be recommended for hire and had lower recommended starting salaries.

This research confirms prior work on the motherhood pay penalty. Sociologists Michele Budig at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Paula England at Stanford University found that interruptions from work, working part time, and decreased seniority/experience explain no more than about one-third of the gap in pay between women with and without children, and that “mother-friendly” job characteristics explained very little of the gap. They conclude that two-thirds of the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers must be either because employed mothers are less productive at work or because of discrimination against mothers.

What’s more, the gender pay gap accumulates over time. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research examined worker’s employment and earnings data and found that, over a 15-year period, prime-age women workers earn 38 percent of what men earn.50 Jessica Arons, director of the Women’s Health and Rights program at the Center for American Progress, summed up the cumulative impact of the gender pay gap over a 40-year period—the “career wage gap”—and found that women lose an average of $434,000 in income.

The pay gap accumulates for a variety of reasons, but chief among them are that pay raises are typically given as a percent of current salary, leaving women further behind each year, and an employer will typically ask a job applicant for a salary history when determining his or her starting salary, which limits women’s upward mobility.

But the pay gap is not entirely the fault of employers. Women make decisions that have an impact on how much they earn. The kinds of jobs women seek and what kinds of educational credentials they acquire affect future earnings. One study found that 95 percent of the gender differential in starting salaries can be explained by differences in college majors, with women continuing to be more likely to major in humanities.

The pay gap accumulates for a variety of reasons, but chief among them are that pay raises are typically given as a percent of current salary, leaving women further behind each year.

Even so, within occupations, women are typically paid less than their male colleagues.53 And, at least some of the wage gap between men and women, and between mothers and non-mothers, is attributable to women taking on greater parenting responsibilities and working fewer hours. Women are more than twice as likely as men to be employed part time and since few jobs offer part-time work, the part-time jobs available tend to pay less than comparable full-time jobs.54 But the reality is that this cannot fully explain the gap in pay.

And if time away from employment for care giving is important to explaining the gender pay gap, how do we as a society intend to deal with the new reality of working women? As more women work, more families do not have a stay-at-home caretaker, which means that both men and women workers are now more likely to balance a job with care responsibilities—either for a child or for an elderly or ill family member—and more are concerned about caregiver discrimination.

Takin’ it to the max

One way, of course, is for families to keep on doing what they’re doing. But is there a limit to how many hours women and men can put into the paid labor force and still maintain some sanity at home?

Women have gone to work in greater numbers, even as the world they worked in and lived in didn’t change. The typical middle-class family puts in 568 more hours at work each year compared to the late 1970s, which leaves less time to spend with children, clean the house, make a home-cooked meal, or plan a vacation. No wonder so many families report feeling stressed. And the recession only makes this worse as families increasingly worry about job losses or hour or wage cuts, on top of everything else.56

Inside the home, men continue to do less (usually much less) of the housework and care work than their wives—even though the number of hours they devote to work around the house has risen—and many businesses continue to act as though every worker has a stay-at-home spouse who can cope with all of life’s little (and big) emergencies.

Yet remarkably, amid this rising double duty mothers have not reduced their hours of parenting. Between 1985 and 2000, mothers spent an average of four more hours at a paid job and five more hours parenting. Mothers are spending less time on housework, volunteering, and on themselves. Fathers also are spending more time with their children: While fathers spent two more hours at their job, they spent four more hours parenting.

Many families, especially those in lower-paid employment, have turned to “tag-team parenting” to make it all work. Parents work alternate shifts so that someone can always be home with the children. Lower-income families are more likely than higher-income families to have this kind of schedule. Some of it is driven by the kinds of jobs they have available to them—shift work is far less common among middle-class or professional jobs than in manufacturing and retail—and some of it is a way to keep child care costs low and care for their children themselves. And some professionals, such as academics or consultants, also “tag team,” often for the very same reasons.

But there may be a limit to how much more women can—or will be able to—work outside the home. Most important, the United States does not have a well-developed basket of policies to help families who have no one at home to provide care. And these are not just challenges for women. The 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce reports that the majority of fathers (59 percent) in dual-earner couples report experiencing “some or a lot” of work/family conflict, as do 45 percent of mothers.59 Clearly, we need to find a new way of addressing how families provide care.

Where do we go from here?

As men lose their jobs with frightening frequency amid the recession, women’s employment is even more important to family well-being—in millions of families, women are now the “primary breadwinner.” Recognizing this is the key piece to understanding how this social transformation is affecting nearly every aspect of our lives—from how we work to how we play to how we care for one another. Understanding that as women have gone to work, everything has changed is the first step. Identifying what we need to do to reshape the institutions around us is the next step. Then we can begin to take the necessary actions to readjust our policies and practices.

The policy implications vary from issue to issue, but the conclusions are clear: We need to rethink our assumptions about families and about work and focus our policies—at all levels—to address this new reality. Clearly, we aren’t going back to a time when women were available full time to be their families’ unpaid caretakers, so we need to find another way forward.

Endnotes

   1. U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, available at http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/srgate.

   2. Here and throughout this report, we refer to overall gender pay gap as women earning 77 cents on the male dollar. This figure is the ratio of women’s to men’s median earnings for full-time, year-round workers as of 2008. This figure is the best way to show that women are paid less than men overall, but it does not include part-time workers, even though they are often paid less than their full-time colleagues for the same work. Further, the 77 cents figure does not get at difference in the skills that women and men bring to the job, nor does it address the fact that women and men tend to hold different jobs. U.S. Census Bureau, 2008, “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance in the United States: 2008,” Current Population Survey, Table B-4, available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/incomestats.html#cps (September 4, 2009).

   3. U.S. Census Bureau, DataFerrett, Current Population Survey, July 2009, available at http://dataferrett.census.gov; Stephanie Ventura, “Changing Patterns of Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States” (Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, May 2009), available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db18.htm.

   4. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009, Current Establishment Survey, Table B-4, available at

      ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.ceseeb4.txt (September 4, 2009).

   5. Heather Boushey, “Women Breadwinners, Men Unemployed” (Washington: Center for American Progress, July 20, 2009), available at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/07/breadwin_women.html.

   6. There are two surveys that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) conducts that track monthly employment in the United States. One is a survey of business establishments, the Current Establishment Survey, and the other is a survey of households, the Current Population Survey. The BLS reported that for July 2009, 49.9 percent of workers on U.S. payrolls were women, while women made up 46.7 percent of the total labor force, as reported by households. Throughout this report, we refer to the share of workers who are women, which is taken from the Establishment Survey.

   7. Author’s analysis of U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

   8. Author and Jeff Chapman’s analysis of Miriam King, Steven Ruggles, Trent Alexander, Donna Leicach, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 2.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center [producer and distributor], 2009.

   9. These are families excluding single people. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008–2009 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

  10. Timothy S. Grall, “Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support: 2005,” (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 2007), available at www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/p60-234.pdf.

  11. Mishel, Bernstein, and Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008–2009.

  12. Katharine Bradbury and Jane Katz, “Wives’ Work and Family Income Mobility” (Boston: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2004).

  13. Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

  14. Author and Jeff Chapman’s analysis of Miriam King, Steven Ruggles, Trent Alexander, Donna Leicach, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 2.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center [producer and distributor], 2009.

  15. Ibid. Breadwinner mothers include single mothers who work and married mothers who earn as much or more than their husbands. Co-breadwinners include all breadwinners as well as wives who bring home at least 25 percent of the couple’s earnings. The data only include families with a mother who is between the ages of 18 and 60 and who has children under age 18 living with her.

  16. M.V. Lee Badgett, Randy Albelda, Alyssa Schneebaum, Gary J. Gates, “Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community” (Los Angeles, CA: The Williams Institute, University of California Los Angeles School of Law, 2009).

  17. Author’s analysis of the Center for Economic and Policy Research Extracts of the Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group Files.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Richard B. Freeman and Ronald Schettkat, “Marketization of Household Production and the EU-US Gap in Work,” Economic Policy Journal 20, no. 41 (2005).

  20. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions,” Journal of Political Economy (2002), available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7527.

  21. Carolyn B. Maloney, Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: Why Women’s Lives Aren’t Getting Any Easier—And How We Can Make Real Progress For Ourselves and Our Daughters (New York: Modern Times, 2008).

  22. Chinhui Juhn and Kevin M. Murphy, “Wage Inequality and Family Labor Supply” (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1996).

  23. Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, “Changes in the Labor Supply Behavior of Married Women: 1980–2000” (Cambridge: NBER Working Paper No. W11230, 2005), available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w11230.

  24. Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1991).

  25. U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey.

  26. Amott and Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work.

  27. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds., Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (Metropolitan/Holt Paperbacks Book, 2004).

  28. Heather Boushey, “Opting Out? The Effect of Children on Women’s Employment in the United States,” Feminist Economics 14, no. 1 (2008).

  29. Chad Newcomb, “Distribution of Zero-Earnings Years by Gender, Birth Cohort, and Level of Lifetime Earnings,” Social Security Administration, Office of Policy, Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics. Note No 2000-02, November 2000, available at http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/rsnotes/rsn2000-02.html.

  30. Author and Jeff Chapman’s analysis of Miriam King, Steven Ruggles, Trent Alexander, Donna Leicach, and

      Matthew Sobek.

  31. Boushey, “Women Breadwinners, Men Unemployed.”

  32. Author and Jeff Chapman’s analysis of Miriam King, Steven Ruggles, Trent Alexander, Donna Leicach, and

      Matthew Sobek.

  33. Ibid.

  34. U.S. Department of Labor. 2009. Current Population Survey. Table A-6. Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t06.htm [September 15, 2009]).

  35. Nayla Kazzi and David Madland, “Mixed News for Older Workers” (Washington: Center for American Progress, September 4, 2009), available at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/09/older_worker.html.

  36. Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Women.

  37. Bureau of the Census, “Children with single parents—how they fare,” Census Brief 97-1 (Department of Commerce, 1997), available at http://www.census.gov/prod/3/97pubs/cb-9701.pdf.

  38. Randy Albelda and others, “Bridging the Gaps: A Picture of How Work Supports Work in Ten States” (Washington: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2007), available at http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/bridging-the-gaps-a-picture-of-how-work-supports-work-in-ten-states/.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Boushey, “Opting Out? The Effect of Children on Women’s Employment in the United States.”

  41. Joan Williams, Jessica Manvell, and Stephanie Bornstein, “Opt Out” or Pushed Out? How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict: The Untold Story of Why Women Leave the Workforce (San Francisco: The Center for WorkLife Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law, 2006).

  42. Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy, “Fast-Track Women and the “Choice” to Stay Home,” Annals of the American Academy 596 (2004), available at http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/596/1/62.

  43. Boushey, “Opting Out? The Effect of Children on Women’s Employment in the United States.”

  44. Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, “Swimming Upstream: Trends in the Gender Wage Differential in the 1980s,” Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 1997, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=10786.

  45. Ellen Frankel Paul, Equity and Gender: The Comparable Worth Debate (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1988).

  46. Judy Deyland and Catherine Hill, “Behind the Pay Gap” (Washington: American Association of University Women, 2007), available at http://www.aauw.org/research/upload/behindPayGap.pdf.

  47. Author’s analysis of the Center for Economic and Policy Research Extracts of the Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group Files.

  48. The differences were that one resume listed the applicant as “Parent-Teacher Association coordinator“ and included phrase “Mother/father to Tom and Emily. Married to John/Karen,” while the other listed “Fundraiser for his/her neighborhood association” and “Married to John/Karen.” Shelly J. Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik, “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty,” The American Journal of Sociology 112 (5)(2007): 1297–1338.

  49. Michelle J. Budig and Paula England, “The Wage Penalty for Motherhood,” American Sociological Review 66 (2)(2001): 204–225.

  50. Heidi Hartmann and Stephen Rose, “Still a Man’s Labor Market: The Long-Term Earnings Gap” (Washington: Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2004), available at www.iwpr.org/pdf/C366_RIB.pdf.

  51. Jessica Arons, “Lifetime Losses: The Career Wage Gap” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2007), available at http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2008/pdf/equal_pay.pdf.

  52. Judith A. McDonald and Robert J. Thornton, “Do New Male and Female College Graduates Receive Unequal Pay?,” Journal of Human Resources XLII, no. 1 (2007), available at http://jhr.uwpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/XLII/1/32.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Jeffrey B. Wenger, “The Continuing Problem with Part-Time Jobs” (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2001), available at http://www.epi.org/Issuebriefs/ib155/ib155.pdf.

  55. Mishel, Bernstein, and Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008–2009.

  56. Madison Park, “Study: 8 Out of 10 Americans Stressed Because of Economy” (CNN.com, December 9, 2008), available at http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/10/06/economic.stress/index.html.

  57. Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson, and Melissa A. Milkie, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).

  58. Heather Boushey, “Family Friendly Policies: Helping Mothers Make Ends Meet,” Review of Social Economy 66, no. 1 (2008).

  59. Ellen Galinsky, Kerstin Aumann, and James T. Bond, “NCSW 2008: Times Are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and Home,” in National Study of the Changing Workforce (New York: Families and Work Institute, 2009).

In a few days, O’Barry would return to Europe to promote the documentary film he stars in, The Cove, and finally wrap up 62 days of constant campaigning. Now, standing on a forested hillside above the lovely aquamarine inlet that has become infamous for the slaughter of dolphins, he waited for a crew from 60 Minutes-Australia to get the right angle on a setup shot. He yawned.

But fatigue wasn’t turning into impatience. Having worked for years as an animal trainer and underwater stuntman on more than a dozen television shows and movies, O’Barry is no stranger to the elaborate preparations required for film’s illusion. Nor is he innocent about how to use the media to take an obscure issue and make it a cause célèbre: Watching the maneuvering and re-maneuvering of a camera crew was just part of the business of saving dolphins.

“I’m talking to seven million people,” O’Barry said, referring to the average number of weekly viewers of Australia’s 60 Minutes. “I’m very conscious of that.”

The producer said they were ready and O’Barry let out a little sigh, as he almost always does before answering questions. Then, just as characteristically, he performed with gusto one of his well-polished raps.

“You see those tarps?” he asked, motioning to the rolls of green cloth coiled above where the local fishermen stab dolphins to death. “They’re covering up. It’s a cover up. They say this is their tradition and their culture, but this begs the question: What are they hiding? Are they ashamed of their tradition and culture?”

When O’Barry gives an interview, he makes long, steady moves with his hands. This habit makes it hard to miss the dolphin tattoo on his left hand, or the fact that he is missing the top of his right thumb, which he blew off while working on the James Bond film Never Say Never Again.

At 70, his white hair is thin and the line of his jaw has softened, but his brown eyes are sharp. He wears almost the same outfit every day: khaki pants, a khaki cargo vest with “Dolphin Rescue Team” embroidered on the breast, a beaten tan hat with captain’s laurels ironed on the brim, and two-toned Sperry Top-Siders, no socks. The overall affect is of an avuncular hipster, a kind of Pirate for Good who doesn’t seem to notice if he has told you the same story two or three times, a story that always has to do with dolphins. “The dolphin’s smile is nature’s greatest deception,” is one of his favorite lines.

Since The Cove became a critical success at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009, O’Barry has given countless media tours of Taiji – the small Japanese fishing village on the picturesque Wakayama coast that, as he says, is “part Norman Rockwell and part Norman Bates.” The next stop on the tour for the 60 Minutes journalists was the Taiji Whale Museum or, as O’Barry tells reporters, “a whaling museum that celebrates the killing of dolphins and whales.”

In a country known for its cutting edge technology, the Taiji Whale Museum is a crude affair. The tanks where the dolphins live are tiny and there are cracks in the concrete amphitheater. The place is an easy target for O’Barry, who has spent most of the past 40 years on an international crusade to halt the captivity of dolphins.

He led the 60 Minutes crew to the main arena, where a small crowd watched the first dolphin show of the day. “They have nowhere to go and nothing to do – it’s cruel and unusual,” he said. “The only way out is death. You literally bore them to death. You go to the Sydney Zoo and look at the snake exhibit: there’s trees and branches. Even a cold-blooded snake is given more consideration.”

Next, he took the crew to a small cinderblock building where two spotted dolphins were swimming back and forth in a pool barely 20 feet long by 15 feet wide. The dolphins kept coming up to the glass to make eye contact with the human onlookers.

O’Barry addressed the camera: “This is not living. This is surviving. Living is feeding in the ocean, swimming 40 miles a day. This is sensory deprivation. They say this is about education, to create an appreciation for dolphins. But the education doesn’t work, because one of the largest dolphin slaughters in the world happens right around the corner, and no one cares.”

For his final act of the morning, O’Barry ushered the Australians to a dome where visitors can walk into a glass tunnel and stand beneath the dolphins as they swim circles. He pointed to a young dolphin swimming at its mother’s side and let loose another barrage: “That baby will be here its whole life. It will never know the tides. It will never know what it’s like to hunt. It will be bored to death.”

On the way back to the entrance, past a small kiosk selling barbequed whale meat for ¥500 (“What’s that about?” O’Barry said. “You can eat whale meat while watching a whale show.”), the 60 Minutes crew got caught up in the scene of Japanese girls snapping cell phone photos as they fed a trio of pilot whales. Left alone, O’Barry wandered to the lagoon where a solitary orca spends most of its time listlessly bobbing. His shoulders sagged as he sat, chin in his hands, staring at the orca. It looked like all of the energy had drained from him.

“This stays with me for days,” he said on the way out. “I’ll have a hangover after looking at this stuff.”

“He sees it from their perspective,” O’Barry’s wife, Helene, told me later. “He feels what they feel. He feels a lot of anguish, and you can see it in his eyes when he is looking at the dolphins. And it’s just all those sleepless nights, sleepless in Taiji. It’s such a nightmare, you can’t even imagine it.”

The Cove opens with O’Barry giving his Taiji tour and – even through a series of detours into the Minamata mercury poisoning of the 1950s, humans’ fascination with dolphins, and Japanese food culture – keeps him at the film’s emotional center. This works well because O’Barry’s story is so novelistic: the lone man on a search for self and meaning. O’Barry, as the film portrays, started his career as the trainer for the five dolphins that starred in the 1960s series Flipper. The popular television show played a large role in creating the modern affection for dolphins, and so, in a way, O’Barry is responsible for the rise of the dolphin entertainment industry.

But after working as a dolphin trainer for nearly a decade, O’Barry realized with a shock that what he had been doing was wrong. One day in 1970, after the television show had ended, O’Barry was called to the Miami Seaquarium, where he found Kathy, one of the Flipper dolphins, sick in the water. The animal died in his arms and sank to the bottom of the tank.

At that moment, O’Barry decided to commit his life to freeing dolphins. In the beginning of his 1989 memoir, Behind the Dolphin Smile, he wrote: “I wanted people to realize that it was wrong to own dolphins, and even worse, if possible, to make them do silly tricks. With the death of Kathy, the dolphin I most dearly loved, [I was on] a pilgrimage to try to undo at least in part some of the mess I had made of things.”

O’Barry believes he’s to blame for the dolphins at the Taiji Whale Museum, the tanks at some 150 similar dolphinariums, the swim-with-the-dolphins programs at resorts. His convert’s zeal is fueled by the emotional attachments he has had with individual dolphins over the years, both as a trainer and, later, as he worked to return them to the wild. For O’Barry, the dolphin hunt in Taiji isn’t just killing – it’s murder.

“With most documentaries you need a hook, an emotional hook, something that will carry your narrative all the way through,” said Louie Psihoyos, director of The Cove. “Ric was a perfect choice for me for a protagonist.”

O’Barry’s complex history, combined with some unorthodox storytelling, has made the movie a darling among reviewers. The New York Times called it “an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller”; Time said it’s “slick and smart.” According to Hollywood bloggers, the film is on the short list to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary.

The Cove departs from conventional documentaries by being a movie about the making of a movie. Near the start of the film, O’Barry tells Psihoyos that to stop the dolphin slaughter in Taiji, the world needs to see and hear what is happening there. But the local fishermen – pissed off at the intruding Westerners – have set up a round-the-clock defense. So Psihoyos assembles a team of divers and camouflage experts to penetrate the cove and get the incriminating footage.

The result is a cross between Free Willy and Mission: Impossible. Many of the scenes are shot in the eerie green of night vision goggles or the spookier luminous black-and-silver of infrared lenses. Handheld cameras put the viewer at the center of the action as Psihoyos’s crew undertakes repeated sorties to place hidden cameras and microphones. The suspense builds until the team gets what it came for: gruesome images of the local fishermen capturing dolphins for sale to aquatic parks and then, the next morning, stabbing dozens of them to death. Few documentaries pack such adrenaline.

The film – and the media attention it has generated – has been a huge boost to O’Barry’s efforts. Since the film came out, more than 430,000 people have signed an online petition calling for the Japanese Fisheries Agency to prohibit the killing. Nearly 300,000 people have “friended” O’Barry on Facebook. The town of Broome, Australia briefly suspended its sister city relationship with Taiji, creating a minor diplomatic dustup.

O’Barry told me, “The Cove defines the issue. If a journalist has seen the movie, I don’t have to explain to them why dolphin captivity is wrong. They get it. That’s a game-changer for me.”

Lincoln O’Barry, Ric’s 37-year-old son who has worked closely with him over the years, said that the film has been a “tipping point” for his dad’s efforts, and that “we just need a little push to get over the edge.” Lincoln is currently working with the Discovery Channel to produce a television series about Ric and Taiji modeled on the show Whale Wars.

The tsunami of international attention is a core part of Ric O’Barry’s strategy of gaiatsu, the Japanese word for “external pressure.” The more people who see the film and sign the petition, the more likely it is that the Japanese will halt the hunt. “The Cove is gaiatsu on a massive scale,” O’Barry likes to say. At the same time, he is well aware that gaiatsu is insufficient, and that the dolphin killing won’t end until there is an outcry within Japan to halt the practice. “The real change has to come from the inside of Japan,” Lincoln said.

But generating a popular revolt against the hunt won’t be easy, at least judging by the reception to The Cove at a September screening at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo. “The problem with making gestures in civil disobedience, whether political demonstrations or environmental statements,” O’Barry wrote in Behind the Dolphin Smile, “is that they depend on others for their meaning.”

The same could be said for the filmmaking. What a Western audience might see as a clarion call against animal abuse, the Japanese view as cultural imperialism. The press screening had been organized by Earth Island Institute’s International Marine Mammal Project – which has employed O’Barry for the last three years – as a way to generate advance buzz for the film’s public debut at the Tokyo Film Festival. During the showing, the audience responded well to the film.

But in a press conference after the movie, the correspondents’ questions turned sharp, as they demanded to know whether the animal rights issue would sway the Japanese, many of whom don’t see a distinction between eating a dolphin and eating a cow. A reporter from The Times of London asked: “Is there a difference between hunting Bambi and hunting Flipper?”

O’Barry is hypersensitive about the charge of cultural imperialism and goes to great lengths to make clear that the vast majority of Japanese are not involved in the hunt and don’t even know about it. “If you lived in a small town in America,” he said to me, “and you had a group of Japanese showing up to protest something, it would be outrageous.” Imagine if dozens of Japanese activists and hordes of international media descended on, say, Camden, Maine and demanded to know why the locals eat bacon.

At the Correspondents Club screening, O’Barry was well prepared for this line of argument, which he has sought to address since he first traveled to Japan in 1976 in an effort to ease the Greenpeace-led boycott of the nation. O’Barry insisted that more important than the abuse of dolphins was the fact that dolphin meat has dangerous concentrations of mercury. “It’s not an animal rights issue – it’s a human rights issue,” he said. “It’s about people’s right to know. The Cove will do what the Japanese media have failed to do – report the truth. And the truth is that dolphin meat is tainted with mercury.”

The reporters kept asking about animal rights, but O’Barry stuck to his message. Then he engaged in a bit of theater. “If you find that dolphin meat is not toxic, I’ll go away and never come back,” he offered. “But if it is toxic, then print that.” As he said this, he held up a package of dolphin meat from a grocery store. The photographers, who mostly had been still, jumped up and filled the room with the flutter of shutters snapping.

Many of the reporters left the room unconvinced. “Maybe it’s just an anti-sushi campaign,” a veteran journalist for one of Japan’s most influential newspapers said to me.

Still, the film was having an effect. Just a week earlier, the fishermen in Taiji had driven a pod of dolphins into the cove and had captured a few dozen to sell to the marine entertainment industry. But instead of killing the rest for meat – their usual tactic – the fishermen decided to let them go. Seventy dolphins returned to the sea.

Ric Barry O’Feldman (he changed his name in the mid-eighties, to boost his showbiz career) grew up on Miami Beach. His father owned a place called the Biscayne Restaurant, and Ric spent most of his childhood in the water or on the sand. He remembers his fascination for dolphins coming early: “I became attracted when I was about three feet tall, standing on Miami Beach…. That was during World War II, and my mom told me stories about how dolphins had saved pilots who had been shot down. You never heard of other wild animals saving humans. There’s something incredible about that. It’s communication.”

When he was five-years-old, he found a one-dollar bill on the beach and bought a pair of swimming goggles. The ability to see underwater opened up a new world. “Keep your head underwater, and everything slows down,” he told me. “It’s quiet, peaceful, slow motion. The whole world should be underwater.”

At 16, he lied about his age, enlisted in the Navy, and served five years, mostly in the Mediterranean, during which time he learned to dive. After his discharge, he found a job with Art McKee, a South Florida treasure hunter. McKee had found a measure of fame and fortune when he discovered the Capitana el Rui, a Spanish galleon that sunk in 1773, and used some of the loot to build McKee’s Museum of Sunken Treasure, which he built out of coral.

Working for McKee, O’Barry had his first intimate experience with dolphins. On an expedition to locate a Spanish ship that had sunk in the Bahamian Out Islands, the treasure seekers found themselves amid a huge pod of spotted dolphins. The divers jumped out of the water, fearing sharks. O’Barry, who was on the boat and could see the animals’ signature dorsal fins, jumped in. The dolphins came toward him to play.

“You really need to get under the water, to be in clear water, to see them in all of their majesty,” he said. “When you go there, the dolphins initiate the contact and they control the interaction, unlike the dolphinarium. You do a half hour with them, and then they get bored and swim away. It’s wonderful; I don’t know how to describe it. I go back there whenever I can, just to remind myself why I’m doing this.”

Working for McKee was exciting, but not lucrative. With McKee’s help, O’Barry found a steadily paying gig at the Miami Seaquarium. He started out on the aquarium’s boat that sailed around the Atlantic and Caribbean gathering species, including dolphins, for the exhibits. Eventually, O’Barry got a promotion to work at the aquarium’s main tank, feeding the fishes and sharks while visitors watched from the other side of the glass. Promoted again as understudy to the performers who worked the dolphin shows, soon O’Barry was training the dolphins himself.

His big break came when Ivan Tors, producer of Sea Hunt, approached the Seaquarium about filming a television series there. Two feature films about an intelligent and helpful dolphin – Flipper and Flipper’s New Adventure – had been hits already, and Tors, along with an underwater director named Ricou Browning, had a deal with NBC to do a sitcom. One day, O’Barry ran into Browning and the two bonded over dolphin-training methods. O’Barry talked his way onto the show as an animal trainer and dolphin caretaker.

It was a heady experience for a young man. “You know the house that the family on the TV show lived in? That was my house,” he said. “There was a two- or three- acre section of the Seaquarium where no one was. Just me and the dolphins.” The show was a success, its lilting theme song soon ingrained in the popular culture. The job paid well and gave O’Barry a bit of Hollywood status. He found himself in the middle of a vibrant cultural scene.

“I grew up in this incredible community of artists and musicians,” Lincoln O’Barry told me. “The Mamas and Papas lived on my street. Fred Neil lived on my street. Tennessee Williams, Richie Havens lived on my street. So we were always surrounded by dolphins and music.” David Crosby was a sailing buddy; Joni Mitchell came by the Flipper lagoon to play music for Kathy and the other Flipper dolphins. The producer Michael Lang (Lincoln’s godfather) was a regular at the O’Barry house and, according to at least one telling, the idea for Woodstock was hatched at their kitchen table.

O’Barry said, “I look back on the Flipper experience – those were wonderful, halcyon days. I had an XKE Jaguar, three Porsches, a red Ford Thunderbird, and a lot of girlfriends.”

But as he spent more time with the dolphins, he started to question the righteousness of the enterprise. He secretly admired the dolphins that resisted learning tricks. “About halfway through the TV series I really started having second thoughts about captivity,” he said. He was unprepared, however, to make a big fuss. Things were going too well to ruin the party. “I remember complaining to everybody: ‘This is not right, you know.’ But I didn’t actually do anything.”

After the television series wrapped up, O’Barry wasn’t sure what do. He bummed around Miami. He traveled to India. He mostly kept to himself. Then, the death of Kathy gave him new purpose. With folk singer Fred Neil he founded The Dolphin Project, which was dedicated to investigating dolphin consciousness and rehabilitating dolphins into the wild. Having been a dolphin trainer for years, O’Barry was now committed to the idea of un-training them.

“His story of redemption parallels our own culture’s,” Psihoyos said. “The Western culture, we are like him. We are like he was. We have material success, you know, we have plenty of money. But we are going to have to turn our back on the way we get our energy, on the way we treat, not just dolphins, but the whole environment. Ric’s hero’s journey is one that I think our whole society is going to have to make.”

Animal rights organizations have known about the annual hunt in Taiji since 1979, when a filmmaker shot footage of local fishermen driving dolphins and melon-headed whales into the shore for slaughter. But the issue didn’t attract much energy until 2003, when Sea Shepherd – the group of activists known for their confrontations with Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean – sent a crew to investigate. While in Taiji, two Sea Shepherd activists jumped into the cove and attempted to cut the net penning the dolphins in. They were arrested, jailed for 23 days, and then deported.

That same year, O’Barry, at a summit hosted by Earth Island’s International Marine Mammal Project to discuss strategies for freeing captive whales and dolphins, was recruited for the Taiji mission: “I was hoping someone else would raise their hand,” O’Barry told me, “but no one did. So I raised my hand and said I would go. And we literally passed the hat and the next day I was on the plane to Taiji. On the way back… I called Dave Phillips [director of IMMP and a co-director of Earth Island Institute] and said, ‘This is too big for any one group.’”

So O’Barry and Phillips pulled together a number of organizations – Earth Island Institute, In Defense of Animals, a Swiss group called Ocean Care, Animal Welfare Institute, and the UK-based Campaign Whale – to form the Save Japan Dolphins Coalition and pay for O’Barry to expose and stop the dolphin capture and killing. O’Barry traveled repeatedly to Taiji over the next two years.

He spent most of his time hiding in the thickets above the cove, trying to get video proof of the slaughter. He pulled all-nighters in the rain and spent long days in the sun. Working alone, and verbally threatened by the local fishermen, he sometimes felt afraid. “Let’s say somebody decided to do something stupid,” he told me when we were with the 60 Minutes crew on the bluff. “They could easily say, ‘Hey it was an accident. He fell.’”

The years spent by himself, the frustration of trying to convince the world of an injustice that he feels so acutely, have left a mark on O’Barry. He carries with him a loneliness, the weight of a martyr. He is convinced that were it not for him and a small group of allies, the Taiji scandal would fade away. “What I do is, I start looking around: Well, who the hell is going to do this if I stay home?” he said. “Will the government do it, any government? No. Will the marine mammal scientists of the world do it? No. Will the multi-billion-dollar captivity industry and WAZA [World Association of Zoos and Aquariums] do it? No. The animal welfare community? They do a lot of good things, but they’re not doing this. So who is going to do this? You use the process of elimination: We’re the only hope.”

This single-minded commitment has won O’Barry a great deal of respect. As Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson told me, “Ric is one of the most focused people in the movement – knowing what his objective is and pursuing it. And his objective is freeing dolphins and stopping the capture and killing of dolphins around the world. And there is no one who has done that with more passion than he has.”

For O’Barry, who describes himself as “reclusive,” the often-solitary struggle is bearable. But the constant conflict takes its toll. Although he has come to terms with the fact that battling is part of his job description, he is not a natural fighter. If some people seek out drama because it flatters their sense of self-importance, O’Barry is not one of them. “The whole job, the whole effort, it’s all about conflict,” Helene, his wife, said. “It’s the thing he likes the least. He doesn’t want to see conflict himself.”

I witnessed how confrontation impacts O’Barry the night of The Cove screening at the press club. Normally, O’Barry exudes calmness even when everyone around him is in motion; as his Japanese translator put it, he is the eye at the center of the cyclone. But in the hours leading up to the showing, he had a difficult time sitting still. He later confided to me, “Sometimes the stress of anticipating the battle is worse than the battle itself.” That night, the battle felt bad enough, and after the fiery Q&A his stomach was “topsy-turvy.” And so while his team gathered their equipment, O’Barry slipped unnoticed out a back door. His entourage was left wondering what had happened to him.

O’Barry’s activist career started inauspiciously. Immediately after Kathy died in his arms, he hopped on a plane and flew to the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas, where he knew that a marine lab kept a solitary dolphin named Charlie Brown. O’Barry’s plan was simple: As part of the first Earth Day celebration he would don a green armband, boat out to the pen, cut the mesh holding the dolphin in, and usher it to freedom. His civil disobedience would call attention to the plight of captive dolphins around the world.

“I don’t know how I free these dolphins – but I know that if I didn’t show up, it would never happen.”

But everything went wrong. When he finished cutting the wire cage, it collapsed on top of him and pinned him to the seafloor, nearly drowning him. Then the tide went out, leaving his boat stranded inside the pen. Worse, he couldn’t get Charlie Brown to escape; the dolphin just kept swimming around the space it had known for years. The mission felt like a total failure.

The next morning, O’Barry was in the Bimini jail, and a week later in court, charged with trespassing. During the trial, O’Barry showed an instinct for political theater that has served him well in subsequent decades. He had noticed that the chief of police was a devout Christian, and when it came time to enter his plea, he said “guilty,” then asked if he could read from the police chief’s Bible. He opened to Genesis and, with a flourish, read about how God created “great whales” and “saw that it was good.” The capture of dolphins, he said, violated God’s law.

The judge charged him with a five-dollar fine and ordered him on the next plane. Charlie Brown remained in his pen. But the stunt succeeded in sparking awareness about dolphin captivity. The Miami Herald ran a front page story headlined, “Trainer of Flipper in Flap; Can’t Get Dolphin to Flee.” Life magazine covered the episode.

The Bimini action established a hallmark of O’Barry’s method – instinct and emotion first. He is convinced that the secret to his successes is his mere presence. Paul Watson told me, “Ric is an example of what Woody Allen once said, '90 percent of success is just being there.' ”

For O’Barry, planning is a secondary concern, something that he often leaves to others. Discussions of tactics and strategy don’t interest him: “I don’t always know what to do, but I know you have to at least show up. I respond to information. I get a call: There are six dolphins in a cage in Haiti. I get pictures. I get on a plane and I go. I don’t know how I free these dolphins – but I know that if I didn’t show up, it would never happen.”

This persistence often has led to personal sacrifices. Mark Lavelle, an old friend who has known him since “his pillow was full of receipts he was never going to get reimbursed for,” told me: “He’s a person who doesn’t compromise his beliefs. I don’t know how he does it. It’s just over and over and over. It’s just tiring, and he doesn’t spend enough time with his family.”

That was certainly true throughout much of the 1980s, when O’Barry was trying to rehabilitate dolphins in Israel, Brazil, and Central America. He was living hand-to-mouth working as a stuntman and extra, and what money he had went straight to The Dolphin Project. His commitment was straining his relationships. “The issues, it’s always the issues,” O’Barry told me. “That’s how I lost my first family. It was a triangle: me and Martha and the dolphins. And triangles never work. That’s how it was with Lincoln. I was supposed to be there for a school event, and instead I was off in Australia.”

Lincoln acknowledges that his father was often absent, but he doesn’t harbor any resentment. “I wasn’t really aware that it was an unusual situation until I was much older,” he said. “I don’t think he should have done anything differently. People like that have to sacrifice everything in their life.”

As an escape, O’Barry took up oil painting. Then “the issues” began to intrude onto the canvas. “The first series of paintings I did was a woman in a bathtub,” he said. “The second painting, there is a towel hanging out of the bathtub, and I painted a little embroidered dolphin on the towel. The next painting, there is a dolphin in the bathtub with the woman. And the next painting, the woman’s gone. So I started painting dolphins.” In 1990, he and Martha got a divorce.

Today, O’Barry is just as committed, but he has found more of a balance between his work and his family. “When he is with his family, he is really with his family,” said Helene, whom he married in 1999. “Our five-year-old daughter forces him out of this world. Going for bike rides or going swimming. That has meant a lot to him.”

The burning guilt that once drove him has cooled, and what was once obsession has made way for a steadier emotion, a sorrow that he refuses to let become unhappiness. Among social change activists, there are those driven by anger and those spurred by sadness. The angry ones often become brittle and sharp as the injustices of the world grind into cynicism. Those who pursue justice from a feeling of sadness are more likely to achieve a kind of grace, an unflinching recognition of the world as it is coupled with faith that it can change for the better. O’Barry fits in the latter category. “Ric hasn’t changed at all these years,” Lavelle said. “He never got jaded.” At the same time, he has come to peace with the idea that he may not see the victory he has sought. “There’s a couple of lifetimes of work out there,” O’Barry told me.

This natural patience is what makes O’Barry good at deprogramming dolphins before releasing them into the wild. “We are both kind of quiet people, so we get along really well because of that,” Helene said. “Our best times have been when we are living in the jungle together or living on islands, doing this work he so obviously loves. And he’s an expert at that. He’s so in tune with the dolphins. He doesn’t feel the need that a lot of people have – to own them. He gives them their space.”

Which is, of course, not at all like the jostling he has experienced during his years of campaigning. The world of people is not his element.

“If my detractors knew how much I like staying home and watering the bamboo, they would probably pay me half a million dollars to stay home and water the bamboo,” he said. “My favorite thing is watering the plants. I love watching the bamboo grow in slow motion.”

In our first conversation, O’Barry told me, “I’ve spent much of the last 40 years with people who hate me. Instead, I could be at home with people who love me.” It’s a phrase that, along with the bamboo line, appears often in news articles. These repetitions could be mistaken for an older man’s habit. Or they could be the long-rehearsed lines of a well-played part. Because O’Barry is, in a way, performing a role he has written for himself – the redeemed man working to expunge his sins.

Which is not to say that he is insincere. Only that, like many public figures, O’Barry has crafted a persona, and this persona – with its parable-perfect story and snappy one-liners – gives him an armor that protects him from the world. Like many people who are accustomed to being the center of attention, O’Barry is a mix of the withdrawn and the eager. He has the instincts of an introvert; “I’ve never been accused of making chit-chat,” he wrote in his memoir. At the same time, he is an affirmation-seeker, “I’ve always liked people and wanted them to like me,” he also wrote. It’s a combination ripe for vulnerability. Which is why the performance is important: It allows him to stay committed to “the issues” without burning out.

I glimpsed O’Barry’s need to be liked one morning in Taiji. He was using Skype to talk with an official in the office of the president of the Dominican Republic. They had just started discussing the controversy over importing captured dolphins when the call got dropped. O’Barry tried unsuccessfully to re-initiate the call. When I glanced over, he was staring down at his lap, his hands limp, much like when he was looking at the orca at the whale museum. “This guy works for the president,” he nearly moaned. “He’s going to think I’m so rude.”

This is O’Barry’s central contradiction: He hates to be disliked, yet he has committed himself to a line of work in which he is destined to cause antagonism. He may be leading the battle to stop the dolphin killing in Taiji, but he is a reluctant warrior. It is only an ethic of service that keeps him going. “He has a very hard time saying no, my dad,” Lincoln said.

Friends and family are split on whether he will keep up the breakneck pace he has maintained for decades. “I think he’s got a couple of years in him, and that’s it,” Lincoln said. “To a lot of people he seems like a superhero, but even superheroes need a day off every once in a while.”

Others aren’t so sure. “One of the things Ric has demonstrated is that you don’t retire from this movement,” Watson said. “You are in it for life. Eighty, ninety or whatever, he will still be in it. He’s the kind of person who changes the world. That’s the only thing that changes the world – individual passion. Governments don’t change things. Big organizations don’t change things. Individuals change things.”

On our second evening in Taiji, I asked O’Barry what his plans were for the future. It had been a long day, including press interviews and a tense standoff between the media and the local fishermen who had been selling whale meat at the dock. But O’Barry was in fine spirits, singing softly to himself, as he does when he’s happy.

“I’m coming back,” he said. “You bet I’m coming back. We’ve got these bastards on the run.”

Then he put his car in drive and headed for the cove, just to check on things one last time.

To help stop the dolphin slaughter in Taiji, please go to: savejapandolphins.org.

Every day Meals On Wheels delivers more than a million nutritious meals to seniors across the country. But the need is so much greater. In this economic downturn, many of our programs are witnessing costs for food and fuel rise while waiting lists to receive food often keep growing.

The Meals On Wheels Association of America has a mission: to end senior hunger in  America by the year 2020. It’s our 2020 vision. This is our movement. This is our moment.

We can’t do it alone. We need your help. Go to mowaa.org today to see how you can provide the next meal. Also, take the pledge and add your name to the growing list of people who won't stand for this shameful reality right here in America.

This report describes how a woman’s nation changes everything about how we live and work today. Now, for the first time in our nation’s history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. This is a dramatic shift from just a generation ago (in 1967 women made up only one-third of all workers).

It changes how women spend their days and has a ripple effect that reverberates throughout our nation. It fundamentally changes how we all work and live, not just women, but also their families, their co-workers, their bosses, their faith institutions, and their communities.

Quite simply, women, as half of all workers, change everything.

Recognizing the importance of women’s earnings to family well-being is the key piece to understanding why we are in a transformational moment. This social transformation is affecting nearly every aspect of our lives—from how we work to how we play to how we care for one another. Yet, we, as a nation, have not come to terms with what this means.

In this report, we break new ground by taking a hard look at how women’s changing roles affect our major societal institutions, from government and businesses to faith communities. We outline how these institutions rely on outdated models of who works and who cares for our families. And we examine how our culture has responded to one of the greatest social transformations of our time.

Our findings should not be surprising to working men and women. Today, four-in-five families with children still at home are not comprised of the traditional male breadwinner and female homemaker. And women are increasingly becoming their family’s breadwinner or co-breadwinner.

The deep economic downturn is amplifying and accelerating this trend. Men have lost three-out-of-four jobs so far since the Great Recession began in December 2007, leaving millions of wives to bring home the bacon while their husbands search for work; women working outside the home, however, are not a short-term blip. This is a long-term trend that shows no signs of reversing.

Although our report is titled “A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,” this is not just a woman’s story. This is a report about how women becoming half of workers change everything for men, women, and their families. The Rockefeller/Time nationwide poll, conducted in early September as the chapters of the report were being finalized, finds that the battle of the sexes is over and is replaced by negotiations between the sexes about work, family, household responsibilities, child care, and elder care.

Yet, while men generally accept women working and making more money, men and women both express concern about kids left behind. Whose job is it? Men and women agree that government and business are out of touch with the realties of how most families live and work today.

Families need more flexible work schedules, comprehensive child-care policies, redesigned family and medical leave, and equal pay. The aim of this report is to take this conversation up to the national level, to engage men and women in thinking about what this new reality means for our vision of ourselves, our families, our communities, and the government, social, and religious institutions around us.

In short, this report lays the groundwork for how our society can better support the new American worker and the new American family.

The chapters in this report examine a host of ways in which our lives have changed forever because women have entered the labor force in ever-greater numbers. The policy implications vary from issue to issue, but the conclusions are clear: We need to rethink our assumptions about families and about work, and focus our policies—at all levels—to address this new reality.

Clearly we aren’t going back to a time when women were available full time to be their families’ unpaid caretakers, so we need to find another way forward. This report builds on the decades of work on these issues and aims to spark a national conversation and attract the attention of policymakers and political leaders to focus on the implications of this transformation for our society.

Maria Shriver opens our report with A Woman’s Nation. Her chapter describes the unique ways the Shriver and CAP teams approached this complex set of topics. She details how together we took a “deep dive” into how our culture and our society are responding to changes in women’s dual roles in the workforce and in the family.

Shriver takes a historical look at the transformation of the American woman since her uncle, President John F. Kennedy, asked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to chair the first Commission on the Status of Women in 1961. Shriver connects this overarching social shift to the most consistent roles of her life and of most women’s lives—the roles of daughter and mother.

As our country reshapes the face of its workforce, Shriver reminds us that the struggles of the women before us opened the doors for us to guide the next generation of young women through.

In her chapter, Shriver also describes the conversations she conducted with everyday Americans around the nation, discovering that men and women are indeed negotiating everything—from the daily struggle over whether the husband or wife will drop off their child at school, in the morning, to major life decisions about whether a family will relocate to further one spouse’s career, even if it hampers the other’s.

You’ll find quotes from these conversations highlighted between the different chapters of this report—insights that bring to life the equally telling analysis of how we work and live today. And alongside our chapters is a collection of essays that Maria Shriver and her team gathered from an intriguing array of women and men: Oprah Winfrey, Billie Jean King, Suze Orman, Patricia Kempthorne, and Tammy Duckworth; less famous but equally insightful individuals such as Col. Maritza Sáenz Ryan, First Gentleman of Michigan Dan Mulhern and Accel Partners’ Sukhinder Singh Cassidy; and everyday Americans at the forefront of these monumental changes in our society like Gianna Le, a young Vietnamese-American seeking to enter medical school this year.

This chapter captures these insights and matches them to the analysis in the report to sharply define these personal experiences on the larger canvas of our changing nation.

The New Breadwinners, by Heather Boushey, Center for American Progress senior economist, explores the economic underpinnings of the transformation of women’s work. This chapter hones in on who’s gone to work, where women are working, why they are working, how well they are coping, and what this means for the economic well-being of women and their families.

The chapter finds that while women are now half of workers and mothers are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in the majority of families, institutions have failed to catch up to this reality. Women have made great strides and are now more likely to be economically responsible for themselves and their families, but there is a still a long way to go. Equality in the workplace has not yet been achieved, even as families need women’s equality now more than ever.

Family Friendly for All Families: Workers and caregivers need government policies that reflect today’s realities, by Ann O’Leary, Center for American Progress senior fellow and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Health, Economic & Family Security at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, and Karen Kornbluh, former visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress, explores the implications of women in the workplace for government policy affecting workers and caregivers.

O’Leary and Kornbluh argue that we need to reevaluate the values and assumptions underlying our nation’s workplace policies and social insurance system to ensure that they reflect the actual—not outdated or imagined—ways that families work and care today.

Up until now, government policymakers largely focused on supporting women’s entry into a male-oriented workforce on a par with men—a workplace where policies on hours, pay, benefits, and leave time were designed around male breadwinners who presumably had no family care giving responsibilities. But allowing women to play by the same rules, as a traditional male breadwinner worker is not enough.

Too many workers—especially women and low-wage workers—today simply cannot work in the way traditional breadwinners once worked with a steady job and lifelong marriage with a wife at home.

O’Leary and Kornbluh suggest that a fruitful way for government to address this new economic and social reality would be to update our basic labor standards to include family-friendly employee benefits and reform our anti-discrimination laws so that employers cannot disproportionately exclude women from workplace benefits.

Their chapter also argues that we need to modernize our social insurance system to account for varied families and new family responsibilities, including the need for paid family leave and social security retirement benefits that take into account time spent out of the workforce caring for children and other relatives.

O’Leary and Kornbluh close with suggestions for increasing support to families for child care, early education, and elder care in order to help working parents cope with their dual responsibilities.

Next is a reflective essay, Invisible Yet Essential: Immigrant women in America, by Maria Echaveste, Center for American Progress senior fellow and senior distinguished fellow at the Warren Institute at University of California Berkeley School of Law. This chapter focuses in on how we often overlook the crucial work—child and parental care, home maintenance, food production, and cleaning—once done by the unpaid wives of male breadwinners but which is now the work of immigrant women.

These hardworking immigrant women have helped make possible other women’s mass entry into the workforce. Echaveste points out that our economy is increasingly based on a growing service-sector industry, which in turn challenges all of us to value the work of the millions of immigrant women performing these services. Indeed, she concludes that the work these women do will be necessary regardless of how high-tech our economy becomes. They can no longer be ignored.

Sick and Tired: Working women and their health, by Jessica Arons, director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress, and Northwestern University law professor Dorothy Roberts, explores the implications of women working and earning the family income on women’s health, as well as women’s access to employer-based and private health insurance.

They find that women’s breadwinning has not always come with greater access to health benefits and, too often, women’s health is compromised as they combine work and family responsibilities. As more women work, the authors note that we are developing a greater understanding of the health implications for women and their families—everything from inequitable job conditions and workplace health hazards to the timing of when women become mothers.

Further, they highlight how our current health insurance system, centered as it is on employer-sponsored insurance, fails women in a variety of ways.

Better Educating Our New Breadwinners: Creating opportunities for all women to succeed in the workforce, by professor and former dean of University of California Berkeley’s graduate division Mary Ann Mason, explores the implications for our education system, focusing on post-secondary education. She finds that women have made great advances in educational attainment, yet there is still clear evidence that women face barriers within our educational institutions. Further, even when women receive the same degrees as men, they continue to face lower wages and fewer high-paying job prospects due to inflexible and unsupportive work environments.

Mason examines both sides of this gender coin. Women receive 52 percent of high school diplomas, 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 50 percent of doctoral degrees and professional degrees. But three problems persist. First, not all women have gained access to post-secondary education. Hispanic women, for example, lag far behind their counterparts.

Second, women remain concentrated in the “helping” professions of health and education and are falling behind in entering the higher-paying fields of the future, including science, mathematics, engineering, and technology. Finally, more women with family responsibilities are attending all levels of post-secondary education, but they need family-friendly support to get their degrees (just as all workers need businesses to respond to the fact that our highly-educated workforce necessarily combines work and care).

Mason recommends that policymakers focus on these three problems and offers some solutions to help them do so, including increasing family-friendly environments in our educational institutions and increasing compliance with Title IX with regard to science, engineering, mathematics, and technology at all post-secondary levels.

Got Talent? It Isn’t Hard to Find: Recognizing and rewarding the value women create in the workplace, by Brad Harrington, professor of organization studies and executive director of the Center for Work & Family at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, and Jamie Ladge, assistant professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University, point out that women make up half the talent that is available to corporate America and small businesses.

The authors argue that women’s outstanding performance in educational institutions, especially in higher educational and professional schools, demands that employers create workplaces that attract, retain, develop, and exploit (in the best sense of the word) this tremendous resource.

They detail, however, that the vast majority of employers need to let go of outdated models such as thinking that there is only one place that work gets done, one way to structure a workday, one model for the ideal career, and one leadership style that works in today’s workplace. Harrington and Ladge show that flexible work arrangements, flexible career paths, and new leadership styles better meet the needs of today’s diverse workforce as well as today’s flexible and fast-changing economic environment. They argue these new work policies should not be perks for only a chosen few. All workers need policies that meet the changed realities of work and family, not just elite workers. In short, the conversation is no longer about whether women will work, but rather about how businesses are dealing with the fact that their workforce is increasingly made up of women and most workers today—men and women—share in at least some care responsibilities.

The Challenge of Faith: Bringing spiritual sustenance to busy lives, by Kimberly Morgan, associate professor of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University, and Sally Steenland, senior policy advisor for the Faith and Progressive Policy project at the Center for American Progress, explore the ongoing role of religion and spirituality in women’s lives.

They ask how traditional faith communities and new organizational forms of spirituality have responded to women’s increased employment outside the home. Their conclusion? Women are struggling to find the time for religious involvement amid the responsibilities of job and family, which in turn means religious institutions need to adapt to these new realities—especially as the support and services that organized religion provides become more important than ever.

Morgan and Steenland note that some congregations have actively engaged with today’s new realities, providing increased services that address the challenges for families that no longer have an adult who remains outside the labor force.

Yet others have not, and in many cases while women have entered boardrooms and are leading companies, faith institutions have been slow to incorporate women into their leadership. Morgan and Steenland suggest several ways for faith and spiritual communities to better engage with today’s busy women.

University of Michigan communications professor Susan Douglas then shows us in Where Have You Gone, Roseanne Barr? How the media that we’re surrounded by every day have in some ways overshot reality and in many ways not caught up on the way women work and live in our society today.

The mainstream media outlets often suggest that women have “made it,” portraying women as successful executives at the top of every profession, yet in real life there are far too few women among the highest ranks of the professions, and millions of everyday women struggle to make ends meet and to juggle work and family. Douglas suggests women need to challenge these misleading portraits with facts, vigor, and humor.

Douglas’s provocative chapter is accompanied by an essay titled Sexy Socialization: Today’s media and the next generation of women, by Stacy L. Smith, a fellow at the Center for Communication Leadership and Policy at the Annenberg School of Communications, and two of her colleagues, Cynthia Kennard, a senior fellow at the Center, and Amy D. Granados, a policy analyst at Annenberg.

The three authors highlight what today’s 8-to-19-year-olds are taking in about the role of men and women in the workplace and society through the lens of various media, focusing on how troubling male and female sexual stereotypes could affect the life and career choices of our next generation. The authors express concern about the future of women breadwinners in the coming decades because of these stereotypes, but hold out hope that the media industry itself will change as more women rise within its ranks or launch new media outlets on their own.

Our report then shifts focus to a series of chapters and essays that we hope will get people talking about all of our analytical research. In Has a Man’s World Become a Woman’s Nation?, Michael Kimmel, sociology professor at the State University of New York, Stonybrook, surveys the varied responses that men have had to women’s entry into the workforce and to losing the title of sole breadwinner.

He finds that most men have chosen the path toward acceptance of greater gender equality and often relish the extra earnings women bring into the family—but that some groups of men continue to struggle with the idea of widespread employment of women and mothers as it has made them question their very notion of masculinity.

Above all, though, Kimmel finds that while both men and women want the kind of support that makes it possible to have a dual-earner, dual-caregiver family, these issues are more often misperceived as only “women’s issues” in Washington and statehouses around the nation.

Men need family-friendly policies so that they can have the sorts of family relationships they say they want to have, as well as careers that enable them to work and live better in our changing 21st-century economy. Kimmel closes his chapter with a call for men to rally behind efforts to make it better for women and men together to work and live in our changing economy and society, not rely on women alone to do so.

Next, we learn that negotiating around the kitchen table can be good for your marriage. In her reflective essay, Sharing the Load, Evergreen State College sociologist Stephanie Coontz provides evidence that the most stable, high-quality marriages are those where men and women share both paid work and domestic work. This is a shift from generations ago when the most stable marriages were those where husbands specialized in paid work and wives did all the domestic work.

In this section we also include two concluding reflective essays, one by senior correspondent for The American Prospect Courtney E. Martin and the other by political strategist and media consultant Jamal Simmons. They explore what it all means for today’s generations of women and men who grew up in a world that was less likely to question the desirability of the equality of women but understands that does not yet mean true equality.

Simmons focuses on how the woman you commit to today may have the same name and social security number as the woman you are with tomorrow, but she may want completely different things in her life at different times throughout your lives together. For him, the rules seem to be maddeningly flexible. Martin notes that the women (and men) of her generation have come of age at a time when feminist values are simply in the water.

But she argues that we need comprehensive policy reform that reflects an accurate picture of the workers and families as we really are, not as we imagine ourselves to be. She closes by saying that “It’s a good thing we’ve been so pumped up on post-gender idealism, because there are some big battles ahead.”

To gauge just how representative these conversations and observations are of actual conditions in American homes and workplaces, we close the report with a hot-off-the-press landmark nationwide poll. This Rockefeller/Time poll of 3,413 people nationwide takes a broad and deep look at what men and women think of their changing roles in society and their attitudes toward each other as spouses, parents, bosses, and co-workers.

Center for American Progress fellows John Halpin and Ruy Texiera, Kelly Daley with global research company Abt SRBI Inc., and former Los Angeles Times pollster Susan Pinkus conducted, analyzed, and then concisely summarized the poll findings for us in their chapter Battle of the Sexes Gives Way to Negotiations.

The poll results reveal a truce in the battle of the sexes, demonstrating that men and women are in agreement on many of the day-to-day work and family issues. The old line in the sand separating them has largely washed away. Indeed, both men and women agree that women’s movement into employment is good for the country.

Virtually all married couples see negotiating about the rules of relationships, work, and family as key making things work at home and at work. The authors conclude that the one clear message emerging from this poll is that the lives of Americans have changed significantly in recent years, yet the parameters of their jobs have yet to change to meet new demands.

They find that political and business leaders who fail to take steps to address the needs of modern families risk losing good workers and the support of men and women who are riding the crest of major social change in America with little or no support.

Rather than pining for family structures of an earlier generation, the authors report that the poll found that men and women agree that government and businesses have failed to adapt to the needs of modern families. Americans across the board desire more flexibility in work schedules, paid family leave, and increased childcare support.

Given the ongoing difficulties many people face in balancing work and family life, it is not surprising that large numbers of Americans—men and women alike—view the decline in the percentage of children growing up in a family with a stay-at-home parent as a negative development for society.

Yet, ever practical and pragmatic, this poll demonstrates that Americans understand that everything has changed in their work and lives today and that consequently they are working things out as best they can while looking to their government and their employers to catch up.

The academic research, anecdotal evidence, personal reflections, and poll results that make up this unique report all confirm that recognizing women now constitute half of the workers in the United States is only the first step. The second is identifying what we need to do to reshape the institutions around us.

We can then begin to take the necessary actions to readjust our policies and practices. When you finish reading our report, we’re confident you’ll agree that more than four decades after President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, we’ve learned that while there’s much to cheer about, we still have a long way to go.

We as a people must transform the way our government, our businesses, our faith-based institutions, and our media deal with the realities of a woman’s nation so that all of us can better cope with the transformation of how we work and live.

The ultimate goal is a more prosperous future for all women and men in a nation that recognizes the unique value of each of us to contribute to the common good at work and at home. We believe that we can get there together, and that this report takes an important step along that path.

Thousands of people left homeless by the devastating Haiti earthquake are moving into a camp with 1,000 ShelterBox tents – the largest tent village to be built since the disaster.

Situated near the US Embassy in Port au Prince, the encampment, named Congress Camp, will house up to 6,000 refugees from the centre of the city allowing them to stay close to their communities and carry on with their daily lives.

ShelterBox’s Response Team (SRT) in Port au Prince has been working around the clock to help set up the camp with 1,000 disaster relief tents, each of which can house an extended family of up to 10 people. The team has worked closely with the French aid agency ACTED and IOM (International Organisation for Migration) to create the tent village which is also equipped with showers and latrines.

John Leach, ShelterBox’s Head of Operations, said: “This is an urban camp which means people can carry on with their daily lives and won’t be forced to locations outside of Port au Prince.”

“We have a huge number of tents here which will provide shelter to thousands of people and give them a chance to start rebuilding their lives. But we also have tent encampments set up in several other locations in and around Port au Prince; thousands more ShelterBoxes are on their way to the city.’

In another camp in Delmas, a suburb of Port au Prince, work is continuing to provide emergency shelter to families with newborn babies and pregnant women. Additional tents have been set up with the help of the US Military’s 82nd Airborne Division.

SRT member Mark Pearson (UK) said: “Forty additional ShelterBoxes were dropped here to replenish the camp and now more than 200 families are living in this camp. We could not operate without the full support of the US military and state department in this area.”

ShelterBox has also worked with the women’s charity V-Day in providing 40 ShelterBoxes to vulnerable women in Port au Prince. In addition, 50 ShelterBoxes have been given to the French association, Enfants de la Rue, to help house children caught up in the quake.

Meanwhile, the aid operation from the UK continues. Another 1,800 ShelterBoxes are set to be flown from Stansted Airport to Santa Domingo, the Dominican Republic, where they will be transported overland to Port au Prince. It will bring the total number of ShelterBoxes deployed in Haiti to more than 7,000 boxes, providing emergency shelter to more than 70,000 people.

ShelterBox Founder and CEO, Tom Henderson, added: “None of this would have been possible without the fantastic fundraising efforts from ShelterBox supporters around the world. The need is huge, but the response is matching it.

By the sheer grit and determination of our staff, volunteers and donors we’ve been able to respond in record time, preparing more ShelterBoxes in two weeks than we’ve ever done before. We’re in this for the long haul and I know our supporters will keep on going, keep on fundraising and keep on helping us make a difference.”

So, how do you design your application form? Are there decent metrics to help you assess grantee progress? And why aren’t these the first questions you want to be asking yourself?

My guess is that none of us have gone into this business because we’re passionate about processing and evaluating grants, yet these aspects of our work devour an inordinate amount of time and money. Think also of the resources our grantees divert from their real jobs to chase donor prospects and meet the evaluation demands of funders. How much value does all this add?

As long as we’re in the realm of a thought experiment, I contend that the ideal system might require no applications, no metrics, just a river of money flowing from philanthropists to where it’s needed.

Yes, our work is complex, and it is vital to make good decisions. But I believe we could do just as well if we simply found 50 experienced and creative programme officers and let them direct that entire river of money without so much as a cover letter or a concept paper.

How would they do it? I believe they would know, intuitively. Their experience would tell them who to talk to, how to evaluate potential solutions and players, and what levels of funding made sense. Yes, they’d make mistakes. Yet the river of money might be twice the size it is today because we would reduce waste at both ends.

At Greengrants, we’ve had success with a model that uses elements of this idea, most notably with our grantmaking advisers who volunteer their time to identify grantees and help us cut red tape.

Since we make very small grants, which can be expensive, a simple, almost handshake system seemed to be a practical shortcut. As I’ve become increasingly comfortable with our approach, I’ve come to believe that it needn’t be limited to our little niche.

Decisions don’t always benefit from more information and deliberation. I believe we are too fond of the idea that we can inoculate against bad decisions by developing more rigorous systems. Even if these systems protect us from the occasional bad grant, I think the cost is far too high.

Recent research on cognition tells us about the limits of conscious thought – its low capacity for handling complex information. In Blink!, Malcolm Gladwell’s primer on intuition, he cites an experiment in which people solved 30 per cent fewer puzzles when asked to explain their methods, because their intuitive sense was working much better before their conscious brain intruded.

How can we make the world a better place? This is our puzzle, and it’s astonishingly complex. I can’t begin to solve it in each of the 120 countries where we’ve made grants. Our approach is to assign that question to as many people as we can who will help us answer it in the countries where they live and work.

It’s a system that uses local knowledge, trust and even intuition to cut corners. Do we make mistakes? I certainly hope so. How else can we learn? And what of the consequences of inaction? How many opportunities will be missed while we’re waiting for the latest data?

Intuition often allows us to do things faster, cheaper and better, giving us a survival advantage. When we talk about harnessing intuition, we are also talking about simple common sense.

There are some very serious and urgent challenges in the world today. Our survival is clearly at stake, and it strikes me that another log frame analysis might not really move us forward.

So what can we do? Perhaps it’s time to trust our instincts a bit more – and the knowledge and experience of our grantees, staff and partners.

Here’s a thought: trust their strategic vision instead of forcing them to conform to our vision. Look hard at the return on investment of further data gathering and remember what drew us to this enterprise in the first place. Then always, when in doubt, fall back on the wisdom of the many resourceful and energetic people we have gathered together in our cause.

As a faculty member, I would be embarrassed for him to have to tell his CEO friends, “Thanks so much for your donation, but unfortunately we have to give it back because we couldn’t find any students who wanted it.” So, I need your help. Please contact me if you or anyone you know is interested in the program. We want to help out as many young scholars as we can. Don't worry about whether or not you (or they) have taken the GMAT, etc. All you need to do is just apply.

The MA in Management is a 10-month program for applicants who graduated on or after May 1, 2009 from an accredited college or university and have less than 12 months of post-graduate work experience. Applicants must have majored in liberal arts, sciences or engineering. However, business or business-related majors are not eligible. Corporate fellowships (full tuition and stipend) and other scholarships are available; applications must be completed by the March 1, 2010 scholarship deadline for consideration.  For more information on the MA program visit this link and for more information on the Corporate Fellowship award visit this link.

The full-time MBA is a two-year program for applicants who graduated from an accredited college or university and have a minimum of two years of post-graduate professional work experience. All majors are eligible.  For more information visit this link.

We also offer a part-time MBA program on evenings and Saturday for working professionals.  For more information visit this link.

The Master of Science in Accountancy (MSA) program is a 12-to-18-month program for applicants who graduated from an accredited college or university. All majors are eligible and there is no minimum or maximum post-graduate work requirement. For more information visit this link.

The Summer Management Program (SMP) is a five-week business “boot camp” for rising juniors and seniors currently attending accredited colleges or universities. Recent (after December 2009) graduates are also eligible. Business and business-related majors are not eligible. This is an 8-credit course. For more information visit this link.

Various scholarships are available for all of the programs listed above. For more information on application criteria visit this link, and for more details on scholarship opportunities visit this link.

For additional information about the Wake Forest University Schools of Business, visit our website, email admissions@mba.wfu.edu or call 1.866.925.3622.

Women say they feel increasingly isolated,
invisible, stressed, and misunderstood.

I wondered what was going on. I talked to the women, and they filled out our questionnaires. I learned women are hungry for something that's missing in their lives—a place to connect. They say they feel increasingly isolated, invisible, stressed, and misunderstood. They say the news media, where I'd worked for 30 years, don't accurately reflect their lives anymore. They say women on TV shows and in the movies certainly don't either. They can't believe how out-of-touch government is with who women are today and what they need to survive.

They can't understand how slow business has been in figuring out how to retain, support, and promote women. They lament that many faith institutions want women to be volunteers, but won't give them a seat at the table, let alone a place at the altar. They're terrified how quickly their family finances could be wiped out by a child's catastrophic illness or a parent's Alzheimer's. And they're exasperated that pundits and pollsters continue to jam women into convenient boxes with labels like "soccer moms" or "security moms."

Of course, women are as diverse as men. They are successful businesswomen, single mothers living below the poverty line, college graduates making their own way, blue-collar wives in two-career families, gay mothers, foster mothers, childless women who've been laid off, women setting up Internet businesses from home, soldiers in combat units overseas. They don't dress the same way or vote the same way or have the same color skin. They don't speak with one voice. And they don't have one issue.

We decided we needed to learn some new, hard facts about today's American woman. Who is she? How does she live? What does she think? What does she earn? What are her politics? How does she define power? How does she define success? What does she think of marriage? What does she really think of men? How does she want to live her life moving forward?

We went to the Center for American Progress, where the president and chief executive, former Clinton presidential chief of staff and author John Podesta, told us CAP was right in the midst of studying the impact of the changing economy on women. In fact, CAP's chief economist, Heather Boushey, who is an expert on women and workforce issues, told us that women were right on the cusp of a huge change. Women were about to break through and account for fully half of all American payrolls for the first time. Bingo!

We decided we needed to learn some new, hardfacts about today's American woman. Who is she?How does she live? What does she think?

We told CAP that we wanted to study how women's changing roles were impacting not only the economy but also all the other areas of American culture that our conference participants had pointed out to us. And we especially wanted to know what men thought about it all. CAP said, "We're in!"

This report builds on the extraordinary work of so many women's groups who have gone before us, and the more than 200 state, county, and local women's commissions that day in and day out investigate and monitor the status of women and work diligently to promote equality. Their work and the groundbreaking reports of the Institute of Women's Policy Research have played critical roles in examining the status of the American woman.

Our report breaks new ground by taking a hard look at how women's changing roles are also affecting our major societal institutions: our government, businesses, religious and faith institutions, educational system, the media, and even men and marriage. And we examine how all these parts of the culture have responded to one of the greatest social transformations of our time. We look at where we are and where we should go from here.

It was back in 1961, when my uncle, President John F. Kennedy, asked former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to chair the very first Commission on the Status of Women. According to anthropologist Margaret Mead, who co-edited the final report, the goal was "a review of the progress that has been made in giving American women practical equality with men educationally, economically, and politically."1

The Commission's 1963 report, American Women, said that the role for women "most generally approved by counselors, parents, and friends [is] the making of a home, the rearing of children, and the transmission to them in their earliest years of the values of the American heritage."2

Back then, only 10 percent of families were headed by unmarried women—and in families where both parents worked, less than a fifth of the wives earned as much or more than their husbands.3 In fact, most women's jobs were in what the report called "low-paid categories" such as clerical work. And the Commission also found a "widening gap [between] the educational and career expectations for boys and for girls."4 The gap in political participation was wide, too. There were only two women senators and 11 congresswomen, and just two women had ever held cabinet posts.

Among the Commission's policy recommendations: equal pay for equal work, access to child care and paid maternity leave, and enhanced educational opportunities for women. Mead signaled in the final report, "The climate of opinion is turning against the idea that homemaking is the only form of feminine achievement."5

Indeed it was. The report was published within months of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, the opening salvo of the Women's Lib movement, which promoted the idea that women's true fulfillment could come only outside the home with "liberation" from wifely and motherly duties. With that, the pendulum of opinion seemed to swing all the way in the other direction.6 You could understand why women got whiplash.

All of a sudden, so many women became activists, taking to the streets and the halls of power. Many of these women risked their reputations, their security, their jobs—sometimes even their lives and marriages—to knock down walls of inequality. They got many outdated work laws changed and new anti-discrimination laws put in place.

Their work and their courage created opportunity for many women, enabling more women to go to college and professional schools, more women to play sports, more women to get on career tracks. Today we stand on their shoulders. Their work freed so many of us to dream new dreams and fulfill them. And with the simultaneous sexual revolution, the advent of the pill, and the Roe v. Wade decision, many women postponed or even said no to marriage or children. Women were moving up the ladder in just about every area of endeavor.

Fast forward to 2009. For the first time in our nation's history, fully half of U.S. workers are female—and mothers have become the primary breadwinners in 4 in 10 American families.7 That's a sea change from 40 years ago. What had been a slow and steady shift has been accelerating during the current recession, when more than three-quarters of the jobs lost have been men's jobs, especially in areas such as construction and manufacturing.8

With more and more men forced to stay home, more and more women are bringing home the bacon. Women are more likely than ever to head their own families. They're doing it all—and many of them have to do it all. When they work, it's no longer just for "the little extras." Their income puts food on the table and a roof over their heads, just like men's income always did.

In fact, half of all families rely on the earnings of two parents and in more than 20 percent of all families a single mother is the primary breadwinner.9 Seventy percent of families with kids include a working mother.10 And more and more of them, like me, are moving into what I call "the squeezed generation," caring for both kids and our own aging parents.

Welcome to A Woman's Nation

It's a transformational moment in our history—much as the opening of the West, industrialization, the great 1960s civil rights campaigns, and the flowering of the Internet age have all irrevocably altered the fabric of American life. With working women now the New Normal, striving and succeeding in areas where they never have before, so many assumptions and underpinnings of our society are cracking open.

The rumbling is shaking the ground in every corner of the culture, and many women and men are struggling to get their footing. The effect on every sector of our society will be deep, wide, and profound. We hope this report will help us all come up to speed and begin a national conversation about how our institutions need to adapt to the unfolding of A Woman's Nation.

To take the pulse of Americans—their realities and their expectations, their hopes and dreams—I put back on my journalist's hat and together with our team crisscrossed the country holding conversations with an array of women and men on the frontlines of this new American revolution. In addition, the Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with Time magazine, commissioned a nationwide poll of 3,413 men and women to substantiate what we were hearing on the ground and flesh out the academic research.

An overwhelming majority of both men and women said they're sitting down at their kitchen tables to coordinate their family's schedules, duties, and responsibilities, including child care and elder care, at least two to three times a week.

Together, the results of these efforts provide a fascinating window into the changing American landscape. What we heard loud and clear is that the Battle Between the Sexes is over. It was a draw. Now we're engaged in Negotiation Between the Sexes.

Virtually all married couples told the pollsters they're negotiating the rules of their relationships, work, and family. An overwhelming majority of both men and women said they're sitting down at their kitchen tables to coordinate their family's schedules, duties, and responsibilities, including child care and elder care, at least two to three times a week. Men said it was more like every day!

Indeed, during my conversation with powerful businesswomen on the West Coast, one told me she and her husband "are constantly renegotiating our agreement about what gets done, who does it—or do we hire somebody as opposed to doing it ourselves." And a man in Seattle told me he and his wife have to work out "who's gonna take care of the light bill? Who's gonna pay for the mortgage? It doesn't matter who's bringing the money in. The money is coming in, but decisions have to be made about how the money is going out."

In the Rockefeller/Time poll, more than three-quarters of both men and women agreed that the increased participation of women in the workforce is a positive change for society. Both sexes also agreed that men are becoming more financially dependent on women. And both women and men said they're still adjusting their lives, their expectations, and their assumptions to the change.

Women and men said they're still adjusting their lives, their expectations, and their assumptions to women's participation in the workforce.

The findings matched what I heard in the street. Everywhere I went, people talked to me about how overstressed and in crisis they feel, especially when it comes to financial security. Women said that never before has so much been asked of them, and never have they delivered so much. Divorced mothers talked to me about trying to make do without child support. One single mother who had just lost her job told me she was utterly dependent on her family and friends just to stay afloat.

Men are feeling out of sorts and stressed-out as well. One man said to me, "We've been in our comfort zone. We're men! We bring the money to the house! As soon as women start working, they're bursting our bubbles and basically doing our job. Doing it better, in some cases."

The men who were polled said that compared to their fathers, they're much more accepting of women working outside the home. But they're still looking for a playbook. Here's an exchange from Seattle:

Maria: Is there a revolution going on about what it means to be a man, what are the rules of manhood today?

Mike: Yes, but it wasn't started by us!

In fact, many Americans feel disoriented. The African American owner of an automotive parts company in Detroit told me, "Nothing in business school prepared me to deal with the problems I'm having." He said he has trouble sleeping at night. He's had to reduce his workforce by two-thirds, and employees are asking for pay cuts instead of layoffs.

Female employees want help with child care or time off to tend to sick grandparents. "Men are conditioned to be problem-solvers," he explained to me. "I solve my own problems. Well, today, the problems that are out there are very difficult to solve."

And very difficult to adapt to, according to some men we met. One told me, "It used to be really easy. You'd go into all these kinds of arenas where there were just guys. The military, the firehouse, the police station, the law firm, everywhere you went. And the big change, of course, is that women are now in every one of those arenas.

The dilemma for women has often been, ‘How do I be those things that are called masculine, like confident and assertive and ambitious, and still be a woman?' And for men now, everywhere we go, there's women. And some guys sort of feel like, ‘Oh my God, women have invaded!'"

And more and more often, a woman is the boss. One 55-year-old man told me, "In the olden days, women used their sexuality in the workplace, because they were looking for a husband to support them. Now the women have power." Intriguingly, though, the poll shows that women find it much harder to work for female bosses than men do.

And women often define that power differently from men. One woman who had made it to CEO chose to give up the corner office and downgrade to a lower-rung position. She told me, "I will admit, it was fun, it was power, and I was dealing with a bunch of top dogs. But now I get to hang out with my kids when they come home from school. For me the definition of success is not being a CEO and not being the biggest dog and frankly not making the most money. It's living a balanced life."

In fact, talk to women, and you hear a lot about the search for "a balanced life." More and more of them say if they could, they'd like to leave companies that are unresponsive and start their own businesses. Many of them do. In fact, the number of women working for themselves doubled between 1979 and 2003, so that women make up 35 percent of all self-employed people. Growth in the number of women-owned businesses is significantly higher than the growth in the overall business sector: The number of women-owned businesses is growing at a rate of almost 23 percent, 2½ times faster than the growth in the number of total businesses.15

One female corporate executive told me, "Women don't need equal pay. They actually need to be paid more, because the fact of the matter is that we typically are responsible for more within our families, and we have to pay to outsource more. Most of the men I have competed with for positions have had a stay-home wife at some point and many have had a wife throughout their entire marriage."

But other women countered that it's not up to employers to help with flex time or child care money. "If I'm doing the same amount of work as men, I want the same compensation. It's up to me figure out if I want to spend it on child care."

In 2009, these aren't just women's issues anymore. An overwhelming majority of both sexes believe the structure of the modern workplace isn't meeting people's needs. A preponderance of both men and women told the pollsters that if businesses fail to adapt to the needs of modern families, they risk losing good workers.

Still, too many women and men who were polled said there were occasions when they wanted to take off from work to care for a child, but were unable to do so. In fact, women reported actually being afraid to ask for time off for caregiving. And large majorities of both sexes agreed that businesses should be required to provide paid family and medical leave for every worker who needs it.

Many of the highly successful women I spoke to worried about women who had made it big and then got beat up in the media. They talked about the outright sexism they've seen hurled at high-profile women such as Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, Katie Couric and Barbara Walters, Carly Fiorina and Martha Stewart. They question whether the climb all the way to the very top is even worth it.

Another hint that there's still plenty of underlying sexism: Women told me that male co-workers ask them all the time to give pep talks to their daughters, but never to their wives. They marveled, "They want us to inspire their girls to great achievement, but don't you go giving their wives any big ideas!"

In fact, the poll shows that a substantial majority of women feel that men resent women who have more power than they do. Yet wherever I went, I was surprised how open men were to sharing their bafflement about what women want—and their own insecurities about what's expected of them.

"All of us grew up thinking this was a man's world, that doors were just gonna open to us because we had a Y chromosome," a Seattle man told me. "And suddenly, we have to adjust to the fact that that's not the case. And the recession has made it even more intense for us. So every family is trying to figure out what does it mean that we're both working or that I'm laid off and you're working? We haven't thrown some switch to go from a man's world to a woman's world. It's more like we're finally, for the first time, in a position where it's no longer only a man's world. Now what does that mean?"

With all the change and insecurity, women told the pollsters they rely on faith-based institutions and spiritual practice in general for help getting through.

Good question. What does it mean, especially in families where wives are suddenly the primary providers? Those stories moved me. One man told me, "My wife makes about three times what I make, and that has been challenging to me. I was raised very traditionally. The masculine partner took the lead or was supposed to."

Some men talked about reinventing themselves. I met a stay-at-home father who says he's coming to terms with shuttling the kids around and being supported by his wife. "It's confusing. Am I turning into not enough of a man? It just all depends how it's defined in your own family. So if I'm enough of a man to them, that's all that matters."

Another father told me, "It's role reversal a little bit. I have dinner ready. I do the grocery shopping. I do laundry. She works harder than I ever did." And what about his wife? She's worried about their daughter, because "I feel like I'm not there as much for her as I ought to be. I do have some regrets." In fact, the men and women who were polled both said they're concerned about the effect of both parents working and raising children without a stay-at-home parent.

With all the change and insecurity, women overwhelmingly told the pollsters that religious faith is important to them in general for help getting through. And men report seeking connectedness through talking and listening to other men—on the Internet, on sports radio, in church groups.

Is there any group that doesn't feel like fish out of water? I was relieved to discover during my travels that many younger couples aren't so wedded to old stereotypes. When one twenty-something woman's live-in boyfriend lost his job in Detroit, she told me, "The expectation was that we would just pull together and figure it out. People from my generation just expect women to work."

And I was glad that so many young men starting out today have a whole new sensibility about fatherhood. They told me they just expect to be active in their children's lives and help out at home, and they want it that way.

For some, of course, "woman as primary breadwinners" is old news, especially among Latinos and African Americans.

For some, of course, women as primary breadwinners is old news, especially among Latinos and African Americans. Said one black man, "When I see a strong woman, I'm actually more attracted to that, because that represents the women I was raised with." And a Hispanic single mother in Los Angeles said, "My mother taught me to work and be successful and not depend on a guy for all the things that I need."

Gay couples aren't following old stereotypes either. One lesbian partner told us, "When we go to soccer and back-to-school night, usually we are the ones where both parents are there. We don't have gender rules, so we've always joked, ‘Who's gonna be the husband tonight and take out the trash?' "

And marriages where the partners have adapted to the new realities seem to be stronger. As you'll read in this report, research shows that women are more sexually attracted to men who do more work around the house. And since a big predictor of a husband's satisfaction is how often he has sex, maybe all that kitchen-table negotiating and communicating about who does what around the house is having a good effect on the institution of marriage.

Within this huge shift, there will always be some who blame society's current ills on the very fact that so many women have gone to work and aren't staying at home with the children anymore. They point to high school dropout rates, teen pregnancies, and the millions of latchkey kids. They see those as women's issues. But most of the people we spoke to don't feel that way. They feel the care and nurturing of children isn't just a women's issue anymore.

These are family issues, and they affect all of us. Families have moved beyond finger-pointing to figure out how to confront these problems together. A union man in Detroit put it this way: "I think the fact that our roles are changing is just another way of us adapting to get the job done. We will do whatever needs to be done. And we will do it well."

More than four decades after President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women, we've learned that while there's much to cheer about, we still have a long way to go. Women still don't make as much as men do for the same jobs. Women still don't make it to the top as often as men.

Families too often can't get flex-time, child care, medical leave, or paid family leave. The United States still is the only major industrialized nation without comprehensive child care and family leave policies. Insurance companies still often charge women more than men for the exact same coverage. Women are still being punished by a tax code designed when men were the sole breadwinners and women the sole caregivers. Sexual violence against women remains a huge issue. Women still are disproportionately affected by lack of health care services. And lesbian couples and older women are among the poorest segment of our society.

But so much has changed. Homemaking is no longer, as Margaret Mead wrote back then, the "most generally approved" job for women. Women's expanding role in families, industry, the arts, government, politics, and other institutions is altering the American landscape. Women are learning they no longer have to shoehorn themselves into one stereotype or another, but they can do so if they choose—or they can make it up as they go along.

In 2009, women have more choices than they did 40 years ago. They can choose to have kids with a partner, in a traditional marriage or not. They can to stay childless, live as single parents, or choose a same-sex partner. They can be like the single mothers who raised a president of the United States and a brand-new Supreme Court justice.

They can be like Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. They can be like Diane Sawyer, Michelle Obama, Sandra Day O'Connor, or like Nancy Pelosi, who spent the first half of her life staying home to raise five children and then went on to become the first female Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Or anything else they can imagine.

It's in this new world that I'm raising four children. I'm trying to teach my boys to understand that the women in their lives will work and will have independent minds. I'm trying to teach them not just how to hold the door open, but how to do their own laundry and make their own mac and cheese. I'm also trying to teach my girls how to advocate for themselves, be smart about their finances—and to look not for a savior, but a loving, supportive, open-minded partner.

Which brings me back to my mother.

In so many articles after my mother's death, her brothers and pundits were quoted as saying, "If only Eunice had been a man, she could have been president!"

"If only." My mother learned from that. Her call to those who faced discrimination and the sting of rejection was to turn adversity into action. "Use adversity to give your life purpose and mission," she said. "Turn your adversity into advantage and opportunity." That's what she herself did, channeling her passion and outrage into changing the world for people with intellectual disabilities. She used her intelligence and her energy to improve the world—and that's why she's alongside so many other extraordinary women, all agents of change, who are immortalized in the Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

My mother figured out how to be true to herself in the man's world she was in—and I believe her solution makes her a real role model for today's American woman. She mothered five kids who adored her, shared the spotlight with her husband—and carved out a career for herself impacting millions of lives for the better. Her message to women was, "Don't let society tame you or contain you." Today, she could run for president. And I believe she would win.

I know for sure if she were alive today, she'd say about this report, "It's about time!" She'd get her hands on a hundred copies and send them to friends. She'd make bookstores put it in the window. She'd make sure every office on Capitol Hill had a copy, whether they wanted one or not. And when I'd say, "Mummy, calm down! This is just the first step," she'd say, "Well, when's the next step? Take that step, Maria, and take it now!"

And we shall. As we move into this phase we're calling a woman's nation, women can turn their pivotal role as wage-earners, as consumers, as bosses, as opinion-shapers, as co-equal partners in whatever we do into a potent force for change. Emergent economic power gives women a new seat at the table—at the head of the table.

As we move into this phase we're calling a woman's nation, women can turn their pivotal role as wage-earners, as consumers, as bosses, as opinion-shapers, as co-equal partners in whatever we do into a potent force for change.

Back in 1960, President Kennedy talked about the torch being passed to "a new generation." Well, five decades later, the torch is being passed . . . to a new gender. There's no doubt in my mind that we women will lift that torch. We will carry it. And we will light a new way forward.

Endnotes

1. President's Commission on the Status of Women, American Women (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1963), p. 18.
2. Ibid., p. 19.
3. See chapter by Boushey, Table 1, p. 38; Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008/2009 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
4. American Women, p. 4.
5. American Women, p. 204.
6. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963).
7. Heather Boushey, "Women Still Primary Breadwinners" (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2009). Institute for Women's Policy Research, "Unemployment Among Single Mother Families," IWPR Publication #C369 (2009). Ellen Galinsky, Kerstin Aumann and James T. Bond, "Times are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home" (New York: Family Work Institute, 2008), p. 8.
8. Boushey, "Women Still Primary Breadwinners."
9. Institute for Women's Policy Research, "Unemployment Among Single Mother Families," IWPR Publication #C369 (2009).
10. Galinsky, Aumann, and Bond, "Times are Changing," Figure 5.
11. Ibid, p. 6.
12. See chapter by Harrington and Ladge, p. 198.
13. Marti Barletta, Marketing to Women: How to Understand, Reach, and Increase Your Share of the World's Largest Market Segment, 2nd edition (Chicago: Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2006). 14. See chapter by Harrington and Ladge.
15. Darrene Hackler, Ellen Harpel, and Heike Mayer, "Human Capital and Women's Business Ownership" (Washington: Small Business Administration, 2008).

(Editor's Note: The Playa Wire will be publishing the remaining chapters of the Shriver Report in future posts.)

Earlier this year, the Center for American Progress decided to closely examine the consequences of what we thought was a major tipping point in our nation’s social and economic history: the emergence of working women as primary breadwinners for millions of families at the same time that their presence on America’s payrolls grew to comprise fully half the nation’s workforce. In addition, we were watching the Great Recession amplify and accelerate these trends. We are in the midst of a fundamental transformation of the way America works and lives.

But my own interest wasn’t just academic. It sprang from a very personal source: my mother. My family wasn’t much like what we were watching on TV in the 1950s. My parents had a tag-team work life—my father working in a factory during the day; my mother in a pink-collar job from 5 p.m. until midnight. Like millions of families today, they juggled, struggled, nurtured, laughed a lot, and fought a little so that their kids could lead good lives and get ahead. I don’t think my mother ever really thought of herself as a trendsetter, but she was at the leading edge of a wave that shaped America in the last half of the 20th century—a wave we call “a woman’s nation.” Though she recently passed away, she still serves as a role model for my daughters.

So I was delighted when Maria Shriver, who cleverly conceived of the phrase “a woman’s nation,” came to me with the idea of combining a project she envisioned with CAP’s work and together producing a landmark examination of this fundamental change in American society. We realized that Maria could add invaluable depth to the efforts underway because she recognized not only the enormous impact of these changes on the workplace, but their import for every aspect of the American life and culture, as well. A partnership was born, and it produced a document that goes far beyond the typical findings of your standard economic policy report.

This report brings together the relentless intellect of a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist who pushes beyond statistics to fully reveal the complexity of women’s lives and the academic muscle of a progressive think tank that understands how to comb through data and illuminate the trends re-shaping the American landscape.

In the summer of 2009, Maria packed her bags and crisscrossed the country and, with her team, engaged in conversations with everyday women and men in Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Silicon Valley, hearing and understanding from both sexes how this cultural upheaval has changed their lives. Maria used the diverse voices she heard to stitch together the work CAP was doing.

CAP’s contribution—led by senior economist Heather Boushey, the leading authority on the study of working families and the U.S. labor market, and Ann O’Leary, a CAP senior fellow and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Health, Economic & Family Security—shines a light on America’s defining institutions. We examined government and businesses; faith, culture, and media; and our health care and educational institutions, and then we considered meaningful ways they can adapt to this sea change in Americans’ lives.

And the Rockefeller Foundation, which generously funded a nationwide poll in collaboration with Time magazine, conducted a comprehensive examination of American attitudes about the role of women in today’s world.

The result is an exhaustive, multifaceted report. CAP’s economic team commissioned work from a variety of scholars and experts. Maria inspired and assembled a collection of diverse, incisive, and illuminating essays and brought to us her conversations with dozens of Americans around the country. And then there is the landmark national poll that closes the report. Together, we’ve created a provocative study that we expect will spur a national conversation about what women’s emerging economic power means for our way of life.

When we look back over the 20th century and try to understand what’s happened to workers and their families and the challenges they now face, the movement of women out of the home and into paid employment stands out as a unique and powerful transformation. Unlike the America our parents still remember and even helped to build, today:

* Moms aren’t home all day caring for younger children, waiting for the cable guy or to pick up the kids from school, yet quality child care and flexible hours at work are in short supply.

* Workplaces are no longer the domain of men. The last remnants of those days can scarcely be found at all, save on episodes of “Mad Men” or on “Leave it to Beaver” reruns. Women now comprise half the workers on employers’ payrolls. And while men and women still tend to work in different kinds of jobs, most workers under 40 have never known a workplace without women bosses and women colleagues.

* Schools still let kids out in the afternoon, long before the workday ends, and they shut their doors for three months during the summer, even though the majority of families with children are supported by a single working parent or a dual-earning couple.

* Most workers—men and women—now have family responsibilities they negotiate daily with their spouses, family members, bosses, colleagues, and employees. But it is still a rare doctor’s office that is open evenings or weekends, even though so many people work at all hours in our 24/7 economy.

When we look back over the 20th century and try to understand what’s happened to workers and their families and the challenges they now face, the movement of women out of the home and into paid employment stands out as a unique and powerful transformation.

Women becoming primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners changed everything. But, even though we were all witness to this phenomenon’s slow emergence over many years, these changes seem somehow to have snuck up on us. As a result, our policy landscape remains stuck in an idealized past, where the typical family was composed of a married-for-life couple with a full-time breadwinner and full-time homemaker who raised the children herself.

Government policies and laws continue to rely on an outdated model of the American family. And, despite the existence of innovative practices in corporate America, most employers fail to acknowledge or accommodate the daily juggling act their workers perform, they are oblivious to the fact that their employees are now more likely to be women, and they ignore the fact that men now share in domestic duties.

Our policy landscape remains stuck in an idealized past, where the typical family was composed of a married-for-life couple with a full-time breadwinner and full-time homemaker who raised the children herself.

Slow, too, have been our institutions of faith in recognizing this transformation of male-female dynamics at a time when increasingly urgent lives make spiritual support more needed—and, perhaps, less available—than ever before.

And the media present flawed images of the real challenges women face, embracing glamour, power, and sex while ignoring the daily struggle to raise children and pay bills.

At one level, everything has changed. And yet so much more change is needed. This report contemplates what a new America should look like after we finally embrace this important new dynamic in our lives and the changes it has caused in our homes and businesses.

At CAP, our work builds upon the progressive ideals of leaders who brought needed change to our national life, people such as Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King. We draw from the great social movements of the 20th century, from labor rights and worker safety to civil rights and women’s suffrage.

“A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything” is work in the best tradition of those ideals. It flips a switch in our culture, sparking a collective acknowledgement of the interdependence of men and women today. With that switch we hope will come changes in the collective mindset of our government, business, faith institutions, our culture, media, and most importantly, men and women. Embracing these new dynamics and sparking new conversations is what “A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything” is all about.

But this report is only the beginning of that conversation. In the months and years to come, we at the Center for American Progress hope you will join us in our efforts to transform our ideas into actual policies that make the world around us work better for families—as they really are. We hope you enjoy this report and that you’ll join us on the road ahead.

Gluten intolerance is not as debilitating as Celiac's Disease. Celiac's is more complex. The difference being that if a person with Celiac's ingests as much as a crumb of gluten they can land in the hospital. For those of us with gluten intolerance, we can suffer from bad stomach aches, or flu-like symptoms.

For those of us with Gluten intolerance, here is what happens: after being ingested, gluten flattens the very vili in the intestines that allow our bodies to assimilate its nutrients. Without the ability to assimilate food, we are malnourished; which opens the door to many potential medical problems. For us, leaving gluten out of our diets is NOT a simple short-term diagnosis, or fix. This IS a lifetime way of living.

This is where Hippocrates comes in handy: Let food be our medicine and let medicine be our food.

So how do we make life delicious, once diagnosed with either gluten sensitivity or intolerance? We leap into our kitchens and make bread! I used to make Challah every Friday night with our girls. That was out the window once we were diagnosed, so I thought! Ha!

Thank God for Whole Foods Market and the wonderful choices that were stocked on the shelves. Pamela’s, Bob’s Red Mill and a plethora of new food manufactures producing gluten free products to our rescue!

It truly is amazing what we can bake and prepare now. However, not all gluten-free products are created equal and you must read your labels! Not all products are truly gluten-free or beneficial for our bodies.

Yet the great news is that the culinary world is catching on. Restaurants and food manufactures are becoming aware and bringing us choices and opportunities to live among the "gluten eaters." Everyone is on the bandwagon. Gluten free is HIP! It is a michyah, a “miracle” in Yiddish.

Here’s how to make your first great tasting gluten free bread!

Ingredients:

1 Package of Pamela's Gluten Free Bread Mix (yeast pack enclosed)
1 Package yeast
1/4 cup fresh ground flax seeds
1/4 Cup Bob’s Red Mill coconut flour
1/4 C melted butter or Earth Balance buttery stick (dairy free)
1/4 C brown sugar, honey, agave or molasses
3 Large Omega 3/DHA eggs
1/2 Cup milk (Hempseed milk works great! And is dairy free!)
3/4 C Warm water

Mix all dry ingredients together. Mix all wet/liquid ingredients together. Blend together. Beat for 3 minutes using a stand mixer or a hand mixer. Dough will be sticky. Place batter in an 8 x 4 bread pan. Let the bread rest for 60-90 minutes, while covered in a warm place on your counter; not where it is cold or there is a draft.

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

Beat together 1 egg and 1 tablespoon of water. Using a pastry brush, paint the top of the bread with egg mixture. Sprinkle sesame seeds on the top. Put bread in oven.

Bake bread for 60-70 minutes. Let rest for 15 min. and then remove from bread pan. Cool slightly before slicing.

Note: On January 30th, I will be teaching a class at Whole Foods Market Plaza in El Segundo, CA at 11am. The class will be "How to make your Gluten-Free lifestyle delicious!"

I will share ways to enhance the flavor and benefit of your gluten-free foods, as well as the many choices you have in baking and dairy alternatives. You can sample many GF products, tour the store, get answers to your questions and learn the magic of menu planning.

Come have some fun while learning ways to enrich your gluten free life. I hope to see you there. For gluten-free recipes, questions or ways to enhance a favorite recipe contact Peggy at peggy@kitchenblessings.com

GEMS uses a holistic trauma-informed treatment model in their programs to address girls and young women’s complex needs throughout their transition and development. GEMS supports and empowers young women and girls who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and provides a continuum of services including:

• Street Outreach
• Court Advocacy and Alternatives to Incarceration Program
• Comprehensive Case Management
• Individual Counseling
• Education, Recreational and Therapeutic Groups
• Youth Employment and Leadership Training
• Transitional & Crisis Housing
• Referral Services

GEMS’ vision is to end the commercial exploitation and trafficking of children. GEMS advocates at the local, state and national levels to promote policies that support young women who have been commercially sexually exploited and domestically trafficked. We believe that all young women have great beauty and worth, and the potential for future success. The voices and experiences of youth survivors are integral to the development and implementation of all GEMS’ programming.



Martha B, Mary J Blige with Rachel Lloyd

GEMS is currently promoting the benefit song "This is To Mother You," written by Sinead O'Connor, which is performed (in the videos below) by Sinead O'Connor,  Mary J. Blige and Martha B, to bring awareness to human trafficking of American girls. All proceeds of this inspiring song will directly support the services that GEMS provides to trafficked and exploited girls and young women.  The song can purchased at Gems-Girls.org.



("Girls Are Not for Sale - We Are Millions" performed by Sinead O'Connor, Mary J Blige and Martha B.)



("This Is to Mother You" written and performed by Sinead O'Connor)



("This Is to Mother You" written by Sinead O'Connor, performed by Mary J Blige and Martha B)

Forty tons of emergency aid is being flown to Haiti from the Newquay Cornwall Airport as ShelterBox's massive aid operation to the earthquake-stricken country continues. Enough emergency shelter for 7,000 people will be flown directly to Port au Prince Airport or nearby Santa Domingo to be transferred immediately to the devastated island.

So far, 1,700 ShelterBoxes have been dispatched.

As mentioned in an earlier PlayaWire article, ShelterBox is an international disaster relief charity specializing in emergency shelter provision. Humanitarian aid is delivered in iconic green ShelterBoxes, which contain a disaster relief tent for up to 10 people, a stove, blankets and other items essential for survival. Disaster relief tents have already been used to build an emergency field hospital at Port au Prince airport.

Because of the logistical nightmare of getting aid into Haiti, ShelterBox has used a variety of means to get aid into the island including flying boxes on a Red Cross plane from France and on Virgin Atlantic flights via London Heathrow.

Securing a chartered aircraft for 700 more ShelterBoxes means thousands of people in Haiti left homeless by last week's devastating earthquake will be receiving disaster relief tents and other emergency supplies essential for survival.

ShelterBox’s Founder and CEO Tom Henderson said: 'In terms of logistics, the aid operation in Haiti has been ShelterBox's most challenging in the last decade, with only one airport on the island which was shut until recently and the port was shut as well.'

"As food, water and medicines are starting to get in, the focus now is fulfilling the need for emergency shelter."

To add to the logistical problems of delivering aid in Haiti, the airfield has only been operating during daylight hours and there has been a shortage of aviation fuel.

Richard Thomasson, Airport Operations Manager at Newquay Cornwall Airport said: "The Airport is delighted to be supporting ShelterBox in sending aid to Port au Prince. ShelterBox plays a crucial role in such catastrophes and we are happy to facilitate such aid flights to assist in this process directly from Cornwall."

Public donations are vital to ShelterBox's continuing work around the world. To make a donation please ring 0300 0300 500 or go to shelterbox.org to donate online and get the latest updates on the charity’s response to the Haiti earthquake.

Yasmin recounted her experience at the workshop. “I was anxious, not knowing how they would react to my singing because it is so different to what they grew up with. I arrived and everyone was tense as I spoke for the first fifteen minutes. But I did not want it to be a lecture so I asked for their help in turning it into a discussion. And then they did not stop asking me questions; smart questions.”

Clearly enthused and moved by her experience, Yasmin said, “They look like brothers and sisters, these kids. We are so alike that you cannot tell who is Arab or who is Jewish, and it is so natural for them to be together. I told them to always remember what they share in common. They may not know it yet, because they are young, but they are the solution, they are making history; they see each other, not as enemies, but as human beings.”

Yasmin recalls her own childhood, “I did not have this opportunity. Even though my neighbors were Arab, we did not mix. I grew up believing that they hate us and they want to kill us. One Arab teenager at the session asked me why Jews listen to Arab music if they hate them so much. I told him that I think music is a way we can touch each other, and get to know each other, because, although we are neighbors in Israel, we really are very far apart.”

She adds, “Through music we can discover each other, and discover that if someone has the heart to make beautiful music, they must also have the heart to accept us. I believe this can work. I could see how moved the students were, even the tough macho ones. They really can bring change between our two peoples, but it is a big responsibility.”

As a Goodwill Ambassador for Children of Peace, Yasmin feels passionately about her work for the charity and the children. “If I gave just one of them the hope or belief that they can dream and achieve, then this was, for me, the greatest honor. What a privilege to be exposed to the beautiful work this school is doing.”

Likewise, the students were very moved. One of them, Yael, said: “I very much enjoyed the meeting with Yasmin Levy. I was very impressed by her musical abilities, and even more than that I enjoyed listening to her personal story. I think that she showed us that what we are doing in our school is very important, and that our dream is happening, and we live it from day to day.”

Aid workers for the international disaster relief charity ShelterBox have been in Port au Prince since Thursday, working around the clock assessing the most effective ways to distribute the much-needed aid.

ShelterBox is an international disaster relief charity specializing in emergency shelter provision. Humanitarian aid is delivered in iconic green ShelterBoxes, which contain a disaster relief tent for up to 10 people, a stove, blankets and other items essential for survival.

930 ShelterBoxes have already been dispatched and are en route to Haiti while another 1,000 are being packed today at ShelterBox HQ by ShelterBox’s team of volunteers. Virgin Atlantic Airlines is supporting the relief effort by flying hundreds of the ShelterBoxes on their planes.

ShelterBox Response Team (SRT) members Dave Eby (US), Wayne Robinson (US) and Mark Pearson (UK) have been in contact with government officials and ACTED. They have set up a base with the help of a Haitian Rotarian.

Mark Pearson, who was one of the first on the ground in the Indian Ocean Tsunami, said, “This is worse than the Tsunami. It’s utter chaos at the airport. Buildings have been completely destroyed, the hospital has been destroyed. It’s a full-scale emergency, there’s so much destruction.”

“The priority at the moment is search and rescue, and then, emergency shelter provision, so obviously there’s frustration. There’s no fuel and people are hunting for water. It’s difficult to put the scale of destruction into words.”