How can mothers win? Ending the bias against caretakers.

As we’ve seen, both women and men face challenges reconciling work-life integrity. Usually, individuals are forced to adjust their own behavior: share household burdens, manipulate supervisors’ perceptions, or just opt out entirely.

What makes this whole balancing process harder is that caretakers suffer a particular bias at work. In her seminar last week on “Reducing the Caretaker Penalty: Norms, Laws, and Organizational Policy,” Stanford University’s Shelley Correll demonstrated how mothers, for example, are paid less than both fathers and childless women---nearly 5-7% less per child, in fact. But it’s difficult to overcome this because of two absurd and paradoxical societal perceptions:

• The assumption that mothers are less committed to their office work
• The normative view that mothers should be more committed to their children than their office work-and if they’re not, they’re bad people.

If mothers try to work their way out of the caretaker bias, they’re seen as selfish, arrogant, and dominant, and are penalized accordingly. Basically, mothers can’t win!

So can laws change societal norms? Professor Correll explains how, yes, they can not only provide punitive protections but also create more symbolic social consensus that implies what’s right and wrong.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) gives employees that have worked for over twelve months in an organization with more than 50 people the right to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year. Just knowing about FMLA and other organizational leave policies positively affects how colleagues view mothers and other caretakers who take short leaves. Even a limited law that’s weakly enforced can promote gender equity.

If we enable workplace leave more reflexively, we can prep society for more openness, namely to the reality that all people---men, women, rich, poor---have and must honor responsibilities outside of the workplace. As Professor Correll put it, “work should be a verb, not a place,” and Best Buy’s management has pioneered Results Only Work Environments (ROWE), where employees are paid for results and output rather than the number of hours worked.

Convincing employers and supervisors of the merits of this kind of flexibility might be more difficult, because they may have legitimate concerns about their workforce. But these employers ought to keep two things in mind. One is that their own expectations of different groups---women caretakers, African Americans, etc---are often incorrectly biased, and these are biases that impede a fair and efficient workplace. Another is that more flexible work environments will mean longer-term retention of good workers.

Low- and hourly-wage workers and their employers face another challenge: their work is inherently based on time commitment, and already feels risky. Even if they can afford it financially, these workers don’t want to take FMLA because it will prejudice their employers upon return.

Accordingly, good laws are even more important in these cases, setting the norm for what is right.

Photo Source.

The responsibilities of being a "Token" minority

Lauren Lyons, a Masters in Public Policy alumna of the Harvard Kennedy School, is a rocket scientist (literally, she used to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab) and a space and technology policy expert. An engineering graduate of Princeton university, Lauren serves on the UN's Space Generation Advisory Council, and conducts Space exploration public outreach.

She just wrote an absolutely stunning blog post about being a Black woman in elite academic and professional situations in America. Being even a minority in a room is a major step towards breaking glass ceilings; accordingly it can come with certain responsibilities---but also pain and frustrations.

Lauren was kind enough to let us feature that brilliant piece here. Please read the whole thing...

The Curious Conundrum of the Code-Switching Tokenized Teacher

A student raises her hand in a political science lecture, and confidently proclaims: “If people are to be treated equally under the law, then policies that single out minorities for special advantages are not only unfair and unnecessary, but are unconstitutional. President Obama is evidence that class is what determines your success in America, not race.”

People of color who have attended elite academic institutions might be able to identify with the following, oft reflexed, 3-step stream of consciousness:

Step 1: Jaw drops reactively in forming of the classic “WTF?” face.

Step 2: Calm down. Quickly straighten out the “WTF?” face, and try to appear nonplussed.

Step 3: Decision point:

a) Sit quietly and allow this person—and whomever in this room of 150 students agrees with her—to graduate from here actually believing this, be elected into Congress (because at this school, it really is a possibility), and then pass laws that curtail civil rights legislation, all while disappointing my ancestors who would have given anything for such a teaching moment on inequality and social justice, or 

 b) Take on the responsibility yet again, as the lone voice of color, to explain the “minority perspective,” subject myself to repeated Q&A, speak on behalf of every Black, Hispanic, and Native American kid who knows for certain that this country is in no way post-racial, deal with the fallout of receiving emails from classmates wanting to discuss it further a.k.a. try to prove me wrong and deny my experience, and risk now being forever marginalized at the resident thought leader on the Black experience even though my field of study is Science and Technology Policy.

Phew.

No, this is not an exaggeration. And as you can probably imagine, this thought process – although it occurs in the mere blink of an eye – is mentally, emotionally, and spiritually exhausting. And it seems that the more I find myself within elite academic, business, and social arenas where minority perspectives are vastly underrepresented, the more I find myself facing the Curious Conundrum of the Code-Switching Token Teacher. Allow me to unpack that a little bit... 

To continue reading the full article, please visit Lauren's blog: http://www.laurly.com/post/60174788163/the-curious-conundrum-of-the-code-switching-tokenized

Guest Post: Providing a Voice to Afghan Women

On a quiet Friday morning, as I exited the gates of the Afghan Special Operations Compound on the outskirts of Kabul, my interpreter and I set out to pick up Pashtana, the first woman DJ I hired to work at my radio station. As the three of us returned to the checkpoint, we were stopped at gunpoint. Through the yelling and gesturing, my interpreter relayed to me that the guards assumed she was a prostitute. Was it even possible that this was the guards’ only logical conclusion for her presence at their base? Sadly, it was.

After over a decade of American involvement in Afghanistan, the all too familiar plight of the Afghan woman has become an unfortunate symbol of sluggish progress made in the country. Although there are some successful efforts to advance the status of women in Afghanistan, the push toward equality cannot be too strong and the results cannot come soon enough. In the war-torn society with deep-rooted gender roles, empowering Afghan women to seize a leading role in educating their society could prove to be successful in the fight against inequality.

Photo by Tech. Sgt. Gloria Wilson

Two years ago I deployed to Afghanistan as an advisor to the Afghan Special Operation Command. I was charged with training the Afghan Commandos in operations to inform the civilian population and counter enemy propaganda, helping build trust between the civilian population and the government. In distant, hard-to-reach villages, where illiteracy is rampant, Commandos use radio stations to disseminate their message to a wider audience.

Our largest radio station, in Kabul, employed Afghan DJ's who devoted much of the programming to interviews pertaining to military operations, presenting a dominantly male perspective. It soon became clear that we were ignoring half the population. The strategy of employing women on the front lines to reach out to other women has grown in popularity over the years in Afghanistan, where men and women often live segregated lives. Thus, I sought out local Afghan women who were interested in devoting their time and, consequently, risking their lives to reach a female audience over the radio.

Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Marcus Quarterman

Through radio broadcasts, Pashtana became our link to Afghan women and, in turn, the station became Pashtana’s means for advancing the discussion of gender equality. Each week she would record commentary and interviews on location, for instance, at a women’s health clinic or a girls’ school. Then after each feature aired on Friday, she opened the phone lines to discuss topics of interest with the audience. With each broadcast we received hundreds of calls from both men and women willing to openly discuss these culturally sensitive topics. And over time, the success of her weekly shows demonstrated just how significant such communication can be in terms of enhancing the exchange of ideas and increasing our understanding of public sentiment.

I remember standing at the gate to the Afghan military compound on Pashtana’s first day. I noted how stoically she sat, unfazed by the accusations and AK-47s. We were eventually granted access and the next day I sat quietly in the Afghan Special Operations Commander’s office. He expressed his apologies to Pashtana and articulated her essential role at the radio station; and I couldn’t have been more proud as she graciously accepted, determined to assume that responsibility.


Dan McConnell is a former US Army Officer and current MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School. You can reach him for questions or comments at dan_mcconnell@hks14.harvard.edu.

Let's Talk About Gender

Today the 113^th Congress is getting sworn in. There is more gender diversity this time than ever before – 20 out of 100 Senators and 81 out of 435 Representatives are women. Still, the gender gap is evident.

There is also a gender diversity issue among people who like to learn about gender gaps. Among attendees of weekly WAPPP seminars last semester, the percentage of men in the room never got above 30 percent. And when 60 people crowded into the room for a particularly well-attended session on “Race, Gender and Dynamics of Social Hierarchy Reversal”, only 7 of them were men – 12 percent.

This is disappointing to me. I want to discuss gender with women and men, because social and political implications of gender affect all of us. Instead I face the situation that Debora Spar described best: 

“All too often, women are scared of raising the topic of gender with men, thinking it will brand them as radicals or troublemakers, while men are terrified of saying or doing anything that might classify them as politically incorrect. The result, of course, is that no one says anything productive at all.”

This observation stood out to me as a rarely-acknowledged truth, even though it was not the focus of her article.

In an attempt to spark dialogue, I asked a few of my male colleagues at the Harvard Kennedy School to share some thoughts on gender in the context of their personal and professional experiences. I will feature their posts over the next couple of weeks. 

If you are a male reader interested in contributing to these guest-blogger series, please contact me at anya_malkov@hks13.harvard.edu, and let’s talk about gender! 

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.