Why do a right-wing legislator and a French feminist agree about the wage gap?

Wisconsin Sen. Glenn Grothman

Yesterday, a Facebook friend from Wisconsin posted a link to the story below, commenting, "Really? Here we go again.”


Wisconsin State Senator Says Women Are Paid Less Because ‘Money Is More Important For Men’


I clicked on the link to Think Progress, ready to start fuming over the latest Republican anti-woman idiocy. And sure enough, here was news that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had repealed the state’s equal pay law. Yep, plenty to be enraged about.


But what about that ridiculously stupid quote by the faintly Gingrichy looking state Sen. Glenn Grothman? I initially assumed he was referring to the antiquated idea that men need money more "because they have families to support." Instead, Grothman declared that the existing wage gap results from women prioritizing childrearing over breadwinning.

“Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.”

Now this is truly horrifying. Really, deeply horrifying. But it's not because Grothman’s quote is so idiotic.

It's because I agree with him.

I rarely find myself siding with a Republican these days about anything, especially regarding women. Especially a Wisconsin legislator, one who would dismiss a wage-gap study by calling the nonpartisan American Association of University Women "a pretty liberal group.” I’m nodding along with this guy? Just kill me now.

Oh, I don’t totally concur with Grothman—in the Daily Beast story that Think Progress quoted, Grothman said, “What you’ve got to look at, and Ann Coulter has looked at this, is you have to break it down by married and unmarried. … (then) the differential disappears.” Oh god, please tell me I’m not agreeing with anything Ann Coulter ever said.

Luckily, no. Grothman and, presumably, Coulter are both wrong. The AAUW study found that even after controlling for marital status, hours worked, number of children and all kinds of other factors, there was still an unexplained 5-percent difference in the earnings of male and female graduates one year after graduation, and an unexplained 12-percent gap after 10 years in the workforce.

But let’s face it. That’s not the full wage gap (which is 23 percent). And Grothman’s quote about the lawyer couple is, unfortunately, supported by simple logic. If a woman drops out of the workforce while her husband keeps making money—earning raises, getting promoted—then down the line, when she eventually returns to work, there’s a good chance she’ll be earning less than he does. And in some way that gap, as Grothman says, resulted from “a different sense of urgency in each person.”

What that doesn’t explain is where the “sense of urgency” comes from.

As a group, women unquestionably do spend less time working—for pay, it's important to stress—than men do. Stay-at-home mothers outnumber stay-at-home fathers more than 30 to one. Research by economist Karine Moe and anthropologist Dianna Shandy, both of Macalester College, showed that even when mothers don’t drop out of the paid workforce entirely, they often sacrifice earnings on behalf of their children: they work part time, go into lower-paying careers with flexible hours, waive promotions to more time-consuming jobs.

Meanwhile, even as we liberal, progressive, feminist women get all up in arms over Grothman’s ill-informed sexism, we (some of us, anyway) are applauding a French feminist intellectual for saying essentially the same thing.

French feminist philosopher Elisabeth Badinter

In her new book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women (a best-seller in Europe) Elisabeth Badinter argues that today's mothers sacrifice careers and self-fulfillment for unnecessarily time-intensive nurturing involving lengthy breastfeeding, attachment parenting, providing children with nearly constant availability and attention.

I haven’t read The Conflict, though judging by what I have read about it, including a New Yorker profile of Badinter, I probably wouldn't agree with every single thing she says. But overall, Badinter makes a good point. And she’s addressing the kind of mothers who typically wouldn’t be caught dead agreeing with right-wing Republican senators.

Just moments after my Facebook friend posted the Grothman story, another Facebook friend posted a link, with favorable comment, to a Slate blog item about Badinter’s book. Feminist writer Amanda Marcotte examines “the taboo around criticizing the oppressive nature of competitive mommy devotion” reflected in the anticipated backlash against Badinter’s ideas, mainly from progressives defending women’s choices.

“The problem," Marcotte writes,"is that said choices are usually made on pain of being considered bad, unnatural mothers if you opt out of them and choose to keep a bit of your life and body for yourself."

Now, Grothman and Badinter disagree about one really important thing. Grothman implies that this decision comes from within; he seems to feel we females are naturally hardwired to care less about money than mothering. Badinter blames mothers’ behavior on parenting trends and external pressures. Grothman may be partly right—it's possibe women are somewhat more inclined that way by evolution and biology—but the impulse can’t all be innate, or how do you explain our spending more time with our kids than our mothers and grandmothers did?

Research shows that modern mothers as a group devote 40 percent more time to their children than mothers in 1965—even though we also spend way more time at paid work. The study found that employed mothers carve time from other activities—housework, leisure, sleep—to devote to their children. Yet half said they felt they still weren’t doing enough with their kids.

As the pressure builds, it stands to reason, women will want to  cut back on paid work, or give it up entirely. Sure enough, a 2007 Pew Research study found that only 21 percent of working mothers want full-time jobs—down from 10 years earlier, when 32 percent liked the idea of working full time. Preference for part-time work was up over that same period, from 48 percent to 60 percent. (And this is no grass-is-greener situation: stay-at-home mothers became less interested over that decade in working outside the home, full or part-time.) Among men, meanwhile, a solid 72 percent say full-time work is ideal.

It's undeniable that women, as both Grothman and Badinter say, feel more compelled than men to sacrifice pay for time with their children. The reasons are complex, multifaceted and, I suspect, involve a mix of internal and external motivators. They deserve much further study. There simply isn’t enough honest public discussion about this stuff.

Wait—what?   Don’t we talk about this stuff pretty much constantly? After all, the so-called “mommy wars” (the supposed battles between working and at-home mothers) certainly get their share of media coverage. So does “helicopter parenting,” the idea that today's parents spend too much time controlling every moment of their kids’ lives. But both of these discussions typically center on how these choices might affect the child, not the parent (in the latter case, children are perceived to be warped by too much coddling, but the effect on mothers' lives and livelihoods is generally not part of the discussion).

These media obsessions distract from other real, pressing issues: like whether children really are such delicate flowers that they require (or are harmed by!) constant parental attention; how much financial security mothers should be expected to sacrifice to provide it; why it’s mostly mothers, not fathers, who make such sacrifices; and why as a culture we encourage women to make them without fully connecting their “choice” to its potential results, including women’s far greater likelihood than men to live in poverty.

Bashing Republicans is fun and usually warranted. But in this case a bumbling Wisconsin right-wing state lawmaker and an esteemed French feminist intellectual are at least somewhere on the same page. And their point is worth closer examination.

Let's give "mommy" a rest

There's probably a German word for this: the experience of reading something that precisely expresses some inchoate feelings that have been floating around the edge of your consciousness for a while without your having fully explored them, even though you do intend to do so at some point and maybe write an essay about them, which you now realize is impossible because this other writer has managed to describe said feelings so articulately that even though you're kind of disappointed at the loss of your own essay you go, "Yes! Yes! This!!" and click immediately to your blog to link and post about it. I suggest, Readingfeelingtheregoesyouressaybloggenfreude.

That's the experience I had upon reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner's "Time for a War on Mommy" in the Wall Street Journal's online blogs.

Brodesser-Akner complains about the ubiquitousness of the word “mommy” to describe women with children—especially as a modifier to “track,” “wars,” “blogger,” etc. The label, she argues, does a disservice to everyone involved: to the particular women in question, to mothers in general, and even to their children—who do not, contrary to conventional wisdom, necessarily benefit from growing up under the impression that their maternal parental units’ lives revolve entirely around their existence.

Photo from momlogic.com

Let me just pull a quote or two to give you the gist:

Why are we grown women calling each other Mommy? Is being a mother such a silly avocation that we have to baby it up, stringing it with the hormones and gushy feelings of what our children call us? Does it strike anyone that calling a woman who has had a child Mommy is demeaning and infantilizing? Does it strike anyone that calling philosophical disagreements Mommy Wars is no different than screaming “GIRL FIGHT!” as two strippers go at it in a mud pit?

And

Maybe you think I’m taking this too seriously. But consider this: When we allow our children to name us, a name they use before they can speak, and then we go by that name in the world, are we doing them any favors? When our children see that we are first and foremost a mother, and a mother in their terms, I believe they suffer.

I have long hated the use of the word "mommy" by anyone but my kids (who, sadly, haven't uttered it for at least a decade, and in fact now often upgrade to the crisply mature “Mother”).

As someone who longs to dignify the role of motherhood—to spread the idea that although, yes, we often spend an inordinate portion of our days watching cartoons and managing poop, caring for children is ultimately an important project, one among many important projects in which we are engaged—I find the word “mommy” demeaning and condescending. To me, it sends the message that a being involved with children is silly and trivial and babyish. And so, it implies by extension, am I.

By the way, like Brodesser-Akner, I wrote a Salon essay that ran under a headline with the word “mommy” in it. But in that case, the subject’s mommyishness was the whole point—I was talking about a phenomenon (schmaltzy mass-emails about motherhood) that in itself was demeaning, condescending, trivializing, etc. etc. I was fine with that.

So I disagree with Rachel Larimore who, writing for Slate's XX factor, half agrees with that "mommy" is overused but pooh-poohs Brodesser-Akner's annoyance as overwrought. Larimore skirts the edge of arguing that what words we use to describe things don’t much matter. Which seems a strange position for a writer to take.

“And really, aren’t the terms mommy wars and mommy track largely creations of the media?” Larimore asks. Well, yeah. Is someone who writes a blog for an online politics and culture magazine seriously arguing that if some term’s widespread use is confined mainly to the media then we can safely ignore it, confident that it has zero effect on anybody's actual lives or their perceptions of things?

Larimore also notes that fathers "don’t sit around wringing their hands about it all or devout thousands of column inches to the issue." Right. Maybe that has something to do with stay-at-home mothers outnumbering stay-at-home fathers about 34:1, with even mothers with full-time jobs still doing the lioness’s share of work at home. Maybe it is related to the fact that, although fathers are unquestionably changing more diapers than they did a generation or two ago, in that same time many many many more mothers are working outside the home (sorry, too rushed to look up statistics; might actually be more than three "manys") while still struggling to get their domestic lives to catch up from 1963. In any case, are a few thousand column inches here or there really too much to ask, considering they're analyzing one of the most dramatic social changes of all time?

By the way, I noticed, among the comments, one by a poster named Taffy forlornly asking, “Was my comment removed for a reason?”

I don’t know if that’s THE Taffy, as in Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the author of the WSJ piece. I don't know if Slate actually removed Taffy's comment, or why. But I'd like to let The Taffy know—as well as, really, any Taffy, along with people not named Taffy —that your comments (including, needless to say, comments defending any and all uses of "mommy") are welcome below!