Work and Family

The readings this week discuss the relationship between the act of caring and the commercialization of family life.  Correll investigates the tendency for mothers and mothering to signify a lack of work-place competency.  While it is unclear the exact causes of this presumed incompetence (Correll speculates whether cultural values may play a large role), it is evident that mothers are not as valued as other workers.  It is ironic that this is the case: if mothers earn less due to compromised qualifications or abilities relating to motherhood, how is it that these same women are raised to a higher social standing than other individuals?  The iconic mother, upholding the values of a nation, can successfully rear future generations, yet cannot perform explicit workplace tasks efficiently and in a commited manner.  This paradox is evidently overlooked by those whose judgments promote the devaluing of employed mothers. 

Similarly, the ability of women to embody the qualities most often associated with the ideal Western mother is further marginalized by the removal of not only the individual, but the emotional demands of mothering from the domestic sphere and relocating these mothering qualities into the workplace.  Hochschild identifies two complementary mechanisms contributing to the devaluation of motherhood: first, the disenfranchisement of mothers, experienced in their separation from original families, and second, the reinsertion of these mothers into new families.  In these families, these mothers face a reality in which they are neither legitimate mothers nor official members.

For these readings I have three questions:

1. First: How well do the families in Becker’s article generalize to the broader population?  If the majority of the families studied were childless couples in their twenties or couples in their fifties or sixties whose children are young adults, how does this sample relate to families with small children, who must choose from a limited number repertoire of time-bind solutions?
2. Second: In what other ways does Western culture simultaneously idolize and demonize mothers?  Is it possible for equitably employed mothers to exist in this environment?  What policies would best promote this shift?
3. Third: What is the relationship between the “act” of emotion and the paid employment of nannies who embody the emotional work of caring?  If emotions are produced and reproduced, with individuals constantly legitimizing and undermining expected emotional behavior, to what extent is this occupation an extension of this expectation?    

Work and Family

After reading Hoschild’s Emotional Geography and the Flight of Capitalism, I immediately began relating it my family’s professional experience, which is actually completely different from Amerco. From personal experience, the companies and places of employment my family works at seems to be in a warm modern category. My mother works for IBM, as did my father when I was born, and she was able to take a year off when my sister and I were born, and then for the first three months back at work, she was able to work part-time. Although my father didn’t take parental leave, the benefits awarded to my mother seemed to remedy this. As well, after my parents got divorced, my mother was able to take on the added responsibility of being a single parent (with my father only having custody every Wednesday and other weekend) by switching to part time work. Once my sister and I were able to get to and from school on our own, my mother was able to work full-time yet again.

My step-brother actually shared parental leave with his wife, each of them taking six months after their son was born. As well, my step-sister, after taking her full year of maternity leave for each of her two sons (her husband is a professor, so he was able to be around a lot to help with the kids), she re-entered the workforce by job-sharing with another young mother.

My father’s common-law partner works at a company called Lexis Nexis, essentially a huge publishing company, and there are in place many family friendly policies. First of all, in the summer, every Friday ends at noon, to equal one half day off. However, if you do not want to take this half day off, you can bank them, essentially saving all the half Fridays from the summer, and take a week long vacation. Interestingly, this same company is an example of “the new company town” where the employees can socialize and utilize many services even within the same building. They have movie nights (where they supply the drinks and popcorn), catered breakfast every morning, and a masseuse that comes in each week.

In all of the cases depicted above were from dual earner couples, which most definitely do not fall into the work-as-home and home-as-work model. I’m not sure if it is my living experience that is out of the norm, or is it Amerco that is? I’m just finding Hoschild’s utilization of one major company to depict the need for more family friendly policies in America a little troubling. After reading Becker and Moen’s article, I find it frustrating that Hoschild would depict the dual-earner couple as cold and work-obsessed when that is not the majority case.

As well, I recently stumbled across an interesting article from the New York Times, called the Opt-Out Revolution, in which women with high levels of education, on a track to high status of employment, choose to opt-out of work in order to be a full time mother” http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/the-opt-out-revolution.html?pagewanted=all . It is definitely an interesting read, and gives some insight as to why mothers may be perceived as less committed to their jobs as depicted by the Motherhood penalty article.

1. Am I the only one who has experience a warm modern category? Or in your experience does the workforce fall into a cool modern or traditional stance? Which way should it be?

2. In Becker et al. it is stated that women often fulfill the job category and not the career category in a dual earning couple. How could you justify the work constraints put on women in a dual earning couple? Is the breadwinner ideology following yet again? Is this why in a career/job couple women are more likely to hold the job?

3. To play devil’s advocate, do you think women are more attached to their children and therefore are less committed to their profession? How does the motherhood penalty fit into professions where salaries are set based on seniority (e.g. lawyers and teachers)?

Work and Family

As the youngest of three children, I always had a nanny present during my childhood. My mother worked and needed help around the house, especially having three children under the age of seven. The nanny I remember best was Theresa. She came from the Philippines and had left a family behind. She was probably my nanny from the time I was three until I was about ten years old. I felt that she wasn’t just my nanny she was like one of my friends. Because of this I am definitely able to identify with Hochschild’s article Love and Gold. Theresa took on many of the traditional mother roles: cooking, cleaning, caring for my siblings and me, and helping with homework. She was not just hired help; she came to be part of our family and even started to call my grandmother Bubbie (Jewish word for grandmother). I now can see how these women, mentioned by Hochschild, transfer their love that they should have for their family back home to the family and children they are currently living with and caring for. It is hard to feel a connection with someone who you haven’t seen for five years, and don’t even know how they will react towards you when you see them next. These nannys see the children they take care of everyday and so they know that the love they feel for them is mutual.

In Scaling-Back: Dual-earner Couples’ Work-Family Strategies, strategies are mentioned in order to scale back on the amount of time couples work in order to spend more time with the family. In my family my father is a dentist and as his own boss he is able to make his own hours. For our family this means that he ends work at 2:00 pm on Wednesdays and 12:00 pm on Fridays. This meant that he was able to spend time with us when we got home from school when we were younger. This article was contradicted by Hochschild’s article entitled Emotional Geography which stated that many people enjoy spending time at work as oppose to being home. This is probably due to the differentiation in family dynamics, ie: that some people come home to a happy peaceful house and others come home to chaos. I’m sure those who come home to chaos would rather spend a few extra hours in a calm office environment daily.

1. Do you think that the increasing amount of hours spent at work leads to more marital affairs?

2. Do you think that statistics found in Getting A Job would deter a mother from entering the workforce? Is there the same amount of gender inequality when the top boss is a female?

3. Does scaling back always lead to more time spent with the family? Does it lead to resentment? Do you think a child can read into this, in terms of the eavesdropping child?

Work and Family

This week’s readings made me think of an article that was recently published in Slate magazine entitles “Going Dutch, Women in the Netherlands work less, have lesser titles and a big gender pay gap, and they love it” (found here: http://www.slate.com/id/2274736/). Only around 10% of Dutch women work full time; the majority work 25 hours or less, and are cited as spending their time taking care of families and “having fun”. The writer of the article discusses her opinion of work as an American women and speculates that perhaps we in North America have it all wrong. As Correll, Benard and Paik (2007) show, there is stigma surrounding motherhood that inhibits a mother’s advancement within the workplace, so is the attempt to shatter the glass ceiling just depriving us of unhappiness? This strikes me as a system that Hochschild would approve of, in that it raises the value of care from parents, rather than it being a “pass-on job” (196).

However, what this and many other articles leave out, or do not address enough, is that a woman’s need to work is largely affected by her socioeconomic status. As the article about Dutch women brings up, 25% could not financially support themselves, even with government help. This creates a culture of dependency on male partners, which as we have seen can have dangerous consequences for those in abusive relationships (although I do not know the statistics of this in the Netherlands). In addition, many women want to work more, but the government dictates that they are not allowed to take on more hours thereby creating difficulties for some women to make ends meet. However, this difference in class does not disappear when we look at women in America or Canada, so perhaps the Dutch really are onto something. Regardless of whether or not this seems like a good idea, it is important to challenge our notions of class and work.

1) Are there other approaches to reforming women’s place in the work world that are somewhere in between “trying to be a man” and accepting that work is a man’s world?

2) Is love really a zero sum game of affection? Hochschild brings up that some nannies love the child they watch more then their own children, but is this a transference of love, or perhaps a side effect of the expectation and roles played in the differing relationships one might have with a child they watch, and their own children?

3) Would Hochschild’s “solution” of valuing care really improve the situation of women who take on these jobs in foreign countries? Does it address the root of the problem she presents: the higher pay?

Week 8: Work and Family

After reading Hochschild’s article “Love and Gold”, I immediately thought about the SOS Children’s Villages. SOS Children’s Villages is an independent, non-governmental organization looking after children who are orphaned or at high-risk by providing homes and family-based care. There are numerous villages in different countries all over the world and basically a “mother” is brought into these villages to take care of up to 20 children each. One condition that exists for female volunteers is that they need to live at the village with their “new” family and if they have a family of their own outside of the village, they need to be ready to sever all ties with them—even with their own children. This could be seen as an extreme case of a “care drain”. In Hochschild’s article, we see women from the Third World coming to the First World to take care of someone else’s children (most of the times family who are better off than they are) and, in contrast, with the SOS Children’s Villages, we see First World women going to these secluded villages to take care of high risk children at the expense of never seeing their own children again. As we can see, this care drain is not a one-way phenomenon from the developing world to the developed world but rather a two-way phenomenon—happening at both end points.

In all the articles, there is a common theme of the “double bind”, especially for the women. There is this pressure for these career women to become both an ideal mother and an ideal worker. In Hochschild’s article “Emotional Geography”, she talks about how a certain corporation has different workplace accommodations to meet the needs of their workers. However, most of these accommodations do not include parenthood-related needs, which make it harder for women to cater to these male-orientated accommodations.

Q1) Do you believe that women do not feel any resentment towards their workplace environment, although it is largely catered towards the male workers? If not, could this be because female workers have internalized this male-oriented ideal worker model and they do not question it?

Q2) In the reading “Love and Gold”, Hochschild talks about the issue of sentiment (feeling of love and care) and commitment. What do you believe is more important for the family life—sentiment or commitment?

Q3) What are some patterns of sacredness in your family? Do you believe that there has been a shift within that pattern over the life

Work and Family

The article I most identified with this week was “Love and Gold” by Hochschild as I have been a witness to this phenomena of women leaving their families and moving to a new country and looking after other peoples children in order to support the family that they have left behind. I babysit for a family in Westmount and have done so for about five years now and I am the only non-Philippine worker on the street they live on. All of these women have left their families although I do not think any of them have left their children behind and have gotten jobs taking care of other people’s children. I know they send home a significant amount of their salary home to their family and feel guilty that they do not visit more often. One such woman who I have gotten to know quite well only goes home every five years and was heartbroken when her mother was sick last winter and she could not afford to go home and help take care of her. I guess in a way these women could be viewed as domestic workers wifes because they complete all the domestic tasks that are traditionally performed by the wife. They cook, they clean, they take care of the children, help them with their homework and drop them off and pick them up from their activities. They form strong bonds with these children as the children spend most of their time with their nanny. One example of this bond was apparent when the boy that I babysit asked me if I spoke any languages other then English and French. When I responded no he sighed heavily and said he wanted to learn Filipino because all the boys had learned it from their nannies and he could not understand what they were saying during recess. I think this language acquisition by boys in grade one demonstrated who they spent the majority of their time with.

In the article, “Emotional Geography and the Flight Plan of Capitalism” I did not really find that all of the concepts applied to Canada. In my limited experience with men and women who chose to take parental leave after the birth of the child viewed it as their right and not as something that would hinder their career. I guess, it would depend on your career and the amount of stability you have in your job if you would feel comfortable requesting for the time off but I thought that in Canada people were understanding of someone wanting to take time off in order to spend time with their new family. This article also discussed the “Time-bind” syndrome that we discussed last class in which parents seem to prefer to stay at work then be with their family. But, this idea of parents choosing work over family was contradicted in the article by Becker, Edgell and Moen who found that parents were trying to scale back work hours in order to have more time with their family. I think these contradictory findings can be explained by the fact that each persons experiences with family and work differ which leads to different feelings of where a person would rather spend time. Also, Hochschild’s article only used data from one work environment so perhaps her findings are specific to those workers or people in the area where the company is located.

1) How would you define emotions? Do you agree more with the interactive or interactive account of emotions? Why?

2) At the end of the article, “Love and Gold” it was questioned how we could help stop the need for women to leave their families and take care of someone else’s children in order to provide for the family they have left behind. Do you think there is a way to put an end to this phenomena? Who else would take care of the children of women who have careers?

3) Do you think there is a difference between quantity of time and quality of time that a parent spends with a child? Do you think it is better for a parent to be at home when a child comes home from school and prepares dinners…etc but does not spend quality time with this child? Or would it be better for a child if a busy parent only spends an hour with the child every night but this time is spent doing quality activities?

Work and Family

The readings of this week address different issues within what is known as work and family balance, discrimination in the labor market against women, especially motherhood, and the importation of care.

Becker and Moen (1999) focus on the different strategies that dual-earner couples engage to scale back and balance work and family: placing limits, having a one-job, one-career marriage and trading off. They interviewed middle-class people employed as salaried workers in seven different institutions in upstate New York. Their findings differ from what Arlie Hochschild finds in Amerco (2003) and discuses in chapter 15 “Emotional geography and the flight plan of capitalism”. In this chapter, she also addresses the question of family-friendly policies and environments in the workplace like flextime, flexplace, part-time jobs, job sharing, paid parental leave and others. Quebec and the rest of Canada have different family policies than the United States. How do you think the work and family balance differ in these contexts? If you are interested (and read French because I could not find the link on English), then you may read more about Quebec family policies in http://www.mfa.gouv.qc.ca/fr/Famille/Pages/index.aspx.

The notion of work and family balance is usually conceived as a woman’s problem. Regardless of assumptions of gender roles, it is true that women have different biological demands and needs when having a child, for example. Correll, Benard and Paik (2007) show that a wage penalty is actually put on motherhood. Doing a laboratory experiment and an audit study, they find that while mothers are penalized in perceived competence, salary and recommendation for hiring, men sometimes benefit from being a parent. The authors provide us with a set of explanations of how and why discrimination against mothers could be taking place. Their main possible explanations are the beliefs of tension between motherhood and the ideal worker and thus, say that the “glass ceiling” that women could face may be actually partially explained by this.

How come some women reach high positions of power? Watch some “advice” from two women that have done so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiWGfMTIorM&feature=related. It is very likely that Inara Nooyi & Condoleezza Rice have people to help her. In order to work and keep a household, many (middle-class dual earners, not only the top elite) engage in hiring people to take care of the kids or to do domestic work. As Hochschild (2003) discusses in “Love and gold”, current arrangements of balancing work and family duties have implied an increased dependency of imported care, i.e. female immigrants that may as well leave children behind with kin or paid work to take care of them. Becker and Moen (1999) write “Their strategy of hiring a “wife” underscores the difficulty of managing two absorbing careers while simultaneously raising young children” (p. 998). Are domestic workers wifes? What are the assumptions behind the notion of what a wife should be and do?

In this same line of thought, what are the assumptions of what a woman is, for example, in the title of the book “Full-time woman, part-time career”, a new advice book like those that Hochschild analyses, by Karen Steede-Terry (to see the news of its release: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMt2Cyv3wnY; and to find information about the book: http://www.fulltimewoman.com/html/index.html). A notion that may be useful is that of ‘gatekeepers’. Becker and Moen (1999) talk about how managers, professionals and business persons control resources and perpetuate values using the media. Watch the following video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh0EQte4bFU. Is gender equality in the labor market possible if paid domestic work disappears? Are women careers that Karen Steede-Terry and Coral Arvon depict in the videos compatible to the idea of having more women in higher positions and in intensive decision-making?

I am looking forward to reading your responses and questions for discussion! See you on Monday.