Holding up half the sky

International Women's Day following the pandemic

A gentle reminder to let me know you want a zoom link for COL Dave Maxwell’s presentation on the Korean peninsula security situation on Monday, 20 March at 7 pm eastern. (I will send a transcript and recorded version to those who so generously paid for ActionsCreateCosequences as well) Dave is extraordinarily careful in his analysis of this problem so I hope you look forward to hearing him as much as I do.

The Wall Street Journal proclaimed this morning that women began more new jobs in the past four months than their male counterparts. The headline manages to imply this is also fueling the inflation we all feel at the grocery, in travel, and virtually every other sector, all of which drives more women to seek jobs to address the soaring costs. Put another way, women saw job growth rise by more than 700,000 in service industries from July 2022 to January 2023. Women have overwhelmingly dominated education, health, leisure, and other ‘human’ fields for a long while.

Many of these same women are actually holding at least a parttime hidden job as well because they are mothers for at-home children. It continues to baffle me that a country professing such deep concern about the future of our children treat their care as if it were done magically or by a fairy who disappears. We still use awkward phrases such as ‘stay at-home mom’ to describe arguably the most important thing we can do for our society rather than ‘fulltime mother’.

And most women are doing that job inside and another outside of the home. The only way this works is extreme creativity, often in a field one is not trained for but willing to learn to secure the position.

We still find, however, with the surge in women and men seeking to reenter the workforce that day care is perennially difficult, if not impossible, in many parts of the country. It is expensive, if not prohibitive, and it is in short supply. The childcare providers, on the other hand, also have growing expenses linked to liability, safety inspections, and the associated certifications that make any parent comfortable with her or his children attending.

Many of these newly filled jobs don’t provide women long-term benefits. The Affordable Health Act, or Obamacare, has steadily gained public support over the thirteen years since it went into law not because it is perfect nor because it was some attempt at socialised medicine. It was and remains needed in our society for those who don’t have any other options, including women of all ages, marital status, and current health conditions. Health care is amazingly expensive and the men, women, or families trying to make ends meet cannot afford medical insurance otherwise, especially for their children who get ear infections (even at home), break arms from falling in the backyard, and the other wonderful effects of growing up. That parents, especially women, are able to get employment ispositive but the health dangers are real and only getting worse as fewer folks are considering long-recommended vaccinations for their kids. If we learned nothing from the pandemic, we ought to have learned that.

Additionally, as pensions are already disappearing from many sectors, women in these service positions often have no serious chance of contributing to long-term savings devices for their own retirements. A woman trying to pay the rent (another documented escalating cost in all segments of the country), provide meals, find and pay for daycare, arrange transportation for herself and possibly for children, is daunted by the prospect of putting away even $5 monthly.

Women can expand their options with more education but that is neither free nor a guarantee. Taking time to go to school may be a financial commitment but it also requires balancing other responsibilities personal to each individual. The calculation of whether a degree or even a certificate will enhance income and self-esteem, not an unimportant part of one’s life, must include all the aspects of the decision. For some women, the discouraging messages overwhelm their ability to see the benefits because they have few mentors to support them.

Of course that are many women who choose to stay out of the labour market for their own personal and completely appropriate reasons, most of them financially able to do so. I am not demeaning their choices nor do I hold them in any lower esteem. It was not the step I took but I have friends who did. Oddly, I suspect they have faced their own challenges in the process of their lives unfolding as nothing is life is every cost-free. Whatever I learned from economics, I never forgot ‘opportunity costs’.

Life is a series of tradeoffs but for many women these tradeoffs are painful but they are more joyous than they were a century or certainly a millenium ago. Women still face many odds but we all do as humans. Many, many women today eagerly wrestle with the challenges to advance themselves—and others. I have written before about mentoring young women but I should have noted we need to mentor all women—all of us, men and women, but especially women do.

I confess I learned this entire lesson in the rearview mirror. My daughter went to a loving home daycare setting, with her brother, at an exceptionally young age as I was the primary wage earner and feared my colleagues would not see me carrying my weight in the workplace. My boss, to his eternal credit, said to me point blank when I noted she would be starting daycare ‘I did not tell you that you had to come back to work so soon’. No, he did not and I wasn’t even thinking of him so much as my peers. I am pretty sure I was the only woman in my workplace to have borne two children while working there so I was sensitive to how i would be regarded. It may only have been my own insecurities but I also knew my colleagues pretty well. I hope, more than a generation later, I would not have felt the same vibes in the workplace. I would still probably be terrified of losing health care as I was then but I have learned a great deal in those years so I hopefully also learned adaptability that I did not realise I had.

So, my point today is to laud the women of the world, especially this country, who carry a huge, often understated burden. I fear many of them probably have some tearful evenings in the bathroom as they sort through the memories of the workday. I wish for them more resilience than I can express because they deserve that asset. I hope they have both the stamina and chutzpah to stand up for themselves when prior generations might not have. I cannot imagine how we could make it without them.

I rarely have anything good to say about Mao but he did leave me with one phrase—which he almost universally ignored—’Women hold up half the sky.’ Thank goodness they do. Today and every single day, say a toast to the women at work with the sky.FIN

Sarah Chaney Cambon and Lauren Weber, 'Women’s Return to the Workforce Piles Momentum on a Hot Economy’, wsj.com, 8 March 2023, retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/articles/women-jobs-workforce-economy-international-womens-day-5fc372a3?mod=hp_lead_pos5