Category: Employment

‘Equal pay day’ this year is April 12; the next ‘equal occupational fatality day’ will be in the year 2027

Gender gap job deathsOn the gender gap in occupational fatalities by Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute:

Every year the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) publicizes its “Equal Pay Day” to bring public attention to the gender pay gap. According to the NCPE, “Equal Pay Day” will fall this year on April 12, and allegedly represents how far into 2017 the average woman will have to continue working to earn the same income that the average man will earn this year. Inspired by Equal Pay Day, I introduced “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” in 2010 to bring public attention to the huge gender disparity in work-related deaths every year in the United States. “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” tells us how many years into the future women will be able to continue to work before they would experience the same number of occupational fatalities that occurred for men in the previous year….

Based on the BLS data for 2014, the next “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” will occur about 11 years from now ­­– on January 12, 2027. That date symbolizes how far into the future women will be able to continue working before they experience the same loss of life that men experienced in 2014 from work-related deaths. Because women tend to work in safer occupations than men on average, they have the advantage of being able to work for more than a decade longer than men before they experience the same number of male occupational fatalities in a single year.

The full article is here.

Raising Kids and Running a Household: How Working Parents Share the Load

Pew Study parents work life balance bar graphA new survey report from Pew Research Centers:

While mothers and fathers offer somewhat different views of the division of labor in their household, there is general agreement about who in their family is more job- or career-focused. For example, in two-parent households where the mother and father work full time, 62% say both are equally focused on work, while about one-in-five (22%) say the father is more focused and 15% say the mother is. Differences in the responses to this question between mothers and fathers in this type of household are modest.

The full news report is here.

Tricked or Indebted on Land, Abused or Abandoned at Sea

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What human trafficking looks like for young men by Ian Urbina in the New York Times.

Mr. Andrade, who died in February 2011, and nearly a dozen other men in his village had been recruited by an illegal “manning agency,” tricked with false promises of double the actual wages and then sent to an apartment in Singapore, where they were locked up for weeks, according to interviews and affidavits taken by local prosecutors. While they waited to be deployed to Taiwanese tuna ships, several said, a gatekeeper demanded sex from them for assignments at sea.

Once aboard, the men endured 20-hour workdays and brutal beatings, only to return home unpaid and deeply in debt from thousands of dollars in upfront costs, prosecutors say….

“It’s lies and cheating on land, then beatings and death at sea, then shame and debt when these men get home,” said Shelley Thio, a board member of Transient Workers Count Too, a migrant workers’ advocacy group in Singapore. “And the manning agencies are what make it all possible.”

“You go with pride, you come back with shame.” Read the whole thing here.

Gender Gap Journalism

Gender Gap Journalism by Kay Hymowitz at the Institute for Family Studies blog:

The gender gap doesn’t bring out the best in journalists.  With important exceptions, articles on the subject are padded with overly broad statistics, cherry picked research, a myopic view of men and women as lone economic actors, over-credulous references to Sweden, and most insidious of all, an implicit, never-argued assumption that in a just world (i.e. Sweden) women and men would reveal almost exactly the same preferences.  A piece that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times Upshot section “The Motherhood Penalty and the Fatherhood Bonus” by Claire Cain Miller, is a fine example of the genre.

Let’s Reclaim the Glory of Being a ‘Maker’

From “Let’s Reclaim the Glory of Being a ‘Maker’” by Lori Sanders and Cameron Smith in The Federalist.

We’ve heard the story of declining wages over and over. We’ve repeatedly heard the political talking points about the threat of offshoring. We want our children to have better lives than we did.

But if parents want their children to enjoy successful, fulfilling lives, it may be time to broaden our vision of what that entails. It’s telling that, in today’s America, more parents would be likely to accept their five-year-old son’s declaration that he identifies as a girl than would accept their 18-year-old’s proclamation that he wants to be an underwater welder, even though the pay for that particular vocation ranges from $54,000 to well over $100,000.

To upend this narrative that has so many of us looking down our noses at some of the best emerging job opportunities, we need to shift our attitude about the fundamental purpose of education and redefine what success looks like. We need a cultural change of heart, which starts with parents. Not every boy needs to grow up to be a welder, but neither should every boy grow up to be a lawyer.

Highly Educated = Husband Material?

Karol Markowicz in the New York Post, “This guy went to college, but it doesn’t make him husband material.” (The picture of “this guy” at the link is John Belushi from Animal House.)

With more women going to college than ever before, there are only so many baccalaureate bachelors for them to meet and marry.

That seems reasonable at first glance. Hey, if a woman is looking for someone with her level of education, and this is a deal-breaker for her, then sure, there’s a serious shortage of suitable men.

Birger points out that a woman who was 34 in 2007 began college in 1991 when women outnumbered men on college campuses by 10 percent. He notes that “in 2012, 34 percent more women than men graduated 4-year colleges.”

The numbers are indeed daunting. But they obscure a question all of these unmarried college-graduate women should be asking themselves: Why does a degree matter so much, anyway?

Boy Trouble

An overview of what we call The Boy Crisis, Boy Trouble by Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal, 2013: 

When I started following the research on child well-being about two decades ago, the focus was almost always girls’ problems—their low self-esteem, lax ambitions, eating disorders, and, most alarming, high rates of teen pregnancy. Now, though, with teen births down more than 50 percent from their 1991 peak and girls dominating classrooms and graduation ceremonies, boys and men are increasingly the ones under examination. Their high school grades and college attendance rates have remained stalled for decades. Among poor and working-class boys, the chances of climbing out of the low-end labor market—and of becoming reliable husbands and fathers—are looking worse and worse.

Could Working Dads Be Underserved, Too?

From Could Working Dads Be Underserved, Too? by Lydia Dishman in FastCompany

There is a subtle, but potentially seismic shift happening in the workplace. From sweeping diversity initiatives and radical strategies that tackle the gender wage gap to extended paid parental leave policies, the next decade could reveal a very different picture of American workers. But change often comes with backlash….

New research published in the Journal of Business and Psychology reveals that as fathers take on more caregiving and other family responsibilities, workplace norms still see them as “organization men” married to their jobs, which potentially inhibits their development as true, involved fathers. The study also found that there isn’t much in the way of formal support for working dads.

The entire article is here.

Warren Farrell Explains Why a White House Council on Boys and Men Helps Cut Govt. Costs

 

In this video, Dr. Farrell explains how a White House Council on Boys and Men, by strengthening father involvement and the family, reduces the need for the government-as-substitute husband:

 

 





Wilson Quarterly Comment

Lionel Tiger

It’s of course wholly understandable that in a culture wild with materialism and verging on comedy in the search for educational credentials, these three responsible articles about women today would focus on production, not reproduction. The most salient theme is the quality and equality of participation in the public sphere. There is a corresponding inattention to the nature and value of intimate experience. Family life and especially mothering are appreciated, yes, but also characterized as

Wilson Quarterly Comment

 

Lionel Tiger

It’s of course wholly understandable that in a culture wild with materialism and verging on comedy in the search for educational credentials, these three responsible articles about women today would focus on production, not reproduction. The most salient theme is the quality and equality of participation in the public sphere. There is a corresponding inattention to the nature and value of intimate experience. Family life and especially mothering are appreciated, yes, Continue reading “Wilson Quarterly Comment”