Diane Vacca On the Shriver Report: Now that We Are the Labor Force, How About Some Respect?

Eager to see what the Shriver Report has to say about women over 50, I paged through my electronic copy, wishing in my over-50 way that I had physical pages to flip and leaf through. But despite my failure to find any chapter or essay specifically dedicated to those of us who remember only too well the plight of women that Betty Friedan described so well in 1963, I could not stop reading. The study codifies what many of us know to be true, and it also reveals facts about American society that both encourage and dismay.

The statistics are eye-openers; they describe a social landscape much changed in 50 years. In 1969, a third of all workers were women. Now the labor force is 50 percent female. Heather Boushey, an expert on women and workforce issues and an editor of the Report, calls this change “certifiably revolutionary—perhaps the greatest social transformation of our time.” As Gloria Steinem writes, “It should end forever the debate about women’s place in the labor force; women are the labor force.”

Yet Hilda Solis, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor, offers these sobering statistics: “About 67 percent of workers paid at or below the minimum wage are women. African-American women working full time earned about 70 percent (69.6 percent) as much as men (as a whole), and Latinas 62.7 percent as much as all men. … At the top end of the work pyramid, only 23.4 percent of women in the workforce are executives.”

What the study makes clear is that as women leave home to go to work, everything changes. Lost in the great health care debate, for example, is the fact that women are no longer able to provide free, at-home care for sick children or aging parents. They have little time to volunteer at schools or local charities or to head community religious and service organizations. Families depend on supermarkets, restaurants and other retail stores that stay open 24/7 to serve their needs. However, Boushey points out, that means that somebody—disproportionately, somebody from an immigrant and/or lower-income family—has to work during nonstandard hours. The marriages of those workers suffer, as does their ability to access childcare and other support during those off-hours.

What were once viewed as women’s issues are now understood to impact everyone.

• Young men today are much more involved in the business of parenting than their grandfathers were. Maria Shriver reports that a large majority of both men and women believe that businesses should be required to provide paid family and medical leave for every worker who needs it.
• Today mothers are the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of all families, a trend accelerated by the recession, but they still earn less than men—$0.77 on average for every dollar—in the same jobs. Since three-quarters of the jobs lost in the recession belonged to men, the laid-off husbands champion equal pay for their wives.

Women, by occupying seats in what once were exclusively male preserves, enable, even challenge, men to understand that a woman’s experience can be very different from a man’s. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example, explained to her male colleagues on the Supreme Court that a 13-year-old girl suffers a strip search in a way that men can’t imagine. More recently, Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) argued against requiring the inclusion of basic maternity care in medical insurance because he, for one, wouldn’t need it and it would raise the cost of the insurance. “I think your mom probably did,” interrupted Sen. Deborah Stabenow (D-Mich.).

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII, banned employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion or national origin. “Forty years ago it was assumed that more men participated in sports because women were uninterested,” Delaine Eastin, former California superintendent of public instruction, remembers. But, she continues, “[w]ith the passage of Title IX of the Education Act of 1972, the number of women in high school sports grew 904 percent.”

Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and many, many other women fought long and hard for rights that some younger women today take for granted. Sister Joan Chittister, author of The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully, writes:

I am an American woman born in an era when women rose up to claim the human rights that men had been giving men for over 200 years…. Brave women bore the ridicule that being called ‘feminist’ brought with it. They risked the rejection that came with building “a woman’s nation.” They braved the social cost, the terrible discomfort, of being “the first this, the first that.” They gave their lives to changing laws and opening doors. Most of all, they taught their daughters to expect for themselves the same opportunities their brothers took as birthright, to arrogate unto themselves the same possibilities the male world assumed for its sons.

Although women enjoy more possibilities and have more choices as a result of the feminists’ fierce determination to change the laws and attitudes that restricted them, much remains to be done.

Shriver pulls it all together:

Women still don’t make as much as men do for the same jobs. Women still don’t make it to the top as often as men. Families too often can’t get flex-time, child care, medical leave or paid family leave. The United States still is the only major industrialized nation without comprehensive child care and family leave policies. Insurance companies still often charge women more than men for the exact same coverage. Women are still being punished by a tax code designed when men were the sole breadwinners and women the sole caregivers. Sexual violence against women remains a huge issue. Women still are disproportionately affected by lack of health care services. And lesbian couples and older women are among the poorest segment of our society.

I share the hope of the authors that The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything will be a clarion call to action for all Americans to work to rectify these inequalities. Only such hard work can bring America, who pioneered social change in the 20th century, back into the vanguard.

Trained as a medievalist, Diane Vacca taught medieval literature, Spanish and Italian at several universities before becoming a journalist with specialties in politics, the arts and New York City. Her work can also be found at ComedyBeat.com and the New York City biweekly Chelsea Now, where she covers everything from education and public housing to landmark designation and the arts.

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