The XX Factor: What women really think.

Do Women Really Ask for Raises Less Often Than Men?

A guest post from DoubleX intern Danny Townsend:

In the New York Times last week, Joanne Lipman declared that women's progress has stalled because "we've focused primarily on numbers at the expense of attitudes." She tells one story with a precise tally: "In my time as an editor," she writes, "many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion? I'll tell you. Exactly ... zero." Reluctance to ask for a raise is, in Lipman's eyes, a problem of the prevalence of trying to be a "passive 'good girl'" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

The Feminism of Penicillin

When we talk about barriers to the entrance of women in the American workforce in the 20th century, the story we tell is largely cultural and economic. Married women with career aspirations had to contend with wage discrimination, marriage bars, and the perception that a working woman was ipso facto a degenerate wife and mother. A neat new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that we often understate the role of basic medical advances when talking about that sudden, collective jump from home to workplace. It's easy to forget how dangerous childbirth used to be; complications associated with sepsis, toxaemia and obstructed labor could ravage a body well into middle age. "Many maternal conditions had very long lasting or chronic effects on health," the researchers report, "hindering women's ability to work beyond their childbearing years."

Using historical data to quantify the effects of various maternal conditions, economists Stefania Albanesi and Claudia Olivetti find that medical advances like the introduction of antibiotics, the standardization of obstetric practice, and the hospitalization of childbirth were absolutely critical to the rise of married women's participation in the labor market over the last century. They also find a very large effect for the introduction of formula as a mainstream alternative to breastfeeding in the 1930s. A typical woman in 1920 between the ages of 23 and 33 would be nursing for something like 40 percent of her potential working time. As Hanna has so forcefully illustrated, our cost/benefit calculations change when we start to consider the possibility that a mother's time might have some kind of value.

Is It "Moms Go Home"—or "Moms, Go Home!!" ?

Emily, I do understand what you and Linda are saying: It's demeaning to dismiss what women say about their lives as lying or mere rationalization. But I'm not suggesting that. I do know that both women and men say that they want to spend more time with their families (and not just when they are politicians who've been caught with their hands in the cookie jar). But for women, that explanation for leaving a job is socially acceptable, while for men it's appalling (except for the aforementioned politicians). Women are pushed in that direction by social structures, including stereotypes that have been peddled and internalized over a lifetime—for instance, by New York Times articles that say that say women leave their jobs to stay home with the kids, reinscribing that cultural narrative.

To Linda's point: I'm not proposing, as you say, that "the findings about working-class women apply to elite women." My post said nothing about your work, because I wasn't concerned with your work; my concern is with the New York Times' long history of treating women's economic lives as personal rather than public. You are writing about what elite women should and shouldn't do. I care about the pundits and policymakers who are influenced by articles about the elite women—and who make policy based on those anecdotal stories that then is applied to all women.

But news media coverage only about that side of things ignores important other factors at work, like subtle and overt discrimination, that women may be less willing to acknowledge to themselves. A story: A friend of mine got a promotion after her partner, the biomom, gave birth to their child. The co-mom concluded that her boss was a little mind-boggled about exactly how to treat her—and ended up treating her as a "dad," someone who needed a promotion and a raise to support her wife and new baby. That would be consistent with how researchers have found women and men are treated after a child is born: There's a "mommy penalty" and a "daddy bonus." For instance, in experimental reviews of comparable résumés, women with children are less likely to be hired,pare paid less, are more likely to be fired, and are allowed fewer absences or late arrivals than women without children or than men with or without children ... while men with children are treated better than men without.

The social scientists I interviewed all agreed that Lisa Belkin's "research" method—asking people after the fact why they did what they did—was invalid and would never pass peer review. (This would be true as well of Linda's questioning of NYT Styles section brides, although Linda, your goal is different than Belkin's, which is why I am not writing about your work: Your goal is to warn and counsel young elite women about navigating the hazards ahead, and you succeed admirably.) But basic social science and the new neurobiology have consistently shown that post-facto explanations for behavior are unreliable: Healthy people settle on the most livable and socially comfortable story. To find out why people actually do what they do requires prospective, not retrospective, research into what they are thinking as they are making their decisions, not after the decision has been made—as well as into studies of comparable populations' behavior with variables changed. This isn't saying that people lie; it's saying that the human psyche is complicated and resilient and that our internal story is shaped by many factors.

But here's my bigger beef with the news media on this story: Women's economic lives are covered as personal issues ... while men's economic lives are covered as public issues. Moms out of work = style section; dads out of work = business section. That's just appalling. There is no going back to June and Ward Cleaver; the American economy desperately needs to adapt to reality. Flip the issue, and consider the fact that 80 percent of American children are living in households in which all adults are in the work force. That leads to an entirely different set of public policy discussions than does the "moms just wanna go home" storyline.

I will now indulge myself and quote my CJR article here:

... yes, maybe some women "chose'"to go home. But they didn’t choose the restrictions and constrictions that made their work lives impossible. They didn’t choose the cultural expectation that mothers, not fathers, are responsible for their children’s doctor visits, birthday parties, piano lessons, and summer schedules. And they didn’t choose the bias or earnings loss that they face if they work part-time or when they go back full-time.

By offering a steady diet of common myths and ignoring the relevant facts, newspapers have helped maintain the cultural temperature for what [researcher Joan Williams] calls “the most family-hostile public policy in the Western world.” On a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, afterschool programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. ... And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on nineteenth century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?

The moms-go-home story’s personal focus makes as much sense, according to [Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers], as saying, "Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous."

Hurray again to Uchitelle and the NYT for doing it right this time.  

Not Lying to You, Lying to Themselves—or, What Mother Will Say She Hates Being Home?

Oh Linda, are we going to go round on this again? You and I have had this discussion in person and in print. Those Sunday Styles women with children who told you they were "opting out" weren't lying to you; they were fully engaged in the very healthy psychological strategy of wanting what they had. Given the constraints facing them—hostile and inflexible workplaces, internal and social expectations that they (and not their husbands) were responsible for their children's well-being and daily schedules, sudden triggering off the "moms can't work" stereotype in the behavior of those around them (and probably a silent withdrawal of good assignments, promotion opportunities, and the like)—these women "chose" to stay home with their kids. Of course they fell in love with the children—but that wasn't the only force at work. Take any psych class and you will learn about this phenomenon: It's often called "sour grapes," but it's really very healthy. What, they're going to say: I hate spending my life stuck with snot-nosed screaming kids all day, I miss having adult conversations, but I was too angry at my condescending colleagues to accept the cut-rate hours and mommy-penalized pay and insane stress of making everyone happy—just for a few early years? (Most, of course, had a false idea of how easy it would be to get back into a good job—in part because of those rosy "opt-out" articles, as Joan Williams has documented in such detail.) Nope, they "chose" to stay home, as expected.

But what if those elite women (and men!!) had had some better choices—early childhood education and school schedules that match 21st-century workdays, less demanding hours, and the like? Then many of them, male and female, would "choose" reasonable, high-paying, well-respected, career-track work that also gave them some flexibility to care for their families. I had a long list of women tell me this when I interviewed them: If they were single mothers, they bit the bullet and took all the insulting treatment to keep feeding their kids. But if they were married to men with high-paying jobs, those who could sometimes bailed out.

As a point of fact, however, high-education women are more likely to be working once they have kids (presumably because they can afford better child-care options) than are the women for whom earnings are more marginal. If you press me on this I can find the correct BLS table; don't have it at hand (and I have another deadline just now!).

Most important, however, is that the Times has stopped peddling the suggestion that Lisa Belkin's Princeton-grad friends stand in for a wide swath of American working women. Uchitelle's coverage (and the front-page placement!!) is much more promising for the kind of working-family-friendly policies needed for this country's economic growth. I want the newspapers of record to talk about most people, rather than the few, when they're guiding our pundits' and policymakers' thinking.

Linda Hirshman on Opting Out

A guest post from Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work:

XX Factor is full of talk of how the Times just corrected its 2003 opt-out story about why women quit their jobs (it's the economy, stupid). Short version: Female factory workers' wages decline and they won't work for less. Then they cover their decision with talk of falling in love with their babies.

I don't know about Lisa Belkin, who wrote the most famous version,  but I feel compelled to remind Slate's readers that her opt-out story was about high class dames, many her Princeton classmates, workers at the Maytag plant not so much. The women who announced their weddings in the New York Times and inspired me to tell them to Get (back) to Work, similarly tony bunch. Unclear to me why these stories are rebutted by a study of the working class, not to diss the working class, but during the recent economic bad stuff, Princeton grads didn't actually experience wage cuts. Here's the estimable Wikipedia on what happened to the classes, rather than the masses:

Considering how education significantly enhances the earnings potential of individuals, it should come as no surprise that individuals with graduate degrees have an average per capita income exceeding the median household income of married couple families among the general population ($63,813).[21][22] . . . While educational attainment did not help reduce the income inequality between men and women, it did increase the earnings potential of individuals of both sexes, greatly enabling many households with (a) graduate degree householder(s) to enter the top household income quintile.[21]

Household income also increased significantly with the educational attainment of the householder. The US Census Bureau publishes educational attainment and income data for all households with a householder who was aged twenty-five or older. The biggest income difference was between those with some college education and those who had a Bachelor's degree, with the latter making $23,874 more. Income also increased substantially with increased post-secondary education. While the median household income for a household with a household holding an Associates degree was $51,970, the median household income for those with a Bachelor's degree or higher was $73,446. Those with doctorates had the second highest median household with a median of $96,830; $18,289 more higher than that for those at the Master's degree level, but $3,170 lower than the median for households with a professionals degree holding householder.[18]

Congressional economists say that babies don't predict dropouts, even among the top earners, but they are bailing for some reason, and  it sure ain't plant closings at Debevoise. I tend not to think that women are lying to me when I interview them. Maybe the laid-off washer-makers tell sociologists they love their babies when they actually just hate their paychecks, but I don't think the Times brides were having me on.

The Opt-Out Myth—or, the New York Times Gets It Right This Time

Thanks, Meghan, for the pointer to Louis Uchitelle's sharp article in the NYT, noting that women have achieved a new and unwanted equality: equality in unemployment during and after a downturn. At long last we have a front-page correction to the opt-out myth—a myth that the Times has been peddling since 1952, when it first started publishing a decadeslong series of "Career Girls Just Wanna Go Home and Raise Babies" pieces. The most recent and most notorious iteration thereof was a 2003 Sunday Times Magazine article called "The Opt Out Revolution." Besides making many women spit out their coffee and fire off nasty e-mails, that article started up a whole industry of refutations. I published one such refutation in the Columbia Journalism Review last year, called "The Opt Out Myth"; you can find a footnoted version here, with links to some of the underlying social science research about how women get sidelined for "working while mother."

Kudos to Uchitelle for getting the story right—and to the NYT editors for putting it on the front page, above the fold!

But a Boob Job IS an Investment

In his "Human Nature" blog, Slate's Will Saletan rejoices over the recession's toll on the cosmetic surgery business and expresses horror at the idea that some suckers (social parasites?) still refinance their homes to get cosmetic surgery during economic downturns. Then these vain people justify their ill-gotten boobs and rhinoplasties on the grounds that their plastic surgery was "an investment." Saletan cries foul: "When you can't pay the mortgage, we're supposed to bail you out? And your surgeon calls what you did an 'investment'?"

But isn't that a perfectly reasonable perspective? Sad but apparently true: We live in a society that rewards beauty and punishes ugliness, often using the medium of cold, hard cash. A 2005 Federal Reserve study, for instance, found that attractive people—in all occupations—earned 5 percent more per hour than the physically average, while the ugly earn 9 percent less an hour than everyone else. So say you find yourself, through sheer genetic bad luck, stuck in the low-earning "ugly" category—why shouldn't you decide that putting down $5,000 for a nose job or $2,500 for a "chin augmentation" is a smart long-term investment? If you can go from "ugly" to "average," you've potentially got a lifetime 9 percent income boost right there! Even if you're utterly devoid of vanity, some wisely chosen plastic surgery might be a sound economic decision.

I'll go further: Research suggests that the benefits of physical attractiveness start at birth. Nurses in maternity wards spend more time with the cute babies. And even parents, God help us all, apparently take better care of cute kids than of ugly ones—in a 2005 Canadian study, researchers found that parents with unattractive children often didn't even bother to buckle the little tykes' seat belts. Clearly, parents, if you want your ugly kid to get a fair shake in life, you need to get him or her to a cosmetic surgeon, pronto. And this, comrades, should be our new rallying cry: high-quality, government-subsidized day care; universal preschool; and free pediatric cosmetic surgery on demand!

The Motherhood Crunch: Worse for Scientists?

In which sector do women have it worst? According to a new report by economist Sylvia Hewlett and her co-authors, science comes out looking bad as usual, this time in the private sector. Women are 41 percent of entry-level hires in science, technology, and engineering firms. But 52 percent of them leave. Hewlett, the founder-director of the Center for Work-Life Policy, points out that women's careers stall out somewhat more between the ages of of 35 and 44. (That's when 46 percent of women leave these jobs, as opposed to 40 percent between the ages of 25 and 34, and 40 percent between 45 and 60.)

The timing of the drop-off matches the findings of Mary Ann Mason, former graduate dean at UC-Berkeley, about women with kids in academia. Mason shows in her book Mothers on the Fast Track that mothers more often leak out of the pipeline to tenure after they get their Ph.D.s, and when they come up for associate professor, than when it's time for the tenure decision. It's that 30s and early-40s crunch, when jobs are most demanding and so are kids, if you have them. Mason asked science postdocs, who tend to be in their 30s, about whether they were thinking of leaving the field. Fifty-nine percent of women with children said yes, compared to 39 percent of men with children and 39 percent of single women without children. Those numbers look at lot like Hewlett's drop-out figures.

Hewlett thinks women are tripped up in science, tech, and engineering by the usual suspects: an entrenched sexist culture, the demand to work extreme hours, lack of support, etc. Of the 1,493 women she surveyed (along with 1,000 men), 63 percnet said they'd experienced sexual harassment. Men and women complain at nearly the same rates that they're isolated and lack mentors, but women are substantially more likely to say that the path to career advancement is mysterious, and to worry over juggling work and family (that last stat is 57 percent of women vs. 14 percent of men). Hewlett makes a strong pitch that companies can address all of this—and that rather than chasing workers from around the globe, they should, especially since this is a sector of the economy that's still growing. Her accounts of model programs makes you think that if a firm just makes it clear that it cares about retaining women, it can. Hewlett also found that it doesn't take that much: If a mere 10 percent of women are managers, for example, "all the key variables change dramatically."

Welcoming EJ Graff to XX Factor

Just a quick note to welcome EJ Graff to our midst!  EJ, thanks for the great post. I just finished reading a terrific law review article by Judith Kaye—the chief judge of New York's Court of Appeals—and Anne C. Reddy, looking at why women haven't caught up to men at law firms. Well worth the read.  

Happy Mother's Day

Hey y'all,

I am delighted to be joining this brilliant assembly. For my first post here, I'd like to point out that Mother's Day is coming up. A year ago I wrote a great deal about how the news media gets working mothers' issues all wrong—talking about these issues as personal problems for individual women, rather than shared economic and public policy questions for a 21st century economy. I was asked to give a short talk on this today... and for my debutante moment, I am posting the talk below. At the bottom I'll give some links to my articles last year, and to research sources for some of the facts here. It's long for a blog post, I admit. Sorry! I didn't have time to be brief ...

Mothers work: Get used to it. Too often, issues faced by working families are treated as personal problems for individual women, private questions of how to balance irreconcilable duties, work and family, things that don’t go together by nature. The consequence: We live in the most family-unfriendly of the developed nations.

But women with children have always worked. Centuries ago, in the Wwestern European and American traditions, for instance, married women with children—at least in the classes of butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers that most of us descend from—would have been the business partners who took goods to market, kept the shop’s accounts, and oversaw the adolescent labor (once called housemaids and dairymaids, now called nannies and daycare workers). Early in the 20th century, they might have done piecework, gone out into domestic service, taken in laundry, or fed the boarders. But with industrial and consumer capitalism, work left home. Married men got shoved out of the house to work for salaries and wages. And in white, middle- or upper-middle class families, married women got shut in.

That brings us to the part of feminist history that many of us already know: for the college-educated classes, women’s entrance into the waged work force has been moving in fits and starts over the past century. By the 1970s, feminists had knocked down the barriers to women entering the professions in large numbers. But the workplace still isn’t fixed. A good chunk of discrimination now tends to kick in once a woman gets pregnant or takes a maternity leave.

Researching the book I collaborated on for author Evelyn Murphy in 2005, Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men—And What To Do About It, I was startled by how many lawsuits were won because managers openly and publicly told women that they couldn’t be hired because they were pregnant; or that having a child would hurt them; or that it was simply impossible for women to both work and raise kids. Many other women we talked with had the same experience, but chose not to ruin their lives by suing. One lawyer who’d been on the partner track told us that, once she had her second child, her colleagues refused to give her work in her specialty, saying that she now had other priorities—even though she kept meeting her deadlines, albeit after the kids were asleep. She was denied partnership. A high-tech project manager told me that, when she was pregnant in 2002, she was asked: "Do you feel stupider?" Her colleague wasn’t being mean; he genuinely wanted to know if pregnancy’s hormones had dumbed her down.

These aren’t just anecdotes. Consider the work being done by Shelley Correll, a Cornell sociology professor. In one experiment, Correll and her colleagues asked participants to rate a management consultant. Everyone got a profile of an equally qualified consultant—except that the consultant was variously portrayed as a woman with children, a woman without children, a man with children, and a man without children. When the consultant was a “mother,” she was rated as less competent, less committed, less suitable for hiring, promotion, or training, and was offered a lower starting salary than the other three. In an associated experiment, if she was late or had absences, she was fired sooner than any of the other three. Researchers have found that women with children who work full time have a significantly larger wage gap compared to men than do women without children who work full time. Last I checked it was 70 cents compared to 77 cents. Meanwhile, men with children get paid more than men without children. Fathers earn more—mothers earn less. There’s a mommy penalty—and a daddy bonus. We call this discrimination. 

This exists not because women with children "choose" lower-paying work in lower-paying job tracks. (We can talk about job segregation another day.) Rather, it exists in part because the American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment, to kiss any boo-boo. But if being a mom is a 24-hour-a-day job, and so is being a professional worker—can you say ‘crackberry’?—then the two roles are mutually exclusive. “Working mother” is treated as the social equivalent of “deadbeat dad”: someone who is failing their God-given responsibilities to their children. 

But the United States cannot and will not go back to a time in which women with children do not work in the waged workforce. Over the past century, the U.S. has seen steady upticks in the numbers and percentages of women, including mothers, who work for wages. Since 2000, the percentage of working mothers with infants has held steady at 53.5 percent. When they can afford it, married women with infants take maternity leaves of a year or so, but then head steadily back to work: 75 percent of women with school-age children are on the job. That’s because the vast majority of contemporary families cannot get by without women’s income.

Now, let’s flip this and think from the point of view of the best interests of the children: 70 percent of American children are growing up in families with all adults in the workforce. That means most American families need flexibility to care for their kids. And yet, on a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, after-school programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. How far behind? Out of 168 countries surveyed by Harvard School of Public Health researcher Jody Heymann, the U.S. is one of only four without mandatory paid maternity leave—along with Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on 19th century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t 21ss century school schedules match the 21st century workday?

But the news media and public policy makers still don’t see working families’ issues as economic or public policy questions. Consider: If fathers get pushed off the job, that’s discussed under the heading of labor, business, globalization, world trade, all public issues. But if mothers get pushed off the job—because jobs disappear or are redefined during her maternity leave, or because bosses stop promoting a woman with children on the assumption that she will soon refuse to travel or cut back or go part-time—if mothers get pushed off the job, that’s discussed as women making private emotional choices. How natural: She just wanted to stay home with her baby.

In other words, women are seen as having personal lives even in the same arenas in which men are seen as having public lives. And that has consequences. When the demands facing working families are posited as personal issues for individual mothers rather than as a major public policy issue for a 21st century economy, each family must tackle these issues alone. This focus makes as much sense, according to media critic Caryl Rivers, as saying, “Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous.”

For more info:

The Opt-Out Myth, E.J. Graff, Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2007. (This includes footnotes and links to the supporting research.)

The Mommy War Machine, E.J. Graff, Washington Post Outlook section, April 29, 2007.

Richard Ford on the Equal Pay Bill

Over on "Convictions," Richard Ford elaborates on our objections to McCain's opposition to the Equal Pay Bill. Here's the full post. He concludes:

I have to say it’s hard for me to believe that anyone who is really committed to equal pay would oppose this mild and sensible piece of legislation—it doesn't open us up to lawsuits for "all kinds of problems"—only for the problem of discriminatory pay. Opposition suggests that McCain is most concerned with reducing the absolute number of cases filed—whether or not they have merit.

McCain for Equal Pay? Um, No.

I've got more to complain about: Last night, Senate Republicans killed the Equal Pay Bill, which would have undone the Supreme Court's bad deed in a case last term called  Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. Lily Ledbetter sued Goodyear for sex discrimination because she earned less than men in similar positions—a fact she proved in court. But on appeal, the Supreme Court found that Ledbetter's suit was too late, by setting the clock according to Ledbetter's first unfairly low pay check, rather than the ongoing low salary she continued to receive years later. It didn't matter when she found out she was being shortchanged—only when Goodyear started doing so.

John McCain said Wednesday that he supports "pay equity for women" but opposes the fix for Ledbetter's plight in the Equal Pay Bill because it "opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems." That has a nice anti-litigation ring, but does it make sense? As Rich Ford pointed out in Slate after the Supreme Court's decision, the clear lesson the case holds for employees is, "Sue early and often. If you suspect your boss might be discriminating with regard to your pay, you can't afford to wait around until you're sure." The Equal Pay Bill might give rise to more meritorious law suits. But couldn't it also stave off some losers? And what does it mean to be for pay equity for women while opposing what's on offer to actually help achieve it?

(Cross-posted on Slate's legal blog, "Convictions.")

We're Rich and I Missed the Memo?

Wow, Liza, fully a third of women make more than their husbands? That's way higher than I would have guessed and especially impressive given how many young women are unsalaried while their kids are little. When you factor in all the older women who never worked outside the home and thus draw no pension, that figure seems almost as unbelievable as the report that one in four teenaged girls has an STD. Elaine Chao wouldn't steer us wrong, would she?

More on the Terrible Horrible No Good Billable Hour

Judith, you nailed the efficiency vs. availability conundrum. I'm sure there is room for law firms to dethrone The Hour—and here's a good recent Slate piece by Lisa Lerer explaining why the push for them to do so is coming from their clients. Perhaps most law firm work could be judged in terms of who does good work fast instead of who posts the most 12-minute increments. But for reality's sake, I feel compelled to recognize that sometimes, availability is the golden egg. Some clients see premium value in being able to reach their lawyer at all hours, and that's why the firms cater to this demand. It's possible that the market overvalues availablity—I'd like to think so—but I'm not sure. (Anyone got any good evidence on either side?)

One more point: In her new book The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker writes about studies of academia that mirror the finding that intense career paths play out differently for men and women. In a large study of the University of California system, Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden found that married male scientists have a productivity edge over married female scientists, and over single people. For one thing, many more of the men have stay-at-home spouses.

Law Firm Work: Less is More

When law firms institute family-friendly policies (flex hours, reasonable work loads), who benefits? That depends how you measure it. Mothers at these firms are neither more nor less productive than mothers at other firms, as measured by billable hours, according to a new study of 670 lawyers in Alberta, Canada, by sociologists Jean Wallace and Marisa Young. But fathers at family-friendly firms are less productive than fathers at old-style firms. At the same time, fathers with help at home, like stay-at-home wives and weekly cleaning services, increase their productivity at work, whereas women with stay-at-home husbands and cleaning aren't more productive.

What's going on here? Wallace and Young argue that fathers tend to consider breadwinning an all-important family contribution, so when they have more help at home, they respond by working harder. Also, men are far more likely to have a stay-at-home spouses than women are. Women, on the other hand, seem to sink more time into their kids, if they have it. The happy spin from the authors is that the family-friendly policies aren't hurting the firms vis-à-vis their women employees, which makes the policies seem less costly. The finding about the men working less, though, throws a wrench into the discussion, doesn't it? The authors ask, "How are men using their free timeas a result of working fewer hours?" and then cites other evidence that men may plow their time into more leisure activities. Is that perfectly understandable, or is it shirking? Who's modeling the good behavior here? It's hard to tell, but the gender split is there to be mulled over.

Over at Legal Blog Watch, Carolyn Elefant argues that billable hours are a bad measure of productivity. That makes sense to me as a reason that this study may not translate to other professions in which parents can argue they work more efficiently, squeezing more work into less time. But it doesn't seem like a salient criticism of these findings, since hours are firms' explicit measure of productivity.