Balancing The Federal Budget on the Backs of the Seniors. Obama's Fault!

This would be hilarious if it wasn't so awful:

Ladies and gentlemen, here's your preview of the 2014 Republican campaign commercials, from Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), who is chairman of the NRCC, the GOP's House re-election committee.
BLITZER: Well, let's talk about these proposed changes that the president is putting forward when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, the shocking proposals that you say the president's putting forward that could affect seniors. What's so shocking about changing that CPI, that consumer price index the way that you would determine how much inflation would go ahead with increases for Social Security recipients, for example?
WALDEN: Well, once again, you're trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors and I just think it's not the right way to go.

Imagine me having to write that it is the Republicans who always want to cut "entitlements", it is the Republicans who want to kill Social Security dead and get rid of Medicare (switching it to those vouchers which are like the scratch-and-sniff cards in seriousness) and it is the Republicans that Obama tried to appease with these proposals!  But soon these proposals could be the Democrats' proposals, because they truly are unpopular.

OK.  That is exaggerated, because other Republicans are less critical of the chained CPI part of Obama's budget proposal:

Even as GOP leaders slammed Obama’s budget as a whole Wednesday, they found room to offer some praise for his approach to entitlements, which includes Social Security.
“The President seems prepared to finally concede this time that at least something needs to be done to save entitlements from their inevitable slide toward bankruptcy,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Obama “does deserve some credit for some incremental entitlement reforms that he has outlined in his budget.”

Should I do a post on the chained Consumer Price Index (CPI)?  The short-and-sour part of it is that using it to calculate Social Security payments will lower them.  Another short-and-bitter part is that the general CPI doesn't have a terrible amount of relevance for the retired people because the consumption bundle it is based on doesn't accurately reflect the cost items which are most important for the elderly, such as health care costs.

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The Most Glamorous Outfit For This Blog

Is Google Analytics.  It gives me almost three times the number of visits as Sitemeter does.  Blogger numbers are somewhere in the middle.  So what I clearly want to do is to seek advertisers on the basis of the Google Analytics, right?

None of the three is right, because there is no such thing anymore.  Sitemeter doesn't measure anyone who has the do-not-follow thingy on her or his browser, and wise people tell me that Blogger counts robots whereas Google Analytics is not supposed to.  So how come it gives me more clicks?  Even Sitemeter records the Googlebot.

Add to that people who read through the many and various feeds, and the result is that I had no idea if anyone reads me or if my readership is growing or shrinking or staying constant.  This shouldn't matter, but it does, both because I need "a platform" for the book to be published one day in the next millennium and because advertising income is nice for chocolate purchases and depends on those clicks.

Still, the most crucial reason for me having worried about those numbers is internal.  I'm not gonna write if nobody wants to read me.  Which explains why I have been quite happy (cheerful! elated! dancing under the moon!) when I found out that the Sitemeter numbers are not the only possible ones.  Indeed, all the information taken together suggests that I'm getting more adulators as all goddesses should.  Or that's what I have decided.

Speaking of outfits, did I ever show you this 1940s dress I bought (for thirty dollars and the trouble of fixing one cigarette burn)?  It looks like a proper Vivian Leigh outfit on me.

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Echidne Finally Leans In. On Sheryl Sandberg's book.

Running after the train that passed the station is my frequent and sad lot.  Now that I have finally read Sheryl Sandberg's (and Nell Scovell's) Lean In.  Women, Work, and The Will To Lead,  a very quick and easy read, the conversation has moved on to Margaret Thatcher's influence and other similar matters.

Better late than never, eh?  Two warnings:

First, I couldn't avoid reading a ton of criticisms and reviews of the book before I got my own claws on it.  That's bound to have an impact, if not for any other reason than for raising my expectations about both its message and how controversial it might be.

Second,  I have read a large cartload of self-help books for women at work over my lifetime, and thus I come to this particular book with a different history than most people might.  It's hard for me to ignore  that context, even when the context is irrelevant for those who don't have my history of reading.

The combined effect of those two warnings was to make me feel a bit deflated after reading the book.  It's not that different from many of its predecessor books, except for the fame and position of Sandberg.  All self-help books about women in the world of work are aimed at women who want to climb the corporate ladders, not at poor women holding those ladders up, and all such books skirt the issue of sexism or institutional constraints and focus on only what the woman herself can do.  All such books also give her strivings a happy ending.  The change in how I operated worked!  I got the corner office!  The only problem was me not acting correctly before!

Having said that, the book is also very good in parts.  Sandberg explicitly defines her market as the women who do have some power,  and she admits that this may not apply to poor women.  She also discusses institutional constraints and the need to affect the whole system of gender roles and expectations, and then states that this is not the goal of her book.   It has a narrower objective:  To make women aware of their internalized gender roles and in what way they serve to damage their ability to do well at work.

Her practical examples of how to ask for a raise, how the thing is rigged against women but why women still should persevere is useful and well sourced, and I learned a few things from that chapter.

Her discussion of the ways some women sabotage their careers in expectation of one day having children is also very important.  If ambitious women decide to refuse opportunities or challenges years before they even have children, just because one day they might have them, the career they sacrifice later on won't require much of a sacrifice after all those compromises.

Seeing all that spelled out was beneficial for me, because it highlighted a different side of the very common practice of women "preparing" themselves for the fact that they will be the hands-on caregivers for children one day.  But why sabotage the before-children part of your life, too?

I have noted that this can begin as early as the time when students decide on their majors at college, though it's also true that some jobs allow more flexibility for entry and re-exit than others.  Still, when that is not the case, what useful purpose does not taking risks in one's job serve, for those who can afford such risks, especially if there is a possibility of a soft landing if the risk fails?

Sandberg is also good at demanding men as fathers and as partners to step up to the plate, and not just to eat the dinner off it.  It's not possible for women to do it all.  That it is utterly impossible for any parent, mother or father,  to do what the top jobs in industries require is something Sandberg discusses much less than she should have.  She states that she is always available for her firm and that she goes back to work after coming home at the (gasp!) enormously early hour of 5.30 pm.

All that is ridiculous and preposterous and also probably quite unnecessary in real productivity terms.  It's a way of hazing among adults, a way of stating that one's blood and bones belong to the factory store, only this time the factory store pays you handsomely for that ownership.  And a way to tell the yes-men and yes-women of the corporation apart from the ones who might not be willing to go equally far in showing their obedience. 

This is the part of the book which rang most false to me, the part which required institutional criticism.  Today's expectations of working hours in the well-paid jobs are not sustainable, as a form of life with partners and children and aging parents and even rest and relaxation.  They simply are not, and it doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman.  If that's how you are expected to work, you will one day go home and wonder who those people sleeping there might be.

On the other hand, Sandberg also points out the need for mothers to let the fathers be real partners in childcare.  If the mother expects to be in total control of it, she will soon be left to do it on her own.  Sandberg's discussion of the way some women sabotage other women's careers at work is also good.  It's not really the Queen Bee syndrome that is work at here, I think (though some of that always will exist, as there are King Bees, too), but the Smurfette Principle:  There can be many Smurfs but one Smurfette is plenty.

What else did I like about the book?  The references.  Sandberg credits Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University for them, and they are extensive.  Indeed, one could do worse than read the references as a start of studying this whole problem.

And Sandberg's discussion of the importance of risk-taking.  She distinguishes between bad risks, the kinds which can cause a bare table at dinner or the loss of the house, and good risks, the kinds which really don't have a terrible downside but require perhaps a lateral move at work or taking a new job, and she argues that women are too hesitant to try the latter types of endeavors.

This links to the games more men play in the world of work, games which women may not have been taught.  For example, in journalism a rejection of an article doesn't have to mean anything more than the need to resubmit it to another site.  Women are more likely to regard such a rejection as a real judgement and to stop submitting that piece altogether, and women are also more likely to hold their own work to tougher standards than men seem to do, on average.  That internal judge should take a break and go to the beach.  Just have a look at some of the stuff that gets published (me, even!) and think of it as a game, at least in the first round of rejections.   If a sufficient number of rejections complain about the same problem, then fix it and submit again!

Then to the criticisms, which I hope are read as constructive.  Several other reviews have pointed out that Sandberg focuses on what individual women can do, not on the systemic inequities, and that can easily read as suggesting that individual solutions alone might work.  Sandberg herself states, however, that both approaches are needed at the same time.

In short, I wouldn't make that a strong criticism against this particular book.  Many different approaches are necessary, and the Lean In approach has the advantage of making some women, at least, think about these issues in a way which could empower them and improve their lives.  The need for positive thinking and activism can come in many disguises.

The criticism that the book is elitist is a valid one.  Sandberg belongs to the business elite of this country, and it's hard to see how she could have written a book with all those personal examples that such books seem to require without peppering the text with references which come across as elitist.

The whole focus of the book is on women who have careers, not dead-end jobs.  Books of this type do not get written for women (or men)  in dead-end jobs because such jobs offer very little individual power for those who work them.  You have no real negotiating power while applying for a counter-job at McDonald's, and you certainly cannot get away with crying at work there, as Sandberg relates she has done at Facebook.

On the other hand, the Introduction to the book states that Sandberg is aware of this, that her book is written for those women who do have some moving-room at work.  And it is possible that some of her messages would work in other types of jobs, too, such as the practical examples of how to frame a request in a way which is more likely to get it approved.

There is a sub-text to many of the criticisms of Sandberg's book from the elitist angle.  Women who have nannies and cleaning ladies and so on, in order to succeed at work, seem to be doing it on the backs of other women (though they are also the employers of those women), and since upper-class women already do better than the other women, why focus on ways to make them do even better?

Did you notice what I did in that paragraph?  I framed everything as the woman's duty so that Sandberg's husband wasn't mentioned at all!  It's Sheryl who exploits her nanny and her cleaning lady, because we ultimately think that it's Sheryl who is responsible for any children she and her husband have.

This may be a type of intersectionality, but it's one which looks at class across one gender, rather than looking at class across both genders or both genders across class.  Those cases ARE different.

Whether that nuance matters or not depends on your definition of feminism.  Whether there is any value to looking at the lives of already-privileged women also depends on your angle.  If your viewpoint is across social classes your conclusions are different than they are if your viewpoint is comparing men and women on the same social class rung.

Some of that may be too theoretical to matter to you.  The real question, of course, is how to get more books of this sort about the women at the bottom rungs and how to get that message out there as a form of Lean In or whatever the movement might be called.  And the other real question is whether it matters to poorer women and women of color to  have more women in positions of power if those women were not initially poor and/or non-white.  Note that I'm not answering that question because the answer can be difficult to fathom.

Structural activism is probably more important for women who don't have much power at work.  In that sense this book and most of the other self-help books are not relevant for those women.  Unionization might work much better for domestic workers, hotel cleaners and counter-staff at fast food restaurants.  Federal paid parental leave, subsidized health care and good annual vacations are part of the answer, too.

Then the criticism that the book focuses on women with children:  I don't hold the focus on mothers as a misplaced one, because the majority of women will be mothers, and all women are or have been viewed as "potential mothers."  Thus, our assumptions about who cares for children affect most, if not all women, at paid work.  They are the mutterings in the cultural background:  If I promote her, will she leave?  What will it cost my firm to cover for her maternity leave?

Whether Sandberg's focus on combining motherhood and work is excessive can be debated.  On the other hand,  she certainly lets the corporations and corporate cultures off far too easily.  That's what felt quite false in the book.  Your curmudgeony boss won't suddenly see the light and give you six months of paid maternity leave just because you learned to negotiate effectively,  unless you really are the brightest star in the night sky, and even then he or she will check on those lumens, to see if you truly shine.  And while the initial example in the book about getting nearby parking for pregnant women was a great introduction to Leaning In (ask for it!), the fact is that providing such parking is almost costless for the firm and increases their reputation.  If you ask for decent working hours for all workers, not just parents, you might be packing up your desk in no time.

Finally, I liked this take on why the book is not that meaningful for women of color:

For professional black women, the performances that they feel compelled to give are shaped by the ways intersections of race and gender isolate them and place them under greater scrutiny. As they take stock of their work environments and perceive colleagues’ stereotypes, beliefs, and preconceptions, these women learn that, like Michelle Obama, they must repackage themselves in ways that are more palatable to their white co-workers. As these colleagues’ goodwill and collegiality is necessary for advancement and occupational stability, black women professionals find themselves doing both surface acting and emotional labor in order to successfully integrate their work spaces.

Perhaps put in another way, Tressie points out that the advice on how to ask for a raise might not apply to professional black women, because the cultural mutterings for them are somewhat different from the cultural mutterings about professional white women.  The expected forms of behavior differ and hence what might work in "leaning in" would differ.  But Sandberg doesn't discuss that, and it's possible that the advice she gives in the book would not work.  It could be even counterproductive.













 

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Art Post, Sort of

This is my take (as a five-year old) of the fairy tale Puss in Boots.  For some reason I remember worrying about the fact that the cat would drown in the boots.  I had in mind my grandfather's riding boots which were almost as tall as I was.  Which might be of some interest in thinking about the development of thought in children.  Like the much earlier drawing experience I had (maybe around three) when I was supposed to draw a house and only drew the door handle on the paper as nothing else would fit.

You can see that I copied!  So young and so depraved...

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Margaret Thatcher

Has died.  Melissa McEwan at Shakesville has a thoughtful article on Thatcher's role as the first (and still the only) female Prime Minister of Britain, pointing out the role of misogyny in the public criticisms of Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher is often given as an example of the thesis that the only way women can get into power as the First in some important job is to act like honorary men and preferably reactionary honorary men.  Any sign of feminism in such a woman is an absolute no-no, because opening the door  for one carefully groomed woman might be acceptable (the Smurfette principle), but the gates should not be left unbolted against the rest of the wild hordes.  It is therefore not surprising that she made only one high-level female appointment during her long rule or that her policies carefully avoided upsetting the existing gendered power structures in the British society.

I am not a fan of Thatcher's politics, and neither am I a fan of the way she pulled up the drawbridge after her own successful invasion of the corridors of power.  But I understood that at a particular time (from the 1950s to the 1990s) and in a particular place (the British Conservative Party) the way she was, felt and acted was the only way for a woman to reach real political power.

Thatcher was not a feminist, of course.  She is famous for openly disliking feminism, partly because she was blind to what feminism had given her:  The right to run for office, the right to vote.  She believed that her successes were based on nothing but her own talents and her own hard work.  Women's concerns she brushed off like so much dandruff on the shoulders of her black suit.

Given all this, what should feminism think about Thatcher if feminism was a person?  Embrace her for showing us at least one powerful woman?  Reject her because she rejected feminism? Wonder about the fact that in at least one survey more men than women ranked her as capable and that the man woman* writing about that also wrote this:

Feminism has long been associated with talk: combative rhetoric about equal rights, academic analysis of whether men and women are the same or whether women are actually better, that moldy debate over whether it’s possible for women to “have it all,” both career and family. Many a feminist like Germaine Greer or Betty Friedan, and more recently Sheryl Sandberg and Anne Marie Slaughter, has made her mark through writing about gender issues—sometimes to considerable cultural effect, but still more talk.  Connotatively, a “feminist” has a chip on her shoulder the size of a two-by-four, never shuts up about “empowerment,” is eternally on the look out for sexist slights, and never considers the possibility that other people might deny her a job or dismiss her opinions because she is personally insufferable. The movement has often obsessed with language, leaving a legacy of awkward “him/her” constructions or faddish but equally sexist Bibles whose God is a “she.”  Given the humorless blah-blah-blah the term feminist evokes, it’s little wonder that many young women today avoid the label.

Margaret Thatcher was a real feminist. Not for what she said but for what she did. She did not pursue justice for her gender; women’s rights per se was clearly a low priority for her. She was out for herself and for what she believed in. 

I find that delicious!  The very definition of the exceptional woman and the oddest definition of feminism yet (and there are really weird ones out there!).

So what is Thatcher's legacy for women?  I would imagine that she would be angry at such a question.  Those women, always pestering her when she was nothing like them!  She was one of the boys, or at least a Smurfette among Smurfs.

I think Irin Carmon stated the answer to that question best:

By the same token, it’s possible to have the following measured approach to what Thatcher did for women’s representation in power: It’s better to have women in public life, even when we vehemently disagree with them, than to have no women in public life at all. Every single one counts toward the normalization of women in charge, however abhorrent their policies. Thatcher herself was a necessary rebuke to essentialism, to the humanity-constricting idea that women are inherently more collaborative, peaceful or nurturing. Bella Abzug once said, “Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.” She was talking about female mediocrity, but the same goes for female wrongness.

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*Apologies for getting Shriver's gender wrong there and thanks for grrljock for the correction.

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The Hottest President of the United States of America

This was created after Obama's comments about the looks of Kamala Harris. It's one of those "hottest this or that" lists but, for once, consists of men.

The comments Obama made, to create that response, were these:

At the fundraiser, Obama called out Harris along with several other Democratic leaders in California.
“You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” the president said. “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”
When the crowd started laughing, the president added, “It’s true! C’mon.”

He has now apologized for referring to her looks.

The reactions to all this have been predictable, taking the form of people either arguing that a man can't even compliment a woman anymore without all those feminazis rushing in or arguing that for the boss to talk about his subordinate's looks in public is inappropriate for all kinds of reasons, and mostly for the reason that traditionally women have been ranked first on their looks.  Thus, talking about those looks in some ways puts a woman back in her "proper place" in the grand scheme of things.

It is that gendered  history of certain types of compliments that might matter here.  In fact, I can't quite imagine anyone introducing Obama at an event by adding to a list of his achievements the fact that he probably IS the hottest president we have had for some time.  And if anyone actually did that it would look and sound very weird.

At the same time, I don't think Obama tried to do anything but compliment Harris.  And if these kinds of compliments were equally commonly received by both men and women I wouldn't see it a problem.  Indeed, it's not a problem in the grand scheme of things (fistulas, poverty, legal subordination of women in many countries and so on).  But analyzing it can be useful as one of those "my life experience is different" moments of shared understanding.

But this I have a little bit of trouble with:

During a discussion on the topic Friday on TODAY, celebrity guest Liza Minnelli said she didn’t see anything wrong with what Obama said.
“He can’t say she’s pretty?” she said. “When this lovely woman gets up in the morning and looks in the mirror and puts on her makeup and does her hair, don’t you think she wants to be attractive and wants to be thought of as attractive? She’s not doing that for no reason.”

If I have a shower in the morning do I want my boss to praise me on how clean I smell?  To want to be viewed as presentable or attractive or whatever is not the same thing as to want that vocally discussed in a professional context.  And compliments which are wonderful in certain private contexts are not so wonderful when they are publicly expressed.

Then there is the fact that many men would love to get compliments on their hotness because traditionally they do not get them.  It sounds like a really fun thing, and it may well be, the first one hundred times or so.

That's where the gendered history enters the picture.  The kinds of comments the manager of an exclusive men's financial club in Finland gave, about whether the club would ever admit women.  He pointed out that women would be lovely eye-candy.  I mention that example, because it sorta demonstrates why many women are uncomfortable with public comments about their looks, however complimentary they may be.
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Added later:  Garance makes the case much better.

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Sunday Political Shows and Diversity

Media Matters has done another study about the numbers of Republican, Democratic and neutral people on those shows.  Republicans are, in general, overrepresented.  Last time I looked at one of these studies someone argued that it was because they were the administration.  But this time they are not the administration.

This graph shows the percentage of men and women in the studied seven shows during the first quarter of 2013:

 The reason I don't terribly care for the term "diversity" is that we could argue that this graph does show diversity!  Women are included, after all. 

The problem, for me, is that just talking about "diversity" ignores the population percentages of various groups.  A spoonful of that and a pinch of this in the soup provides a diversity of flavors.  But women, for example, are more than half of the American population.  All other things being equal, we would expect their percentage of those shows to be slightly more than half, too.

I get that those other things are not equal.  But a nonstop focus on diversity puts less focus on that concept of fairness.

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