Who counts?

Tuesday last was Census night in New Zealand. Delayed for two years because of the devastating Canterbury earthquake of 22 February 2011, this census is expected to provide an up-to-date and accurate stocktake of New Zealand and its people. The main reason given for this $72 million exercise is to gain better, more recent information in order to inform government policy and the allocation of government funding, as well as assisting in business planning.

The last time I filled in a New Zealand census form was in the late 1990s. I recall struggling over some of the ill-fitting questions then, but - if I’d thought about it all - had expected the questions would be a little more nuanced this time round. 

Wrong.

There were three sets of questions that gave me pause: those relating to sex, number of children, and unpaid work. The Statistics NZ (SNZ) spokesperson reminded those of us inclined to ‘over-react’ to poorly framed questions that the census is not designed to get a picture of us as individuals, but rather to create an overall picture of what the mass of individuals looks like. There is an incentive to keep the questions broadly similar in order to make meaningful time comparisons between censuses. But, I wonder, how accurate can that overall picture really be if the instrument designed to depict it is a little on the blunt side? 

I first stumbled over the apparently straightforward sex option of male and female. Why were these the only options provided? Even soap operas have heard of intersex and trans people. Apparently, though, some of the leading boffins in the country haven’t. Or, worse, apparently didn’t think this information counts. And, by extension, are there no policy or funding implications for this information, in health for example?  

I am aware that SNZ, in other non-census guises, have met with a variety of advocacy groups in this area. Increasingly, in other contested areas of identification, such as ethnicity, SNZ are relying on a method of self-identification. And there is even now a facility for those who do not wish to record M or F on their passports to now use an X (indeterminate / unspecified) designation. So why the insistence on binarism in the census? 

SNZ have been advising those spearheading a campaign to tick both M and F options in the census that they will impute ( i.e. guess) their sex from their other answers (number of births, for example), and that the best method for answering the question is to select the sex that relates best to how you live your life now. While this may solve the problem for trans people, where does that leave those who are intersex, those have the sexual characteristics of both sexes?

Unimpressed, I moved on.  

Then I came across the question that has hurt and offended many parents of children who were not considered to be ‘live births’.  The question asks women for the number of children they have had who were born alive. The only other options are ‘none’ or ‘object to answering this question’. I guess option 3 was some attempt at sensitivity, though interestingly the only other question that offers this option is the one on religion. I also wondered what policy functions were served by this question: everyone has to have an individual census form - including babies just born on the day of the census - and birth, deaths and marriages data would contain a much more accurate picture of stillbirths, infant mortality and live births. Presumably it is this more accurate information that informs health planning and funding. So, I’m genuinely interested to know, why do we have to answer this question?  Being paranoid, I almost wonder if it is to catch out the people who put two ticks on the sex question ...

But the highest raised eyebrows of the night - and the questions most pertinent to this blog - were reserved for the questions on paid and unpaid work. For the question on paid work, you were asked to specify the number of hours you worked. You were even asked to include the hours under this question if you engaged in unpaid work for a family business. There was no facility under this question on employment to specify that you had a full-time unpaid caregiving role in the home (whether of a child, disabled family member or elderly family member).  Several questions later, however, there was a question on unpaid labour. It asked all respondents to identify whether they engaged in unpaid labour in the form of: household chores, childcare (in your own household), care of the ill or disabled (who are part of your household), childcare (for someone not in the household), or care of the ill or disabled not in your household, or voluntary work in the community.  It did not ask for any specification of hours. 

I’m sure I’m only not the only peeved and under-valued parent who filled in this question by noting the number of hours I worked unpaid on my form and writing a note to the effect that SNZ would only get a proper appreciation of the labour force, if they sought hours for both paid and unpaid labour. For the 1.7 million people who filled in their census forms online, there is unlikely to have been any facility to register issues with any of the questions.

Other censuses do ask further questions about unpaid work. The 2011 census of England and Wales, for example, asked respondents to specify the hours they worked without pay, giving a hourly range to select from. The catch? The unpaid work specified was for elder care or care of the disabled. In this census, childcare is not only unpaid, but also rendered invisible.

No doubt SNZ would point out that there are not one but two post-censal surveys that capture more detail about the nature of unpaid work. One, the General Social Survey, asks about voluntary work in the community and about care for those not in your own household. It is based on a series of survey questions put to a  large random sample of people. The other, the Time Use Survey, includes an activity diary for its participants, so does incorporate whatever unpaid work people are engaged in. The last Time Use Survey revealed the not-at-all surprising fact that women do more of the unpaid labour in the home, and that the women who did the lion’s share of this labour were in their child-bearing years. Funny, that. So what policy is being implemented on the basis of these time-use surveys?  This is a lot harder to discern.

In spite of these two surveys, which provide a fuller picture of unpaid work, my issue with the fact that there is a disparity placed on the value of paid and unpaid work in the census is that it sends a clear message about who and what counts. And that is money earned, rather than time spent. This is ground covered, famously, by Marilyn Waring in If Women Counted, later made into a documentary, Who’s Counting? which you can watch here in its entirety. Waring makes the point that if a person is not visible as a producer in a nation’s economy then they will be invisible in terms of receiving any benefit from that economy. For women, this can be seen in loss of retirement savings, risk of poverty in the event of marital breakdown, and a wide range of gender inequities.

Elsewhere, Waring comments that ‘unpaid work relieves expenditure by the State.’ This was demonstrated in a recent New Zealand case where the government was found to be discriminating against the parental caregivers of adult disabled children who were not paid for their care compared with external caregivers who were. The government contested the caregivers’ case saying the care they provided was part of their ‘natural familial duties’ and therefore not eligible for funding. The costs that would be involved in both paying them adequately and changing policy were also included as reasons for not doing so in the Crown case. Fortunately, the Courts accepted that these unpaid workers were not only working but were also being discriminated against on the basis of family status. The government appealed the decision, which went to the Court of Appeal, who again found in the caregivers’ favour. Reluctantly, the government accepted the verdict without further appeal but made it clear that it didn’t think ‘its’ money was best spent in this area.

Given that such a clear case of discrimination for unpaid workers was met with a tough fight by the government - who based part of their case on the false premise that the caregivers weren’t working at all, but rather engaged in a familial duty of care as part of a so-called ‘implied social contract’, it seems unlikely that the unpaid work of love that other parents engage in will be recognised in any form anytime soon.

Perhaps that is why unpaid care work doesn’t count for much. Because to recognise caregiving as work that should be compensated - even if not at so-called market-value - is to recognise a fundamental shift in what societies value: time spent rather than money earned, nurture rather than exploitation, equity rather than competition, families (of all kinds) and communities rather than individuals.   

But aren’t those the things that really count?

review: The Price of Motherhood

Much like buses, in this blog you could be waiting around for book reviews with none looming on the horizon (as in September) and then several come along all at one (as in October - November). Perhaps this says something about the time I have to devote to reading relatively lengthy books on feminism and motherhood, perhaps on how alert my brain is after a day’s paid and unpaid work. As my current reading material - Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature - is literally verging on encyclopaedic this might be the last review for a wee while. 

Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (2001) is one of the few books I have read - on any subject - that pretty much lives up to the hype on the cover: ‘a landmark book,’ ‘powerful and important’, and ‘a scathing indictment of policies that cheat mothers’. Naomi Wolf could do worse than have a squizz at this to get some tips on powerful ways to combine the personal and political (although, to be fair, I guess she probably has).  Unlike Kunin’s book, which I reviewed last week, Crittenden's book has a resonance beyond the borders of the United States. In the US, the institutional biases towards mothers may be writ large (in paid employment, in divorce, in single parenting, in tax rules), but they are present to some degree in other so-called developed countries as well. Not least in the ways at which the devaluing  - or, more accurately, the non-valuing - of a mother’s unpaid work institutionalises gender inequity and socio-economic disadvantage.

Crittenden’s book, reissued last year, is based on five years of research in economics, history, child development, family law, public policy, demography, anthropology, evolutionary psychology and on field interviews with a range of parents. It is also based on her own experiences of the acute disempowerment she felt on having children. She writes:

This is also a work of the heart, growing out of my own experiences as a professional woman and a mother. As a beneficiary of the women’s movement, for years I lived the unencumbered life of a journalist; one of the boys in a gender-neutral environment that represented enormous progress for women ... [A] surprise came when I realised [after having a baby] how little my former world seemed to understand, or care, about the complex reality I was discovering. The dominant culture  of which I had been a part considered child-rearing unskilled labor, if it considered child-rearing at all. And no-one was stating the obvious: if human abilities are the ultimate fount of economic progress, as many economists now agree, and if those abilities are nurtured (or stunted) in the early years, then mothers and other care-givers of the young are the most important producers in the economy. They do, literally, have the most important job in the world. (pp 10-11)

While I wonder just how ‘gender-neutral’ her previous work environment really was - it’s not like women without children don’t face any barriers in their careers - Crittenden’s outrage struck a chord. I read on, intrigued. 

First of all, Crittenden traces the disappearance of women’s ‘work’ during the nineteenth century, as workplaces began to be increasingly located outside the home. So far, so obvious. What Crittenden also traces is attitudinal shifts and the specific locatable moments at which these seismic changes occurred. Around the middle of the nineteenth-century, for example, the developing national census began to classify the occupations of individuals within households rather than treating households as a single economic unit. As part of this shift, household labour (‘housekeeping’) was re-classified as ‘unproductive’ and separate from ‘productive labour’. Mothers ‘keeping house’ for their own families (unproductive) were distinguished from women keeping house for wages (productive).  This shift in the way a mother’s work was conceptualised meant that by the turn of the twentieth century, women and children were both considered as dependents or, more specifically, as economic liabilities rather than assets. Despite some differences, this trend manifested across the United States, in Britain and in Australia (and, I would guess, a number of other countries too). 

And, in the 1920s, the gendered definitions of productivity became enshrined in international economic instruments, specifically in the measure that became known as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Significantly, GDP only measured goods and services that were sold; by excluding ‘non-productive’ work from the national wealth ‘almost all the activities of married women were omitted from the scorecard of capitalism.’ (p 65). Crittenden does acknowledge that this has more recently begun to change, not least in terms of contemporary environmental problems (e.g. how do you calculate the value of clean water?), the insights of feminist economics, and a deeper understanding of what is called - a little chillingly, I think - human capital.   

Crittenden cites with approval Marilyn Waring’s call to unpaid caregivers to tell census-takers that they are unpaid workers rather than ‘unemployed’; she traces how a campaign to do just that in Canada in the 1990s led to changes in the way unpaid labour in the home was counted in the census. During this campaign, Carol Lees, its principal organiser, encountered resistance from women’s groups who apparently did not agree with her child-care policy (which, according to her, is ‘to value it wherever it occurs, in or out of the home’ p 83). By the late 1990s, a number of countries had begun to collect data on unpaid labour. These shifts started to reveal the ‘free ride’ most societies were getting on the back of this unpaid work: ‘the entire society benefits from well-reared children, without sharing more than a fraction of the costs of producing them. And that free ride on female labor is enforced by every major institution, starting with the workplace’ (p 86). In neo-liberal economies particularly, children are thus seen as an individual ‘choice’ rather than a social good (much less a community responsibility). This rationale drives such practices as expensive child care of variable quality, limited financial benefits for families, a demonise-the-parents approach to all manner of anti-social behaviours, and humiliating reckonings of what a wife is worth in divorce settlements (including child support payments). Cue a thousand comedy routines concerning blood-sucking former spouses...

She closes her analysis by setting out a programme for business, government, and the community, the ‘free riders’ on mothers’ unpaid labour who reap the benefits from well-nurtured children while contributing little to the cost.

Throughout the book, Crittenden doesn’t shy away from the fact that some early feminists bought into the productive / unproductive distinction and played a role in the perpetuation of inequity: she documents a 1909 debate between Charlotte Perkins Gilman (who described the vast majority of women as ‘unproductive parasites’) and Anna Howard Shaw (who argued that a mother’s role in the home should be compensated), as marking a crucial turning point in the US feminist agenda. Gilman, she argues, saw the shift in women’s status as requiring the overthrow of the patriarchal family as an economic unit to emancipate women, revealing some degree of contempt for the way in which a number of her contemporaries actually spent their time. 

Crittenden concludes: 

As that evening in New York illustrated, at the turn of the twentieth century, the women’s movement contained two contradictory strands: one that denigrated women’s role within the family, and one that demanded recognition and remuneration for it .... For the rest of the twentieth century, the women’s movement followed the first path, and it led to innumerable great victories. But in choosing that  path, many women’s advocates accepted the continued devaluation of motherhood, thereby guaranteeing that feminism would not resonate with millions of wives and mothers. (p 63)

I’m usually a little suspicious of sweeping statements, but it’s nonetheless hard to escape Crittenden’s conclusion. It bristles behind every cry of outrage from previously career-minded new mothers (‘why didn’t anyone tell me?’), some of which are either overtly or covertly contained in the recent outpourings of ‘mummy-literature’: from the sardonic critiques of coffee-groups, to the more personal memoir, to the political polemic, to the historical analysis of motherhood as institution, to the exposition of ‘natural’ motherhood, to the mummy blog. It’s hard not to read it into the statistic of approximately 30 per cent of well-educated middle class women in ‘developed’ countries who are apparently choosing the ‘nuclear option’ of not having children. It’s hard not to read it into the so-called mummy wars between ‘stay-at-home’ and working mothers. It’s hard not to read it in the failure of most governments to provide adequate support for families particularly in early childhood, and in businesses who bemoan family-friendly policies.  It’s hard not to read it in the overwhelming evidence - which Crittenden assembles in subsequent chapters - that those who look after children are not only poorly paid but lack status, have limited political clout, and pay plenty for their ‘labours of love’. 

Isn’t it time that governments, businesses, and communities started sharing more of the costs of raising a child, instead of just reaping the benefits?

review: The New Feminist Agenda

While I was reading Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict (reviewed previously), I cast around looking for reviews to see how other people had responded to the book. In doing so, I happened upon this review in the New York Times by Judith Warner (author of Perfect Madness, a journalistic skewering of the ideology of the perfect mother as practised among middle and upper-middle class white women in the USA). Warner actually reviewed two books: Badinter’s, with which she had some issues while simultaneously being seduced by the elegant writing, and former Vermont governor and US ambassador Madeleine M. Kunin’s 2012 book The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work and Family. While Warner compared Kunin’s dry plain-speaking style unfavourably with Badinter’s, she much preferred Kunin’s ‘concrete, realistic’ politics, writing: 

Kunin’s is not a book of literary value, like Badinter’s. The writing is unremarkable, and there are no big, interesting philosophical ideas. Yet whereas Badinter’s argument is beautiful and essentially wrong, Kunin — Pollyanna-ish faith in the family-friendly nature of female politicians aside — is almost unimpeachably right, as she diagnoses what we in America need, why we’ve never gotten it, and how we may have some hope of achieving change in the future.

I too had some issues with Badinter’s book, although not quite the same ones as Warner, and thought it might be interesting to likewise read Kunin’s book in order to gain some insight into ‘concrete, realistic’ solutions.  Unlike Warner, however, I was less enamoured of Kunin’s book. I concede, however, that this may well be because I am not from the United States. I don’t mean that in an obnoxiously knee-jerk anti-American way. I mean rather that I found this book, while interesting, of limited use to those outside the US.  Instead, it made me very glad that I lived in a country that does not do the following:

• have no paid parental leave whatsoever (the only OECD country which does not)
• have slim to no paid sick leave for anybody, let alone parents of small children
• fail to protect unpaid parental leave for more than three months (after three months, parents seem to be at the mercy of their employers)
• fail to provide free healthcare for small children
• fail to provide new parents with professional support in the first weeks after having children 
• consider a forty-hour working week to be ‘part-time’
• have no right to request flexible working legislation
• tax spouses (usually mothers) at a marginal tax rate meaning proportionally more tax is taken from them, thus making it even more unaffordable for women with children to work
• does not provide proper regulation of early childhood education leaving some of it dangerously inadequate, and ensures that this sector remains one of the most poorly remunerated in the country (unless you are privileged to work for the Department of Defense)

And the list continues (and I will concede that there are New Zealand politicians now in power who seem hell-bent on eroding some of the protections we currently do enjoy, particularly in respect of single parents on benefits). Quite properly, Kunin is outraged at this laundry list of societal failings and her pragmatic aim is to set out a programme for women to take up the call and demand change.  She even begins her book describing her anger:

in my seventies I’m still dissatisfied with the status quo and harbour a passion for change. Old age allows me the luxury of being impatient - there isn’t much time left - and it permits me to say what I think, to be demanding, and, best of all, to imagine a different world where there is true gender equality in the workplace, the home and the political arena. (p 1)

Kunin then details a list of her expectations, developed through her involvement in second-wave feminism, that she sees as remaining unfulfilled. At the top of this list is the elusive goal of balancing career and family. Indeed, she was motivated to write this book by concluding that ‘many women who have careers that we could never imagined for ourselves are still flummoxed by the most age-old problem: how to have a job and take care of the children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled.’ (p 2)

She then proceeds to systematically deliver the evidence of maternal disempowerment in the US, both in the workplace and on the home-front. She looks to international models (France, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, Canada, the UK, and Australia) not simply to find the US lacking but to compare and contrast how other countries’ social policies would translate in the US environment (with difficulty, apparently). Her political acumen is to the fore here and the programme she develops from this analysis is nothing if not pragmatic: don’t go for ‘paid parental leave’ (who will support the idea of women being ‘paid to do nothing’ - aarrgh!) but ‘family leave insurance’ (a tactic which was apparently successful in New Jersey); appeal to business’s self-interest rather than their moral duties (here she looks at examples of companies who have implemented family policies and how it has benefitted rather than disadvantaged their businesses) and building bipartisan coalitions across different interest groups (people with disabilities, the elderly and men) in order to re-define what the rhetoric of family values means in practice.

She is obviously way more cognisant of the terrain of US politics than I will ever be, and her proposed programme sounds sensible. And yet even Kunin recognises that it may be too unachievable: “Could we hold a march for family­/work policies in Washington? Would anybody come? Or would they be too tired, too busy, too scared of losing their jobs to attend?” Warner thinks what’s needed is a new glamourous multi-tasking Gloria Steinem as a figurehead to inspire and rally everyone. I’m not so sure.

My issue with Kunin’s programme is that it still deeply enmeshed in specific ideas about what constitutes ‘real work‘ and looks primarily to self-interest (particularly in the business world) to provide the answer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for paid parental leave, flexible working and so on, and I think business has a key role in this - but not to the exclusion of a strong social safety-net provided by a functional welfare state. And I’m frankly disappointed that her pragmatic suggestions appear to perpetuate the myth that stay-at-home parents don’t work (which is why looking solely to business will only ever provide part of the solution).  

As unpaid - or low-paid - carers of children, the chronically ill and the elderly, stay-at-home parents (usually mothers) work too, and in doing so contribute immeasurably to the economy. ‘Immeasurably’, that is, in the sense that it isn’t systematically measured - there are many examples of calculating the costs of a mother’s unpaid work: here in Canada and here by the International Labour Organisation. Where is the part of Kunin’s programme that calls for the substantive recognition and valuing of this work?  Sure, she gestures at in places - for example in the chapter, ‘New Family Portraits’ which looks at shared parenting, stay at home dads, and how to explain ‘resumé gaps’ - but when she espouses calling for ‘family leave insurance’ because people will be turned off by ‘paid parental leave’ (because who wants to pay someone for ‘not working’ - aargh!), it may be pragmatic and politically palatable but it’s still reinforcing the idea that the unpaid work of caring is not productive work at all. 

I recently had some insight into this distinction. Having just bought our first house, my husband and I decided it would be prudent to look into life and income protection insurance. Our insurance advisor - a working mother herself - recommended insuring my husband’s income only (even though I too am working). While she was aware that this might come across as offensive to me, nonetheless the advice was couched in terms of the problems we could face if my husband couldn’t work for whatever reason. I’m not disputing that: it would totally suck if we didn’t have access to his income. But later on it got me thinking - well what if something happened to me and we not only lost my income, but my ability to care for our child for no pay whatsoever? If we had to pay someone to care for her without my income to cover it, or for my husband to reduce his hours so he could do it, then we would also face problems (which would, admittedly, be ameliorated to some extent by the safety-net of the welfare state - as would his unemployment or disability). But that unpaid care is apparently not worth insuring because it has no monetary value. 

This is patently nonsense. In a family with dependent children - and overwhelmingly so in the US, I would guess, with the thin social safety net provided - the unpaid work of the primary care-giver enables the other partner to be economically ‘productive’. And this is even more the case for single-parent families: participating in the paid economy is somehow - unbelievably - valued more highly than being able to provide parental care in the home. The limits of Kunin’s analysis in this respect are problematic, yet how to recognise the value of unpaid or low-paid care-work is canvassed at length in earlier work by Ann Crittenden in The Price of Motherhood (2001) and New Zealand’s own Marilyn Waring in If Women Counted (1988). 

While there is much of interest and value in Kunin’s book, perhaps this blind-spot shows up the limits of a politically pragmatic approach, rather than one that takes fundamental issue with the ways in which a national culture operates, and, on that basis, demands laws, policies, practices and institutions to show it values families in fact, not just in rhetoric. After all, if your starting point is compromise, then surely you only end up with small wins at best.