Beyond the Shriver Report - Ms. Magazine on Changing Work/Life Policy

The big news in the Shriver Report, subtitled "A Woman's Nation Changes Everything," is that women comprise 50% of today's workforce...and that we've reached that magic number due to current economic woes. Of those laid off during the recession, three-quarters have been men. But where's the change that California First Lady Maria Shriver, author of the report, alludes to?

The sad truth about this "woman's nation" is in the Fall 2009 issue of Ms. magazine, on newsstands today. In the eye-opening article "Paycheck Feminism," authors Karen Kornbluh and Rachel Homer reveal why our current system is dysfunctional in meeting the needs of working women and families:

[C]rucial U.S. government policies that provide economic security to American workers and their families were designed initially during the New Deal to fit that very different era. "Social insurance" programs--which today include Social Security, employer-provided (and tax-subsidized) health care and pensions, unemployment insurance and Medicare -- as well as the 40-hour workweek were first established when only 10 percent of married women were in the paid workforce.

Women are penalized because far more work part-time (25% of women compared to 11% of men) and therefore do not enjoy benefits typically reserved for full-time workers. Kornbluh and Homer say that policymakers were deliberate in crafting legislation that supported men working full-time because "Even as families during the Great Depression were increasingly relying on the wages of a wife or daughter, a backlash was brewing against women working and potentially taking 'men's jobs.'"

As the workplace changed and woman (and men) began to veer away from the traditional work patterns of previous generations, policies did not keep up with these changes. And 30% of households are headed up by women, yet concessions still are not made for women who still bear the burden of caregiving -- for children or elderly relatives -- and have to adjust their work lives to make job and family possible.

What needs to change? The Ms. article comes up with five recommendations "for revamping U.S. work/life policy to take into account women's lives, the variety of way they work and the value of that work." Just the first one alone would be a significant cultural shift in the workplace: "Stop making unemployment, retirement and other benefits contingent on steady, full-time work." The others also address specific concerns of working women and, in the long run, would lead to a stronger economy and more flexibility for the American family. You can read all five recommendations in the Fall 2009 issue of Ms.