Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/24680
these crucial programs—as the Bush administration want- ed to do—we should modernize and strengthen them. Certainly today’s workers are as much in need of protec- tion against what FDR called “the hazards and vicissitudes of life” as their New Deal predecessors. Health-care re- form is the Obama administration’s No. 1 priority, but also on the table for 21st-century reforms are pensions, Social Security and the income-tax system. Women should take advantage of this opportunity to make sure that when new rules are written, they account for the way women work today. Call it “paycheck femi- nism”: As women become the majority of the workforce, we must educate and mobilize ourselves to demand that policymakers meet our legitimate needs for security, flex- ibility and opportunity. When policymakers back in the 1930s were designing programs to protect families from economic ruin, they made a deliberate choice to do so by supporting working men. 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 poten- tially taking “men’s jobs.” Policymakers wrote the rules so that Social Security, unemployment insurance and other benefit programs went primarily to full-time workers with secure long-term jobs. This was intentional: These programs were designed to support men who worked 40-hour weeks at the same job for their whole career. Women were often kept out of full-time white-collar and blue-collar jobs and concen- trated in domestic labor and clerical work. Meanwhile, those not in the paid workforce could only receive benefits for their unpaid but no-less-consuming work of keeping a home or caring for family members through a breadwinner, making them dependent. Those not in the paid workforce could qualify for support under poverty programs, including what came to be known as welfare, but did not “earn” these benefits despite many having worked to raise the next generation of citizens. The assumption was that breadwinners (presumed to be men) had caretakers (women, of course) holding down the home front. Overtime pay for the breadwinner was mandated, for example, but workers were not given the le- gal option to work fewer than 40 hours a week in order to have time to care for a family. Workers were compensated for disability or layoff, but not if they left the workplace for family reasons. And if married women had a job in addi- tion to their husbands’, their “second” incomes were taxed disproportionately higher. Little government support was offered for services that would help working women, such as child care and after-school or summer-school programs. Most of these policies linger today, although—as the ambitious new Shriver Report outlines (see box, page 31)—women (and many men) no longer follow the per- ceived work patterns of the 1930s, 40s, 50s or 60s, inas- much as they ever did. The company man featured on today’s popular TV series Mad Men, sustained at home by his wife, is now mainly a relic. One-third to one-half of all marriages end in divorce, and 30 percent of U.S. house- holds are headed by unmarried women. Yet women still do the bulk of caretaking, even as they balance it with paid employment. Since women in the workforce aren’t offered any special dispensation to raise their children or care for sick or elderly family members, they’re forced to work part time, take pay cuts and side- track the progress of their work lives. More than twice as many employed women are part-timers compared to men (25 percent to 11 percent). And although the Obama administration is taking action to close the wage gap, women today continue to earn less than men, on average (79 cents on the dollar). Women’s lower-pay, fewer-hour jobs are doubly prob- lematic because they cause women to subsequently re- ceive less from the earnings-based programs that are supposed to soften the harsh edges of the marketplace. Women who lose their jobs are about 10 percent less like- WOMEN PAY MORE FOR HEALTH INSURANCE Insurers charge women up to 140% more than men for identical health plans. SOURCE: National Women’s Law Center www.msmagazine.com FALL 2009 | 29