The Summer of Women

Did we earn paid leave?

This summer has been celebrated as the one that women owned. The Barbie Movie has grossed over $1.2B worldwide. Taylor Swift, Beyonce, the Women’s World Cup have attracted massive crowds, publicity and record-breaking consumer dollars, primarily from women, to women-led entertainment, but also to entire economies surrounding them. I’ve been following the “hot grrl summer” coverage for months and I’m here for the mainstreaming of feminist themes we’ve seen dominating headlines and spending. Alex and I just finally saw Barbie at a mid-week 11am matinee, because we are parents of 3 (under-Barbie-age) on summer camp schedule, IYKYK. It was extremely satisfying to see both the barbie criticisms and overarching gender stereotypes all called out and flipped around in film with an explicit plot about overthrowing patriarchy. I was prepared to love America Ferrera’s speech, which I did, but I also think this Matriarchy Report is spot on:

Although I thought it was great, the content of the speech is well-worn territory for me at this point; it’s the content of half the memes that I see in my 40’s-lady-feminist life… I wish it had been even more explicit about how patriarchy is damaging for men too.

But nothing’s perfect, turns out not even Barbie, and overall I loved it for us and for mainstream entertainment.

Photo by Chris Leipelt

I even watched a couple games of the soccer (Glennon Doyle is giving me lessons) because I was jazzed up about the US women’s national team playing for equal pay. Or, at least an equal split of the FIFA prize money - seems “equal pay” is not so straight forward once you dig into the details. The prize money awarded by FIFA is still highly unequal, and female soccer players overall are paid a fraction that of men. CNN reported that:

“Soccer players at the 2023 Women’s World Cup will on average earn just 25 cents for every dollar earned by men at their World Cup last year. The report also found that, across the board, top female players get paid the same or less in a year than what male soccer players of the same level receive per month.”

Female spending is important - women influence up to 80% of purchasing decisions. But let’s remember: the women spending on concert and movie tickets are still earning at best 83 cents to the dollar compared to men, which worsens for mothers and women of color. The pay gap has barely narrowed in the last two decades, in fact it increased during the pandemic (hello, unpaid care labor!). In the backdrop of Barbie are the Hollywood writers strikes, which as many have pointed out, is a feminist and equity issue. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has some sobering stats illustrating just how far the entertainment industry has to go to improve equity: only 7% of directors are female and 13% of writers, and outnumbered female representation persists on screen, even in children’s shows, with little change over the past 60 years. Representation matters, and it turns out Barbie is an outlier.

The most celebrated victory of this hot grrl summer seems to be about the money they spent as an indication of empowerment. I can’t help but rain on the parade a bit and ask what it all amounts to when it comes to objective changes in equity outcomes outside of Barbie Land. How does this celebration of women’s economic power intersect with the key structure that is both driving and driven by gender inequity: the feminization and devaluation of care labor? I’m convinced that, until we deliberately overhaul our approach to caregiving, progress toward gender equity will remain painfully slow at best. I mean, I had to (bitter) laugh at a Doordash commercial that played before Barbie. It featured a mom and dad relaxing by the pool, when suddenly “back to school” sneaks up on them. Mom is overrun with anxiety, yelling “I need my to-do list!” while dad sort of shrugs and looks confused but goes along with it. Because, duh, mom does all that stuff.

Paid Family Leave is at the foundation of gender and caregiver equity

At four weeks postpartum, I absolutely would not have been able to function at work. My body was barely physically healed. I was in a fog of postpartum sleep deprivation, prone to swings between sobbing with exhaustion and uncertainty, and a heart bursting with a kind of love I’d never experienced before. Like so many mothers, breastfeeding was harder than I expected and it was around the clock, day and night. I was waking to every noise, checking to see if my baby was breathing, often drenched in sweat. I was experiencing the horror of intrusive thoughts, which I now recognize was a sign of postpartum anxiety, but it was brushed off by my doctor as “normal.”¹ My big accomplishment in those earlyish postpartum days would be to leave the house for a doctor’s appointment, or after a couple weeks, the walks that got progressively longer, carrying baby Oscar on my chest, my hazy brain observing the bustling city around me as if I were looking through a window from outside. Expecting women to go back to work at this stage is cruel. I was fortunate to not have to, but many have no choice.

Toward the end of my first pregnancy, I hadn’t been feeling great and decided to start my parental leave three weeks before my due date - a week earlier than the norm - which raised some eyebrows around the office. The whole vibe around pregnancy and leave in the office was superficially supportive with undertones of guilt and shame about how parental leave would impact colleagues. The night of my last day at work I ended up in the hospital and came home a few days later with a baby. Not even one night of solid rest between work and a physically taxing birth, kicking off the biggest change to my life as I knew it.

I worked at a high profile university at the time, and yet the only option for leave was to pay monthly advance premiums into “disability” insurance, which then paid only 60% of my salary for up to two weeks before my due date, and four weeks after. Beyond that, I could use up all of my sick and vacation days, but I was otherwise on my own. Because I went into labor early, those two weeks of paid leave pre delivery were lost due to bad luck and biology. So I got 60% of one month’s salary minus the insurance premiums I had paid in for about two years. I think it worked out to about 2 weeks fully paid leave.

I’ve only been formally employed for that first of my three pregnancies. Leaving formal employment was a choice greatly influenced by the lack of support women receive during and after pregnancy, and in the workplace as mothers. I had planned to take the full FMLA² leave (12 weeks unpaid), but after Oscar was born I couldn’t imagine going back to the office full time, with expectations of 25% international travel. When a Foundation Executive I had worked with on a project offered me a half time consulting contract at a great hourly rate, I jumped on it. Not only was she wonderful to work with, a mother herself, running a foundation that was perfectly aligned with my interests and skills, but it gave me the flexibility to control my hours, travel, and to work from home - years before this was the norm. I was able to take closer to four months off, and then ease back into work, and I’m positive this benefitted my own mental health, my baby and family - just as copious research shows that it does.

Paid family leave policies are also necessary for non-birthing parents, and caregivers for elderly or disabled family members. While my elder parent and sibling caregiving duties haven’t required me to care for them full time, I’ve certainly had to take stints off of work to handle my mother’s care arrangements, move her between facilities, etc. As a consultant, this was simply lost income, but I think in most formal jobs it wouldn’t have been much different. I’m a good example of exactly how and why women exit the workforce at high rates and/or plateau in salary during their prime earning years (the motherhood penalty), though I was fortunate to have a flexible alternative and a partner with a job that offered health insurance.

The lack of a universal policy for paid parental leave in the US is such a clear example of how caregiving is viewed: as women’s responsibility (but not real work), not “valuable” or productive and something to be made as invisible as possible. Fun true fact from the Barbie film: pregnant Barbie was discontinued because it “creeped people out.”

Actual creepy doll. Not discontinued.

The individualization of care is at such an extreme, that those who are not personally in the thick of caregiving are able to conveniently forget that we all have and will be in need of care in our lives, and will probably be in one (or many) positions of caring for others. We have lost our sense of community and care for one another, for honoring the value in humans as humans, not tied to their current level of productivity. We somehow ignore the fact that in order to create more productive members of society, someone has to raise them. I will definitely have more to come on the topic of economic vs. human arguments for a fully supported care infrastructure, and what we can learn from other cultural experiences, because it’s a juicy one.

But I’ll stop now with this. In her book Essential Labor, Angela Garbes provides some hope for creating progress for caregiving that doesn’t depend only on waiting for policy changes like paid leave to occur within overarching capitalist and colonial structures that are at the root of individualized and devalued care labor:

Raising Children should not be as lonely, bankrupting, and exhausting as it is. While we must demand recognition and remuneration for care work, we can’t afford to wait around for governmental support. Our needs are urgent. Reimagining our approach to mothering can birth its transformative potential. Day in and day out, this work can be our most consistent embodied resistance to patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism and the exploitation that underlies American capitalism.

I’m still trying to figure this out every day, but find the message inspiring with real potential in shifting our thinking. Dialogue and representation in media is super important; it just isn’t enough to drive a real change in outcomes. But policy changes aren’t happening either. Is it the policies or the cultural mindset that comes first, or can we work harder toward both at the same time to eventually get there?

What did you think about the Barbie Movie?

Are there ways in which you are reimagining your approach to mothering that you think have transformative potential?

Photo by Rochelle Brown on Unsplash

📚 Reads

‘Sandwich Generation’ is spending more time with their parents and less with their grandkids after paid family leave law took effect³

Who Cares: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve It

The Economy is Looking Up. Why Do Working Parents Feel So Bad?

Thanks, as always, for reading, I’m glad you’re here.

1. It may be common but it’s not normal or something we should have to suffer through alone. If your doctor says this to you, find a new doctor!

2. FMLA protects workers to take up to 12 weeks unpaid leave without getting fired, but many cannot afford to take 3 months unpaid. Not to mention the child or eldercare costs that will come once they return to work.

3. Interestingly this shows the benefits of the CA paid leave law that I apparently benefitted from - prior to 2004, many of us would only have been offered the benefit of not getting fired for taking unpaid FMLA leave. Still, even these modest benefits have tangible positive impacts.