Grace Ross: Women Rising? Yes and No.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

I had an amazing and lovely experience on Valentine’s Day. There had been an international call to gather in support of women’s rights to end violence in our lives. The gatherings were overwhelmingly women, but we had male supporters amongst them.

Thousands of people were in the street in Congo and regions of India, Afghanistan, and South America. The U.S. had major gatherings in a few of the major cities.

I was with a relatively small crew in Davis Square in Somerville where I use to live many years ago. A song about breaking the chains that bind women from our full potential played off of an iPod connected to a laptop. A number of younger women led us through a series of very rapidly paced dance steps.

We did the dance three times and I was reminded that I can pick up dance steps and that I did take Modern Dance in high school.

The energy was fabulous and apparently the energy in the multiple thousands of women gatherings in various parts of the world was palpable. Unfortunately, the message was dealing with the over one billion women who experience violence from men in their lifetime. Of course, the real problem is that the physical violence that women experience is the tip of the iceberg of much larger economic and social barriers that women bang their heads against too many days of our lives.

When the foreclosure crisis hit we heard of a huge spike in domestic violence calls. While the trend had been a decrease in domestic violence for two decades, it’s not clear whether that decrease represents a real decrease or a decrease in reporting which has always made crimes like domestic violence and incest hard to measure and compare. Bad economics and increase in domestic violence have a history.

Divorce is definitely up.

What is clear is that many more women are single mothers raising children. Add to that, the overall economic shift to a dependence on two income households to support a family means that single women-led households are at a greater economic deficit now in terms of basic income for survival than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

No doubt the decrease in and distance below the official poverty level and the minimum wage or welfare payments has widened since the early 70s. Those income losses may explain some of what single woman parents face. There’s cutbacks in childcare and increasing out of pocket health costs even if you are not one of the many who have lost health coverage completely.

This is a time period of incredible flux for women.

While the Massachusetts legislature hit the lowest percentage of women representatives in the last decade or two, the electoral cycle before this one, we still barely reach a quarter of the representation even though the demographics should put us at a little over half. The same is true for government across the United States. Women in comparison to other democratically elected governments have a much lower percentage of the elected seats.

While we see the phenomenon of some women breaking various glass ceilings that hadn’t been broken before the overall plight of women has been a very mixed bag.

When the recession hit job losses among men were much faster and deeper than for women in the workforce. However, women gaining jobs back has been much slower.

It was a phenomenon I had hoped was going to be a wakeup call to our entire society as to why making sure that there’s not essentially a two-tier wage system was so critically important of everybody who has to work for a living. At the same time that men were getting laid off in much larger percentages, the overall wages for the entire population were also dropping. There’s plenty of historical evidence to show that a field that is either dominated by women or becomes dominated by women workers inevitably the wages drop and the benefits become less good. To my mind, it was more of a pressure on the entire workforce to have worse wages and less good benefits that was why women were not being laid off as quickly as their men. Men might be seen as a more expensive alternative. This stark reality certainly drives home the point that if there is a cheaper labor force to be had when companies want to cut back on expenses they use that labor force.

I was hoping this would be a callout to men who might not have thought about it previously as to why they want to fight for good wages for women as well as themselves; they would want to make sure that they don’t become the low hanging fruit when layoff time comes.

However, the bounce back in general on jobs has been pitiful. To the extent to where there’s been an overall increase in jobs it has literally paced exactly the percentage increase in working population of various sectors of our society except for women. Women’s wages remain lower than men’s; women’s access to benefits remained less than men. In general, cutbacks on jobs, particularly in the government sector has meant a field where women tend to have much higher percentages of workers has been hit particularly hard. Cuts to services to the extent to which women tend to have the responsibilities of children, mean they are more dependant on those services.

We often see in foreclosures the underwater house being left with a woman in divorce supposedly as a benefit but it’s a hugely debt carrying asset these days. It’s not clear it has been a benefit at all.

So I celebrate the energy of tens of thousands of women in the streets and our most supportive male allies on February 14th, Valentine’s Day.

That energy of calling together large swaths of people to stand together for an end to injustice and violence that actually damages our whole society is a call that we’re going to have to continue to make. And more of us are going to need to answer it together.