Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

Seeing the following in Slate (in, of all things, an article explaining why it’s righteous for liberals to vote for Obama just because he’s black) helped me clarify some of why I think it was important to bring up the issues my previous post:

(The conservative brand identity also doesn’t have much room for opposition to sexism, another legitimate source of liberal guilt. But Hillary Clinton’s problems, it seems to me, stem less from sexism than from Clintonism.)

Um, what?

Nobody is calling other presidential candidates bitchy, catty, shrill, or emasculating. Nobody is opening an article in a leading national newspaper with a comment on how much skin the other candidates are showing. Nobody is producing novelty nutcrackers modeled after other candidates (and displaying them prominently in places I run errands). Let me guess — could cultural perceptions of gender be at work here?

Yes, there are a lot of reasons not to vote for Hillary that aren’t sexist. If I didn’t think so, I would have voted for her myself. But to say that her gender isn’t a liability in her political career is an attitude both obtuse and harmful.

A lot of older feminists who voted for Clinton seem to think that young people who voted for Obama are naive about the issues of sexism Clinton and other women in politics face — but that’s not true of all of us. And a lot of young men who voted for Obama seem to think that their legitimate, non-gender-related reasons for disliking Clinton mean their perceptions are totally untainted by sexist cultural mores — but that can’t be true, either. People who support these two candidates are fighting when they should be uniting — uniting against racism AND sexism.

Like many people my age, I voted for Obama this year. But while I didn’t vote for the female candidate, it’s not because I think we’ve reached some sort of post-feminist utopia. I’m not choosing any candidate based solely on demographic factors, but I don’t think these factors are irrelevant to the effects a candidate’s election will have or the way a candidate is presented and perceived.

I’ve heard some of my male peers say that Clinton “wasn’t a good feminist candidate” because she gained political power partly through her association with her husband; I’ve also heard them say that it doesn’t matter whether we elect a woman president, because there are already female governors, senators, and world leaders in other countries. But I think it does matter — I think there’s a lot to be gained in terms of public perception from having a woman elected president of the United States. We still live in a country where men shout “Iron my shirt!” at an accomplished professional woman — if they think that’s funny, they don’t get it, and the day we do elect a woman president is one day closer to people like that “getting it”.

The New York Times describes some ways in which Clinton’s gender may have affected the race:

Mrs. Clinton’s supporters point to a nagging series of slights: the fixation on her clothes, even her cleavage; chronic criticism that her voice is shrill; calls for her to exit the race; and most of all, the male commentators in the news media who, they argue, were consistently tougher on her than on Mr. Obama.

The reasons I have for voting for Obama don’t make me blind to these factors — I very much do think that Clinton’s campaign has been presented differently because of her gender and that she’s had to contend with obstacles and perceptions that are never an issue for a male politician. This primary has been framed as a divisive, either-or situation, but it’s a false choice. Obama supporters and Clinton supporters are painted as people with no common ground, when in fact most of us agree about a great deal. Just because I ended up preferring Obama doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the challenges Clinton has endured solely because of her gender or that I don’t see the value in having a woman president for the sake of having a woman president.

Jesse recently read a few chapters of Joan Williams’s Unbending Gender for school, and recommended that I take a look at them. Although a lot of the more theoretical aspects went over my head, I found it an extremely intelligent and interesting analysis of work/family/gender issues with a lot of practical recommendations that support my own positions about work/life balance.

Williams describes a norm of domesticity based on an “ideal worker” doing market work, who works full-time, is available for overtime, is available for relocation, and takes little to no time off for child-rearing. Especially in cases where children are involved, this ideal worker can only fill this role if supported by someone, usually a partner, who abstains from ideal-worker market work in order to raise children and care for the household (hence the slogan “most women need a wife”). While the feminism of a few decades ago focused (successfully) on giving women access to these types of jobs, it insufficiently accounted for the fact that these workers are intended to be backed up by a partner taking care of family work; most women remain primarily responsible for childcare and household work regardless of their employment status, which leads to a situation in which they can only gain the social power of men through essentially working double shifts, one shift as a market worker and another as a mother and family worker. She describes this as a situation that can and should be legally framed as discrimination. She also points out that divorce laws, which award most of the household assets to the market worker (who “earned” the money) without compensating the family worker who made the market work possible (and who will probably also have to support the children after the divorce).

Williams also argues that this system is not just harmful to women (who disproportionately fill the role of marginalized caregiver, or if they do not, have a hard time living up to the ideal-worker norm because they rarely have partners available for family work), but also to men, children, and society — she quotes both women who “choose” to stay home with children but would prefer to keep working at a schedule that allows them to have time for their children as well as their careers, and men who “would prefer the ‘daddy track’ to the fast track”. While everyone seems to agree that children should have more time with their parents, employers reward the opposite behavior by promoting workers who spend long hours at work and passing over or not hiring workers they think will try to take time to be with their families.

She points out that work hours have increased in the U.S. over the past few decades; not only is there more overtime, but people work farther form their jobs, so getting home at 5 is unreasonable for most workers — but an 8-to-7 schedule for both parents is unreasonable for children, thus perpetuating the situation where it’s only practical for one parent to work (and since societal norms still punish men who don’t work, it’s still usually the man).

Williams has a solution to this: more flexible work hours for everyone. She points out an example of a family that decides that someone should be home with the children two days a week; if one parent asks for a three-day week, an employer will usually consider that unreasonable, but if employers were more open to giving both parents a four-day week they could both keep working and still give their children the time they need. She approaches this from an explicitly pragmatic perspective, pointing out that flexible schedules need not disadvantage employers. My position is that this would even be advantageous to employers, who would have a broader pool of qualified workers to choose from and happier (thus more productive) workers at work if they were more willing to give out schedules that accommodate employees’ values and non-market priorities.

The book focuses on families with children, but she briefly touches on how a more flexible work schedule would be advantageous for single or childless people. This is something I feel particularly invested in — as the text points out, the work-hours it takes now to produce a 1948 standard of living are less than half those it would have taken then, yet people are working longer hours and consuming more, in large part because employment structures discriminate against part-time workers, denying them benefits, fair pay, advancement opportunities, and respect. With more flexible opportunities, all kinds of people who are satisfied with a lower standard of living could work fewer hours and devote the extra time to community service, personal projects, travel, family, or any number of other worthwhile pursuits. I’ve seen a few news articles in the past few years incredulously describing the expectations of “Gen Y” workers new to the workforce — we want “work/life balance”, they scoff. How selfish! Imagine! Market work is not necessarily the most important thing in our lives, and we’d prefer less money to longer hours!

In fact, almost everyone hopes to balance their time between market work, family work, community work, and personal time — but employers almost never offer schedules amenable to such balance. If they did, everyone would be better off.