Is BioMom Happier than Baba?

There's been a bunch of back-and-forth going on in the newspaper articles, blogs, and listserves that I frequent about David Leonhardt's article in the New York Times about two economists research (Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers) about changes over time in women vs. men's self-reported happiness.

Basically the story being told by the research reported by Leonhardt is that there is a growing "happiness gap" between men and women.

Here is a direct quote from the author:

Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have
switched places.

Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even starker pattern. Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.

Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work - and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don't enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the
gap is 90 minutes.

The Language Log has a great overview and critique of the entire discussion if you're interested.

In particular, Jezebel is quoted on the topic from this blog entry (I'm borrowing the quote in its entirety because it is so funny):

Remember that study on women being less happy than men? Sounds about right, right? The internerds thought so! (Different ways internet commenters said no shit: "Boo hoo, the feminists made their bed and now they have to lie in it with their cats" and "Men are dogs. Dogs are happy. The end" and "Duh, we get Halo, and you get periods." ) But hold on! Some linguists think it's not true! It's an academic freestyle battle! So after the linguists called bullshit (and by the way, what the fuck is up with linguists knowing everything about everything?) the original economists who published the study struck back to say the linguists were wrong, women really were unhappier, and here's their proof:

* Gender happiness gap at the beginning and end of the sample
oprobit HAPPY SEX [aw=wt] if YEAR==1972
oprobit HAPPY SEX [aw=wt] if YEAR==2006
* Changes in the gender happiness gap using only the first and last years
xi: reg vhappy i.SEX*i.YEAR[aw=wt] if YEAR==1972 | YEAR==2006
xi: reg unhappy i.SEX*i.YEAR [aw=wt] if YEAR==1972 | YEAR==2006

Ha ha ha ha, here's a little regression theory for you guys! (Get it? Blow me! Don't you think I'd be happier if you could?)

Maybe the real happiness gap started setting in whatever year it became popular for economists to stop working on the economy by day and getting their wives off at night and started applying advanced calculus to every single mundane happening in their lives including though not limited to why their wives were faking it! Because that happened in 2004.

The idea of significance is old and the point that the Language Log makes is obvious. Despite this critique, however, I think the article has a true ring to it. BioMom and I are currently discussing our future as two career women with two young kids. My stint at the local college ends at the end of this year and I'll be expected to return to my home institution that is 2.5 hours away. With that I'll be commuting a few nights a week. This reality has put a significant dent in both of our expectations of ourselves as mothers and as workers. I've really enjoyed being home more, and becoming the "primary" to the kids. She's really enjoyed ramping up her career. But both of us ahve also experienced a 'grass-is-greener' effect with each other. I mourn the potential loss of being a 'serious economist' and she mourns the potential loss of not being 'primary' to the kids (especially Big, to whom I've been the primary caretaker for the majority of his life.

Another quote in the original article rang true for me:

Ms. Stevenson was recently having drinks with a business school graduate who came up with a nice way of summarizing the problem. Her mother's goals in life, the student said, were to have a beautiful garden, a well-kept house and well-adjusted children who did well in school. "I sort of want all those things, too," the student said, as Ms. Stevenson recalled, "but I also want to have a great career and have an impact n the broader world."

I've often thought that gender roles (if not too constraining) provide a nice 'short cut' to complicated rational decisions in life. For example, in the proto-typical (stereotypical?) 1950's household, men and women didn't have to spend time (read: opportunity cost) negotiating about who was going to mow the lawn. The upside for the 1950's women was that her constrained choices in the job market translated into easier decisions for the family. It just made economic sense that women stayed home and raised the kids, while men went to the market and worked.

Of course, there were a bazillion downsides to this 1950s stereotype, not least of which was that women who wanted to work didn't have a nice range of choices from which to decide, and men were discouraged to stay home with their kids (and even take a strong role in raising them).

Feminism can take some credit for expanding these roles. This is the upside. Women, now have many more options in school and in the labor force, they can choose to stay at home, and some lucky ones can even have a bit of both, with some part-time options available (albeit quite limited). Further, men can choose to be stay-at-home-dads (if the family can afford it).

The downside is that with choice, comes anxiety. Especially when the ghosts of traditional roles still haunt our homes. I've long said that women can't win in the work/stay-at-home wars. If you stay at home, women wonder why you don't work, or are envious that you can afford not to. If you work, you feel guilty being away from the kids. Without the strict roles of the 1950's we have nothing to blame but ourselves.

As Jezebel put it, maybe it's all the economists causing the problems. In that case, our household is facing a triple-whammy: two moms, two careers, one economist.

Now that's significant.

Gender and Socialization: A comment from the front lines

MimiSmartyPants has a recent entry in which she reviews the book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity .

SmartyPants' one quibble follows (bolds mine):

"In one chapter Serano writes about how it is misguided (at best) to assume that a woman's pull toward the trappings of femininity is always socially constructed, and uses her own experience growing up as a boy as a very logical example. Despite feeling metric tons of pressure to express herself as male, she felt naturally drawn to feminine gender expression, which means that wanting to be feminine has to be at least partially inborn. Also, to assume that women are somehow "tricked" into stereotypically feminine gender expressions is insulting and misogynist, etc. And of course that's true. My only problem is that I think it is impossible for a cissexual woman to separate what is a "natural" pull toward femininity and what is years of near-constant socialization messages about How To Be A Girl. I mean, you can yell all you want about how you "naturally" feel pretty in high heels and makeup and a push-up bra, and maybe you do, but how do you know it's natural? None of us were raised in a cave. In some ways trans women have the best claim to "legitimate" desire of all things pink and girly (if indeed they do desire those things, since of course not all trans women do), because the desire is felt no matter how severely its expression is restricted. The rest of us get many subtle and overt cheers and props for doing the feminine thing, and for some women they want to do it anyway so it all works out fabulously. It just seems hard to know for sure that the path was freely chosen."

I think this point is absolutely true and important -- how do we know what is nature and what is nurture. However, I am not sure that transsexuals have the corner market on helping to illuminate this. Aren't all transsexuals also equally socialized with the rest of us? Admittedly, the socialization may affect them differently, but we all grow up within some similar social context.

Here's what I am getting at. I am not a trannsexual, however, I feel much more aligned with the masculine end of the gender continuum. And while, for the most part I suppose, I was discouraged from exploring my particular gender identity by the general population, I believe that I still receive(d) some accommodations for my masculine(ish) identity. This is to say that I don't believe that social approbations work linearly -- i.e. social pressure increases exactly opposite to the degree to which one expresses oneself outside of the social norms.

It is possible that people get implicitly rewarded to the extent that they "do gender" (to use Butler's term) correctly, regardless of their sex. The closer we approximate our stereotypes of gender (again, regardless of sex) the more comfortable people are around us. As an example (admittedly idiotic and simple), once a guy figures out that he doesn't have to open the door for me, we're okay.

I also wonder if this may be more true for masculine women than for feminine men. Our society is highly oriented toward the masculine, so any social kudos would be more likely to go toward people with more masculine gender expressions.

So, all I am saying is, we are no closer to solving the nature/nurture dilemma.

Gender Identity

I just read this great graphic story (check it out here as well) about a family dealing with a (male) toddler wanting to wear skirts and who prefers pink by Rutu Modan.

Enjoy. It is fabulous.

Is It A Happy Father's Day When the Lesbian Father Out-Mothers the BioMother?

In this past Sunday's Modern Love column in the New York Times, Amy Sohn writes about her reactions to her husband's stay-at-home dad-ness. This is a topic that, in its own variation, comes up at our house quite a bit. I sometimes (somewhat unwillingly, rarely purposefully) "out-mom" BioMom.

Sohn writes "[A]fter we married and began to talk about having children, I realized that a child could have a side benefit for our relationship. If Charles took care of the baby full time, he would be providing care that would otherwise cost at least $25,000 a year. . . He wouldn't have to take on the small jobs he hated, like landscaping and carpentry, and I could stop griping about the credit card bills. We wouldn't have to leave our child with a stranger, and I could feel secure knowing that she would be in the care of her loving father. In this radical-feminist vision, I was little more than a vessel for the baby."

...

"As I began to realize that I liked being a mom, Charles started to see that he needed to be more than just a dad...Besides, I found myself thinking, if Charles and I split the child care on the days we don't have the sitter, then the baby will never love him more."

....

"Our arrangement, of course, has all the stresses of traditional marriage roles, even if we're reversed. Like the archetypal working father, I constantly feel the pressure of being the primary breadwinner and worry that one day my work will dry up, we'll have to sell our apartment and leave the city, and it will be my fault. But the upside of my financial burden is that I never feel guilty about working. . . And I've stopped worrying that my daughter will love Charles more. The other day while she was toddling around the living room, she accidentally knocked a wooden chair down hard on to her foot. I rushed to comfort her . . . and she said, 'Daddy.' I handed her over and watched as he stroked her head, kissed it and told her she was O.K. . . . A year ago I would have seethed with jealousy. But as a mother of a toddler I know that her preferences change and it has little if nothing to do with me. As Charles sat in the armchair and held her, I watched from the floor. Then I reached for her again, and this time she came."

BioMom have faced similar issues as I (a little over a year ago) slid into the primary caretaker role for Seven and, mainly, Big (as he is in need of much more primary caretaking). Like Sohn and her husband, it made sense for us at the time for various reasons; I could easily take a year off of work, my work involved a regular, weekly commute that involved two nights spent away (from which we were both anxious to see a hiatus), she earned more money, etc. etc. So, reading this was all fine and dandy for me at least until I got to this quote:

"At the time I was seeing a 92-year-old Austrian psychoanalyst, and whenever I expressed concern about the financial inequity of my relationship, he would shake his head and say, 'For the relationship to survive, you must be the woman, not the man.'"

We've thought about this too. For our relationship to survive, must I be the Baba and she the Mama?

Sure, the changes involved sacrifices that were unexpected: while her career vamped up, mine has been put somewhat on hold and Big comes running to me--often pushing BioMom aside--when he is hurt or in need. What I don't think we expected were the reverberations of the reversal of gender roles that we had never truly consciously adopted.

Sure, she falls a little on the more femme side and I fall a little on the more butch side. We joke about the butch-femme continuum (see this blog entry from last year, ironically, when I first embarked on what I then called Stay-At-Home-Babadom). Here's an excerpt:

In fact, BioMom and I have our own 'butch-femme' scale with 10 being "highly feminine" and 1 being "highly butchy" and we will rank each other's actions or outfits based on a) our subjective determination and b) our desires for any particular event! On average though, I'd say I'm about a 4 and she's about a 6. We have speculated that sustainable relationships usually aggregate to a 10 on this scale. In other words, if the individual's butch/femme scale is much below 10 (say, two "3" butches) or much higher than 10 (say two "7" femmes) would not engender a sustainable gender-balance and would, therefore, be doomed to failure.

It turns out that this shift in our professional and personal lives (me halting work temporarily, she gearing back up in a heretofore unprecedented manner) has resulted in many unexpected consequences. I, for example, have unexpecedly fallen in love with being a SAHB. But, this has had some repercussions on our household's delicate gender balance. How does one, for example feel butchy, or masculine (an identity one has carried throughout life and that permeates all of their socio-psychological persona) after spending a day changing diapers, attending all-female baby classes and singing songs like "the wheels on the bus" and "bumpin' up and down in my little red wagon?" And, in the reverse, how are one's partner's feelings altered by this shift? Especially when she has kicked her career into high gear?

So here I am, a year into the reverse of Sohn's story, the stay-at-home-Baba who unexpectedly out-mom's the BioMom. Have we (like Sohn's) fulfilled the radical feminist vision?

I think that through this blog I am beginning to see strains of several "big questions" that I have about life as a SAHB and our kids. One of these questions really gets at the differences between GLBT families and their heterosexual counterparts, indeed, if there really are any. This strain is just another mirrored facet on that disc-ball that is that BIG QUESTION. In being a Stay-At-Home-Baba, are we fulfilling the radical feminist vision that Sohn talks about? Or am I just another woman who stays at home with her toddler (for the most part)? Are there consequences to what I'll call the "reverse specialization" that Sohn struggles with when we're dealing with same-sex couples? In short, do lesbians "do" gender?

What can gender roles do for us?
Gender roles can act like other social institutions as a behavioral short-cut. Instead of negotiating each task, each moment of the day, it is just easier when you know who will do what. Economists would say that gender roles decrease "transactions costs" in the sense that new negotiations are not necessary for each task: Are you mowing the lawn today? No! I thought you were going to. I changed the poopy diaper and emptied the dishwasher. Isn't that worth a lawn mow?
Why shouldn't lesbians take advantage of this shorthand, ending some of the mundanity of the everyday negotiations?

How can gender roles against us?
Of course, gender roles hurt us as a society when they become immutable. When they dictate that women can't become firefighters or high-security prison guards and men nurses, regardless of their abilities.

Do lesbians "do" gender?

The fact is that GLBT people have grown up in a society with gender roles (let's face it, while gender roles are immutable, changing over space and time, they still exist and while they can evolve in the course of a single generation, they are powerful and imposing). They/we soak them in like the rest of us.

Furthermore, as stated, "doing" gender can sometimes actually be efficient.

However, what's fun about creating families that fall outside of the societal norms, is that you can pick and choose which societal norms suit you. You can choose to reject all of them, or you can choose to not reinvent the wheel in other cases. (Of course, at some level, this is making lemonaid out of lemons. It'd be a helluva lot easier to just be able to get married and have all that legal stuff taken care of, voila!)

I am very interested in the interplay between how couples (het and homo) "do" gender, how they divide labor in the household (and by that I mean not only the mundane every-day chores as well as the public/private split. That is, how do couples make decisions about careers, breadwinning, and (when kids are involved) child rearing/stay-at-home-ness. Are decisions purposeful? Do they match or reject societal cues? Or is there economic logic behind the decisions that focuses on efficiency over equity? If so, in the case of a lesbian household, is it possible to create an efficient division of labor?

In a couple of papers (here and here) I have explored the idea that lesbian and gay households are not as politically correct as they may seem to the casual observer. Most research indicates that lesbian households tend to be more equal than are households of heterosexual couplings and there is some theory to back up that observation. Because social institutions don't generally support glbt unions, we have less protection in the event that our relationships dissolve. What this translates into is that we (as glbt partners) may be unwilling to, for example, become stay-at-home parents (i.e. strictly specialize labor such that one person becomes the breadwinner while the other performs non-wage labor in the home) because they have no legal recourse in the event of "divorce". Sure, we can proxy some legal amenities, but this is more costly (both money and time-wise) and it doesn't cover everything. But in a small sample of qualitative interviews, I found that some lesbians in some places actually did gender in the way that hetero couples did. And, although my sample was not big enough yet to show this, I suspect that had I interviewed enough couples with kids, this effect would be exaggerated.

As it turns out, I'm not sure the gender continuum is adequate. At least not for this butch-turned-SAHB. Masculinity and feminininity are not either-or's in any one person. We can be both high masculinity and high femininity. For us, the gender-role-short-cut wasn't clear cut and now we find ourselves again, paving a new path along a road less travelled.

Just Because Its Science Doesn't Mean Its Objective

Yesterday's New York Times Article Pas de Deux of Sexuality is Written in the Genes by Nicholas Wade reads as though it were based on an objective series of thoroughly vetted scientific results pointing to verifyable results about sex, gender and sexuality.

There's no doubt in my mind that there are important genetic differences between men and women, and that there are overlaps between gender, sex, and sexuality, and that there is possibly a genetic explanation to sexuality (although I think it is important to acknowledge and enable individual choice in this matter), bad research is just bad research.

One comment on a Feminist Economics listserve to which I describe said about the article:

For me, this article by Nicholas Wade is the last straw. Remember Judith Miller who is no longer with the NYTimes, in part, because she was a shill for the Bush administration hard-liners. Well, Wade has been an uncritical shill for many scientists who come along with poorly-based genetic theories about race, gender differences in abilities, homosexuality, etc. Remember the "brain-size gene"
(microcephalin) of a year and a half ago, suggesting that sub-saharan africans had a polymorphism that might explain cognitive differences?

Full coverage of a notoriously weak argumetnt by Wade. A year later, with new scientific articles refuting the argument about intelligence and Science Magazine's Michael Balter reporting that the lead author had had to retract his speculations about intelligence. Where was Wade's reporting on that?

And, now, he uses J Michael Bailey as a lead authority in today's NYTimes article. We use a 1990's paper by Bailey and Richard Pillard on twin studies of homosexuality in my class as an example of a bad behavior genetics paper. In that paper, the authors dismiss a control (fraternal twins) that did not fit with their theory by saying that in another study they got a number that did fit. Then, I heard Pillard speak at Harvard where he mixed data from the two papers to make their conclusions that homosexuality was genetic look good.

If you're interested in sex differences and where you stand, check out this cool test passed on to me by She-Who-Is-Named-For-The-Elf-Princess.