By Vicki Prichard
NKyTribune Reporter
When Adrianne Frech first introduced the idea of her research on workplace participation, family formation and health, her sister Kristine, who is vice president of Northern Kentucky’s Skyward, suggested she consider presenting at the inaugural Northern Kentucky Women’s Initiative Regional Women’s Summit.
Kristine had some additional sisterly advice.
“She said, “You should really think about presenting at this conference, but you’re going to need to make academic research sound a little more interesting than you do sometimes,” says Frech, an associate professor at the University of Akron.
Adrianne Frech
And that, says Frech, is the only reason that the phrase ‘mommy wars’ is in the title of her session, “Enough With the Mommy Wars: New Findings on /women’s Workplace Participation, Family Formation and Health.”
“Because when I do my research, that’s generally how it’s presented in the popular press,” says Frech.
A successful summit
More than 300 women attended the day-long summit, which was held June 29 at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center. The event, titled, “It’s Time to Take the Lead,” was designed for women at all stages of their careers.
The event featured keynote speaker Betsy Myers, former senior advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama and a longtime advocate for women’s issues. Myers was the first director of the White House Office for Women’s Initiatives and Outreach during the Clinton administration. She has worked with female entrepreneurs at the Small Business Administration, lectured at the Harvard Center for Public Leadership and runs the Center for Women and Business at Bentley University.
“From listening to Betsy Myers’ presentation, I took away that I need to lead myself as well as other people, and make sure that the things I want to be a priority actually make it onto my calendar, instead of just living on my goals poster,” says Lacy Starling, founder of Florence-based Legion Logistics, and presenter of the Summit’s Your Personal Pitch session.
Starling says she thinks events like the Summit are important for women because it provides women the chance to learn about their own specific issues such as stress, how they balance themselves, their lives and their work.
“And it is always wonderful to be in the company of so many strong, powerful, dynamic and fabulous women,” says Starling.
The Summit’s breakout sessions revolved around Myers’ seven principles of leadership: authenticity, connection, respect, clarity, collaboration, learning and courage, and included sessions such as Confidence and Mastery: How to Maximize Your Own Leadership Development; The Balance of Self Esteem, Assertiveness and Stress Management; Developing the Courage to Conquer the Next Level; and Frech’s “Enough With the Mommy Wars: New Findings on Women’s Workplace Participation, Family Formation and Health.”
Work and the ‘choice’ factor
In 2012, Frech, along with professor Sarah Damaske, published a study finding that while all women are equally likely to work full-time through their 20s, 30s and 40s, women who did work full-time had better health — measurably better health in their 40s — than the women who worked part-time and women who stayed at home. Among the reasons for better health, were variables such as access to health insurance.
Betsy Myers
When the research was profiled in the popular press, Time Magazine featured a story with the headline, “The Karadashian moms shouldn’t feel guilty about working, and neither should you.”
“If we step back and look at trends, we see that when we talk about strengthening the work family balance, and I think this is one of the reasons we use the rhetoric of the mommy wars, we talk about family’s making ends meet as a woman’s choice and not a man’s choice, and this sets up a false dichotomy because it is not necessarily the way it has to be,” says Frech.
Women’s career decisions, says Frech, would often take into account that their wages would need to be more than child care costs, an unfair factor, she says, because women often lose on lost income and develop blank spaces on their resumes. It also undermines the idea that people like to choose and plan their careers.
“We socialize women from an early age to bear the responsibility of doing both the paid and the unpaid work in a household, and also to kind of be the one who says “Well, I will step in or out of the workforce based on what childcare costs,’” says Frech.
Meanwhile, she says, men are socialized from a young age to be providers and maximize their earning potential; a factor which sets women up to be what Sen. Elizabeth Warren described in her book, “The Two-Income Track,” as the “all-purpose safety net” where men maximize their providing potential and women do what needs to be done in between.
“If your family needs that full second income, the woman works full time; if your family needs someone who works part time, the woman is the safety net who works part time,” says Frech.
But, Frech points out, we no longer have this all-purpose safety net because a middle class family generally requires two full-time incomes, which means women are asked to work a full-time job that earns more than what childcare costs but maintain the same unpaid work responsibilities in the home that they had beforehand.
Lacy Starling
“And this is the real difficulty,” says Frech. “This is the real reason that we have a lot more gender inequality than we should among working parents, because we’ve increased women’s pay/work responsibilities without giving up any of the unpaid work responsibilities.”
Workforce trajectories
Frech points to distinctions they see that set women apart from men’s workforce trajectories.
“First of all, something that we don’t see for men, but we do see for women, is that women’s workforce participation varies according to how old their kids are,” says Frech. None of you are surprised to see this but is it true for men? No.”
Men, she says, work 40 to 60 hours a week, for as long as they’re physically capable of working, whereas women’s hours are contingent on the number and age of the kids.
“This has been true from about the 1970s on, and you can see from that period of when the child is about six years old — when the child is going from kindergarten to sixth grade — when the child has school all day, women are moving into the paid workforce,” she says.
After about 2001 – 2002, Frech found that the women’s workforce becomes what they call uneven and stalled. Women work close to full-time but never line up with men’s hours completely, they’re averaging, even when they’re working full-time three to five hours fewer a week.
“This is one of the reasons for the gender wage gap, it’s not that women are working at the same jobs with the same amount of experience and getting paid unequally, it’s because women stratify their workforce participation based on the age of their kids, based on what their spouse is working and they, on average, are working fewer hours a week than them — one of the biggest causes of the gender wage gap,” says Frech.
As for the waring debate as to whether women who are moving into the workforce are spending less time with their kids, Frech says the answer is, “No.”
Intensive mothering
“We have entered into a culture that’s called ‘intensive mothering,’ I think you generally know it as the cultural pressure of if a woman is going to work full time then she had better demonstrate a strong commitment to her children as well,” says Frech.
Frech distinguishes this pressure from that of the 1960s when most women were stay at home moms, and most father’s earned enough for the family to only need one income.
When women did stay home, she says, they examined the number of hours a week they spent in direct one-on-one time with their children — reading to kids, taking them to the playground— direct, interactive time with children.
“Mom’s in the 60s spent on average ten hours a week doing these direct, enriching one-on-one activities,” says Frech. “Dads, because they were socialized to be providers and not to spend as much direct one-on-one time with their kids, spent two and a half hours a week with their kids.”
Move forward to 2000, says Frech, and at any given time, four out of five moms working full time, and moms that aren’t working full time often work part time.
“Are these women spending less time with their kids than our kind of ideal 50s and 60s picture of what it should look like, and the answer is they’re spending more direct one-on-one time with their kids, because they have to show a commitment culturally in a way that they weren’t asked to in the past,” says Frech.
So, while kids are likely spending more time at daycare or grandma’s house, or even with their fathers, Frech says if you’re looking at who’s making a concerted effort to read with their kids, take their kids to the playground and do one-on-one activities with kids, moms are doing it more today than they were in the 60s, because our culture of what good parenting is has changed.
“And if women are going to spend eight hours a day at work, we’re asking women to spend more one-on-one time when they’re not at work,” says Frech.
Meanwhile, she points out that men have tripled their time with kids to about seven hours a week of direct one-on-one time.
“So both men and women are doing more, but men are actually working about the same number of hours as they did in the 60s, they’ve tripled the time with kids, which is great, but women are working ten times as much as they did in the 60s and they’re also being asked to spend more time with their kids too,” says Frech.
