Now and Then
August 20, 2018 11:49 AM   Subscribe

Imagine two girls who grew up as friends on the same street, in the same rural town, where they attended the same church and schools, and generally shared the same cultural experiences through high school. Eventually, these two girls become adults and end up living in different places, perhaps hundreds of miles apart. Now imagine two other adult women who live in the same place but who were raised in different places. What type of life experiences will these women have in terms of the work they do and the wages they earn? Will they get married and, if so, how young? If they have children, when will they start to raise a family? How many children will they have? According to the authors of the new BFI working paper, “The Effects of Sexism on American Women: The Role of Norms vs. Discrimination,” the answers to those questions depend crucially on where women are born and where they choose to live their adult lives.

Key Takeaways:
-Sexism experienced during formative years stays with girls into adulthood.
-These background norms can influence choices that women make and affect their life outcomes.
-In addition, women face different levels of sexism and discrimination in the states where they live as adults.
-Sexism varies across states and can have a significant impact on a woman’s wages and labor market participation, and can also influence her marriage and fertility rates.

The working paper is available here [pdf].
The Research Brief (from which the above quotes are drawn) is available here [pdf].

Authors of the study are Kerwin Kofi Charles, Jonathan Guryan, and Jessica Pan.

NYTimes write-up: How Sexism Follows Women From the Cradle to the Workplace by Jim Tankersley
posted by melissasaurus (27 comments total) 51 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is super interesting. Also, it's telling that a lot of the places that score low on levels of sexism are the places where the economy is the strongest and housing costs are also skyrocketing. In case anyone still wonders why millennials feel the need to live in the most expensive places.

I would love it if someone could do a similar study but look at race as well.
posted by lunasol at 12:00 PM on August 20, 2018 [24 favorites]


This makes perfect sense if you look at misogyny as a form of developmental trauma. It gets you so early that it affects every developmental stage, including your actual sense of self. That framing also helps to elucidate why the effects of sexism are so insidious and difficult to fight — it starts so early you don’t know anything else, there’s never a sexism-free community to escape to, and if you’re straight, there’s a good chance those traumatizing dynamics will be replicated in every intimate relationship you have as an adult.

Sexism is different than other isms. I think of the developmental effects of misogyny every time I meet one of those women who seems to live as a mostly empty vessel, waiting to be filled up with other people’s needs, and becomes incensed at women who don’t live that way.
posted by schadenfrau at 12:20 PM on August 20, 2018 [48 favorites]


This is a nice paper but IMO pretty flawed in that it measures sexism at the state level. A woman migrating from rural Pennsylvania to Austin, TX will be experiencing more sexism by that measure. There's huge variation within states that likely drives some of these results. In addition, their measures of sexism is likely to be highly correlated with other things that are unobserved, since its basically capturing southern states. And Utah.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:46 PM on August 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


if you’re straight, there’s a good chance those traumatizing dynamics will be replicated in every intimate relationship you have as an adult.

The framing of the articles about this study made me really angry, so angry I re-typed my response five separate times before coming to this one. And I paused to think about why I was so angry - furiously angry! - and I think it is because it directly contrasts women's 'labor force participation outcome' and women's marriages, in a way that implies you only gain economic benefit from the former, and the latter is a false economic choice.

At core, I believe that a serious part of unacknowledged labor force participation is in fact heterosexual women's work performed for their male marriage partners, which is the only thing that allows those self-same men to perform to their own current output in the labor force. These men have the productivity and focus because they have essentially a paid domestic worker in the home, whose wages are whatever funds from the husband's paycheck that are placed in the family account. Thus, in many ways a significant portion of the income of the husband is in fact in many cases the wages of the wife.

We really denigrate women who say this kind of thing aloud - we call them "gold diggers", we imply that they should be willing to enter into the danger and sacrifice of heterosexual marriage for nothing more than the pleasure they receive from it and are "tricking" men if we have any other motivations - but when you add up the actual expectations of women from heterosexual marriage, it's clear that it's not just one job but several, and one of the jobs is pretending -like a barista, or a waitress - with a smile on your face that it's not a job when it absolutely is.

These studies and articles I see often suggest that women don't know how to bargain because of internalized sexism, which explains the wage gap, and I feel frustrated, because while men are indeed often very skilled at bargaining with employers, they are often very 'skilled' at it because the things they are willing to bargain away are other people's lives. It's easier for heterosexual men to be willing to work long hours when they know they will have a heterosexual woman at home who will clean and cook and get everything that needs doing done even if she has another job, and they just come home, do some extremely light chores, eat dinner, and "relax". It is harder for heterosexual women to be willing to work extra hours when they know they'll still be expected to work the "second shift" at home, when they don't have much to bargain with.

And so I am frustrated with articles and studies that talk about the economic impact of 'internalized sexism', but in many cases it's heterosexual women looking at the dynamics that create our world and trying to figure out the best way to economically survive in it. Is it better for women to work inside the home or outside of it? Well that depends on which of your two employers, boss or husband, is going to be most stable, and who is going to pay more, and how much one job is going to impact the other. How much your boss is going to pay you less or fire you because you keep taking off time to deal with the husband's issues, vs how likely your husband is to divorce you because you aren't heeding his expectations. I would give my eyeteeth for a study that measured which was the best financial strategy and tried to measure factors that would make them more or less stable. But we can't, because we have to keep pretending - even in sociological studies by economists!- that het women just get married because they like it or something and not because they're staring down the void of how to finance children and a house on their own.
posted by corb at 1:07 PM on August 20, 2018 [131 favorites]


Well, marriage is not one thing. Same-sex marriages, for instance, don't have a male-female power dynamic. And if you divide society into liberal and conservative cultural values, liberal marriages will have a goal of two equal partners (of course, we'll often fail at that because we were raised in this broken misogynist society) and conservative marriages will have the goal of enforcing the age-old gender norms of wives submitting to their husbands. They are two very different sorts of relationships, yet we call them the same thing.

When you look at our society from a liberal standpoint, it's crazy that we allow a whole huge mass movement with its TV channels and political parties and religions, all espousing that women (and certain other folks) should not be allowed full agency. And we just let them express it, as if that could possibly be okay. But then we remember that THOSE are the people who have run things since before history started, and it's only been very recently that we've collected enough power to give them a fight.
posted by rikschell at 1:23 PM on August 20, 2018 [8 favorites]


But we can't, because we have to keep pretending - even in sociological studies by economists!- that het women just get married because they like it or something and not because they're staring down the void of how to finance children and a house on their own.

This article provides evidence that women who move to a higher-sexism state than then one they currently reside in marry earlier and make less money than if they moved to a lower-sexism state.

"it directly contrasts women's 'labor force participation outcome' and women's marriages, in a way that implies you only gain economic benefit from the former, and the latter is a false economic choice. "

I dont think that is what what it is doing. It is comparing outcomes that are the result of a labor market, and outcomes that are not the result of a labor market. Since there are no employers and employees in a marriage, its not a labor market outcome. This is independent of whether there are formal/informal labor within a marriage, whether there are economic impacts of marriage, etc.

The distinction matters because they are in effect comparing two women in the same state, and finding that the one woman from a low sexism state will marry later than the one woman from a high sexism state. That implies that the difference in outcomes is due to internalized sexism/norms and not the supply and demand of labor.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:35 PM on August 20, 2018 [9 favorites]


corb, I feel the same way, and I also (since I became involved in a church) have been thinking a lot about how most charitable/nonprofit institutions, like churches, are only able to operate at all if a large number of women are willing to do a large amount of unpaid labor to make it happen. Any church, even my liberal UU enclave, is basically set up on that deep assumption. Men contribute too, but they are the minority.

Women's unpaid labor determines our ability to function as a society in ways that make you dizzy if you think about it for long.
posted by emjaybee at 1:57 PM on August 20, 2018 [62 favorites]


in ways that make you dizzy if you think about it for long.

I think that’s the rage. Maybe we should lean into it.
posted by schadenfrau at 2:12 PM on August 20, 2018 [40 favorites]


liberal marriages will have a goal of two equal partners

As a liberal woman married to a liberal man, I assure you that sexism isn't solely a conservative problem.

I've been doing SO MUCH emotional labor while recovering from major surgery because the mister cannot run the household. Also, there's been a ton of household management I've taken care of from bed that he doesn't realize, so it's not like he's even taken on my full set of responsibilities.
posted by Ruki at 2:12 PM on August 20, 2018 [36 favorites]


Sure, I freely admit men tend to have a deficit here. And you're just as exhausted no matter what the intent is. But I think it still matters that some folks VALUE equal partnership (even if they never achieve it) while other folks value domination and control. This is multigenerational work. And as a dude, I'd say make sure your mister KNOWS you're suffering more because of his incompetence. It should spur him to do better.
posted by rikschell at 2:32 PM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Same-sex marriages, for instance, don't have a male-female power dynamic.

I have some reservations about this idea. Seems like I've read in both MeFi & AskMe comments from several posters who either indicate the dynamics in their relationships tend to follow those of het couples, whether for better or worse.

It takes a lot of work to main parity and allow both individuals equal power in a relationship, assuming any power can be equal. Ideally, the power is fluid enough to adjust and flow toward equality, but life circumstances are continually changing, and it's a delicate balance to maintain. Because the majority of us are raised in the patriarchal social dynamic to parcel out roles along a male/female divide, I think that's the default way to lay out power dynamics in more than a few same sex or even poly relationships.
posted by BlueHorse at 2:39 PM on August 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


And as a dude, I'd say make sure your mister KNOWS you're suffering more because of his incompetence. It should spur him to do better.

So it's still on women then, got it.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 4:32 PM on August 20, 2018 [38 favorites]


And as a dude, I'd say make sure your mister KNOWS you're suffering more because of his incompetence. It should spur him to do better.

yeah, see, part of emotional labor is anticipating someone's wants/needs before they have to say anything about it or act on it themselves. you're essentially telling her "as a dude, I say you - the woman - should be performing more labor so you can motivate him to do better"... do you see the implicit assumptions in your statement? why would a man need a female's prompting (which is labor) to get him to do his part?

this is basically also why so many females default to just picking up the slack themselves... it's just additionally exhausting to have to nag someone else to do the work.
posted by aielen at 4:52 PM on August 20, 2018 [51 favorites]


There are currently thirty-six Metafilter posts tagged with “emotionallabor,” for anyone else who might be thinking of storming into this thread demanding that people explain it from first principles.
posted by schadenfrau at 5:03 PM on August 20, 2018 [29 favorites]


I'm not familiar with the sociology/economic literature on migration patterns, but how much is the decision to live in a different place itself motivated by sexism? I'm thinking of all the women I know who intentionally chose to stay close to their families, much more so than their brothers who tend to fly much further away. Are the women who move cross-country inherently different than women who buy a house 20 min from their parents?
posted by basalganglia at 5:22 PM on August 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


They're not comparing women who stay vs women who leave, they're comparing women who leave to go to a higher sexism state to women who leave to go to a lower sexism state. They use exogenous (aka random) changes in the desirability of states to make sure there is no reverse causality. Basically they say if, say, factories close in a low sexism state then that's going to affect how many women migrate to that state, but since factories closing isn't driven by changes in people's sexist attitudes, they can identify the causal effect. Thats what the TSLS refers to in the abstract.

If an economist is writing an empirical paper, theres a 90% chance that they will have tried to take care of any reverse causality using either design or math. How well they do that is a matter for debate.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:57 PM on August 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yeah, it’s not that he’s incompetent, either. I’m doing more EL because running a household is fucking hard and he’s stressed, just like all the women who work demanding full time jobs and also manage the house and do the bulk of chores. And he was never taught these skills because not only are they “women’s work” but he was raised in a household that outsourced a lot of these things. That said, one thing I will be bringing up in the future is why we have a lawn service but not a cleaning service (we can afford both), because that’s some straight bullshit right there. (I could only do limited yard work due to severe allergies and a tendency for heatstroke.)

Women’s unpaid labor is so undervalued and often invisible. I’m going back to work next week so I’ve been working on building up my endurance and strength after two months of bedrest. I’ve made it a point to list every single thing I’ve done around the house when the mister asks how my day was. I make a list so I don’t forget. It’s been a bit of an eye-opener for me, to see everything written out like that.
posted by Ruki at 6:58 PM on August 20, 2018 [17 favorites]


This hits close to home (ha, get it).

While I grew up in an evangelical family in what's generally considered a conservative part of Oregon, our micro-locale was fiercely egalitarian. Plus I do in fact have a next-door neighbor my age who, on the face of it, lived a very different life, and yet we grew into surprisingly similar adult women. I got the fundy evangelical parents who hated women; she had an independent mother who supported her choices.

We both studied a foreign language and ended up living several places around the world.

Next-door neighbors in the hinterlands of Oregon.

Interestingly, all of the girls who went to our wee elementary school (which has since been closed :( ) ended up with lives that do not fit with sexist expectations. Further: the only boys who attended our elementary school who ended up awful adult men, are boys who arrived later (ages 8-10). The boys who started at our elementary school have all turned into wonderful people and are a massive reason I still have a sliver of faith in humanity. Also, it was very diverse for as small as it was; we had kids from all sorts of backgrounds.

What happened at our elementary school? We were treated like kids, not objects who had to fit sexist ideals. The only place I ever heard that girls were like THIS and boys were like THAT was at church... and being at school, where that sort of view wasn't even conceived of, was a major way I found the solidity and life experience to tell our pastors to stuff it. It's followed me throughout life, and I am so very grateful for it.
posted by fraula at 11:34 PM on August 20, 2018 [8 favorites]


I'm sure most are familiar with the arguments, but on the off-chance that someone isn't, the Marxist analysis of sexism is greatly concerned with the unpaid labour of women.

The nuclear family was constructed as a concept as industrialisation took hold because bosses were working people so hard that there was a real concern that the labour force would not be able to recover, because people couldn't raise kids chained to a workstation, and kids locked in a factory didn't grow up particularly healthy either.

So there is an onslaught of laws and practices which barred women from occupations, reduced pay and established the concept of the "male breadwinner" firmly in society. The cost of the reproduction of the labour force was privatised, with the family unit serving to provide a paid worker and an unpaid worker to support that worker and the replacements for those workers.

Though changes have been made, as women are still generally paid less than men and forced to take on more costly responsibilities, we find that while the total labour distribution within the family is beginning to equalise, the paid and unpaid divide remains. While men still receive more compensation for their labour, this is actually a wise financial decision by many couples, despite the ramifications.

Here and here are some more expansive explorations of the topic if anyone is interested.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 5:38 AM on August 21, 2018 [7 favorites]


I'd say make sure your mister KNOWS you're suffering more because of his incompetence. It should spur him to do better

This made me laugh until I had tears in my eyes. Do you know how hard we work at this? How we try to make it easy? How we try directness, cajoling, bartering, bargaining, nagging, asking, crying, wishing, therapying, etc.?

It should spur him to do better?

No, in a world in which the mister can say, with all sincerity: "this isn't my problem, it's your problem because [your standards for labor are higher/you demand too much/where do we draw the line?/this isn't a big deal/are you on your period?, ad infinitum]" why would it be in his best interest to do better??

That has been my experience anyway.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 5:40 AM on August 21, 2018 [24 favorites]


I'd say make sure your mister KNOWS you're suffering more because of his incompetence. It should spur him to do better

So this, on the other hand, is an excellent example of internalized sexism which contains two big ideas about heterosexual marriage baked into it that you may not even realize and a couple of small ones: first, the idea of the wife-as-civilizing-influence, and second, the idea that Men-Can-Do-Anything-Because-They-Are-Men. The small assumptions that may not seem obvious include the idea that 'the mister' in the case would take such knowledge well, accept its importance, and move forward from there with no resentment.

First, the fact that the wife is expected to be a civilizing influence for her 'bachelor' husband is a trope so baked in that it's hard to even realize it's there, but it's enormous. One of the reasons women largely do the second shift even before you get to the gender-roles-in-the-relationship stuff is that women have, by and large, been socialized to expect that they are expected to be considerate of others and to work to make a home a nice, welcoming space for those who live in it and those who visit.

Assuming the age of first marriage for men is the median of 28, that means, on average, that the woman involved in the marriage will have a minimum of a decade more experience at the household tasks that single women are judged for while men are not. This means, by and large, that women have the equivalent of mid-career mastery at the profession. This is not a gulf that can be bridged by a few moments of 'try hard'. This means that it will taken men nearly a decade to become competent on the same level of women when they first enter, assuming they are trying as hard as the women involved tried, while they're being judged at a far lower standard. And it's going to take them, every time, for years and years and years, more time to accomplish said task, and the task will be done less expertly, and because of that trope of the bachelor incompetent husband, there is social permission for the husband to just throw up his hands, say "Whaddaya know?" and let it fall back on his wife, who was already doing the extra labor of training him in the first place.

And again, that's assuming that the husband is willing, in the first place - which is a big and often incorrect assumption, given the sexism about perceived male competence - to accept that the wife is the subject matter expert on how to make a household run. Men who would never even dream of questioning a coworker with ten more years experience will FREQUENTLY say "well have you considered just doing this?" Yes. We have. We absolutely have. It didn't work. They are not Bold Innovators who will Figure Out Housework, or Figure Out How To Handle Relationships Better. It's like how every time in the emotional labor threads, some dude showed up and was like "well have you considered just putting no work into your relationships? I'm sure they'll be fine! Checkmate, ladies!"

And the notion, of course, that men are Not As Good at something, especially not as good as the ladies they have been trained to think they are better than, is a hard pill to swallow, because it is emasculating for men who have defined their masculinity by being Good At Things (when they were in fact often mediocre). It's one reason for the mass of men assuming that the mass of women just have 'too high standards' - because for men raised on unearned confidence, the notion that they might just not be good at something expected of adults is destroying.
posted by corb at 8:48 AM on August 21, 2018 [38 favorites]


liberal marriages will have a goal of two equal partners

As a liberal woman married to a liberal man, I assure you that sexism isn't solely a conservative problem.


I don't suppose it makes anyone feel better that I (a not-dude) have been doing my bit for equality by leaving the vast bulk of emotional labour/household management to my dude-partner. This is not ideal either, and he would rather a more equal distribution - and in all fairness, I should do more.
posted by jb at 9:02 AM on August 21, 2018


The nuclear family was constructed as a concept as industrialisation took hold because bosses were working people so hard that there was a real concern that the labour force would not be able to recover, because people couldn't raise kids chained to a workstation, and kids locked in a factory didn't grow up particularly healthy either.

So there is an onslaught of laws and practices which barred women from occupations, reduced pay and established the concept of the "male breadwinner" firmly in society. The cost of the reproduction of the labour force was privatised, with the family unit serving to provide a paid worker and an unpaid worker to support that worker and the replacements for those workers.


I'm afraid that, while this seems plausible in theory, it doesn't match with the history of household organization in north-western European culture and derived cultures (Anglo & French North America, Australia, NZ, etc). Nuclear household organization was the norm in much of north-western Europe (England, Netherlands, northern France) from about 1500 (when our records start), and probably earlier - so hundreds of years before industrialization.

Before industrialization, there was also even more reproductive labour to be done in the home. There were fewer ready-made goods, and more work to be done for basic household maintenance, cooking, cleaning, laundry (oh, my lord, laundry! how many millennia of women's time has been lost doing hand laundry!). Widowed people of both sexes in the 16th and 17th centuries remarried at very high rates - widowed women needed money to survive, but widowed men also needed a housekeeper who had skills (baking, brewing, mending, dairying, etc - lots of skilled stuff) that he didn't have, even if he was at home to do it. It was a full-time job.

Wives working for wages was always considered to be the least ideal -- it happened (a lot), but only when it was a necessity because the family needed the money. But women working for wages in the pre-modern era tended to do so more seasonally / part-time, such as at the harvest time. When working class men had better jobs - e.g. in mining in the 19th century - the fact that their wives didn't have to work outside of the home was a sign of their higher status among the working classes. The push for better wages and removing women from the workforce was driven by reformers of all classes, as it was seen as a better quality of life.
posted by jb at 9:22 AM on August 21, 2018 [9 favorites]


So there is an onslaught of laws and practices which barred women from occupations, reduced pay and established the concept of the "male breadwinner" firmly in society.

Women's pay has always been lower then men's. We have 17th century pay records for agricultural labourers (totally pre-industrial) which show this; I was listening to a history of Mesopotamia that noted that we have Sumerian records (c.2000 BCE) that show the same.

The push to keep women out of certain occupations was actually an attempt to keep employers from undercutting men's wages by hiring women to do the same work for less money. While sexist, it was also protective for the male workers -- and would have been supported by their wives as well.
posted by jb at 9:28 AM on August 21, 2018 [4 favorites]


Thats what the TSLS refers to in the abstract.

More specifically, what it means in this case is:

They had real data about the current level of sexism in every state. The problem is that high-productivity women might move disproportionately to states with lower sexism, because they can better afford to make that choice, so high productivity is causing low sexism.

So they use *another* regression to predict a state's sexism based on its relative distance from other states and earlier migration patterns of people within the US. This is really trying to get at the migration patterns you'd expect if people weren't moving because sexism -- it's easier to move to the state next door, and easier to move to a town where there are already a lot of people from your area (ie Buffalonians in metro Charlotte). So for every state, you can make up a pretend value for the sexism level it "should" have if people only moved for not-avoiding-sexism reasons.

Then they throw away the real sexism data and replace it with the values they made up. This is notionally the same variable "purged" of its counter-causal contamination. But it's the part that always gives me fits because you're still throwing away real information about the world and replacing it with made-up numbers, and because there's no way to know just from the paper how much hinges on their specific choice of "instruments" as opposed to some other set of instruments that would, ex ante, be just as reasonable.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:41 AM on August 21, 2018 [3 favorites]


I hope this isn't a derail, but as Yet Another Datapoint that the patriarchy hurts everyone, when we tried to rebalance the emotional labor in our relationship, my wife and I found that we were BOTH fighting uphill against ingrained sexist assumptions. Like, we were explicitly trying to make sure we were being aware of the problem, but my wife was having to actively stop herself from just Fixing Things Silently, because that's what she'd been raised to do. We got through it, but it was an extraordinarily challenging time for us as a family.

She'd been trained so thoroughly to subvert herself in the service of The Family that it was nearly unconscious, and a big part of that was that I, as The Man, was not supposed to actually be aware of all the unpaid emotional labor she was doing. So she'd not only been indocrinated to do this, but to actively hide that she was doing it. And for many, many years, because I was blind to emotional labor, I just went along with it, because, you know. Magical Household Fairies.

I got a clue, and we got better, but this toxic kind of shit is built into the system from top to bottom. It's not a bug: it's a feature of systemic sexism, and it can and does happen even in families who are trying to be aware of it.
posted by scrump at 9:03 AM on August 22, 2018 [13 favorites]


These men have the productivity and focus because they have essentially a paid domestic worker in the home, whose wages are whatever funds from the husband's paycheck that are placed in the family account. Thus, in many ways a significant portion of the income of the husband is in fact in many cases the wages of the wife.

Not only do I agree with this, but I think it is tangled with the root of two really ugly forms of misogyny in American culture.

First, men who rail against child support and alimony, and suggest that they "cannot survive" on what is left over. It is not merely the loss of wages, but the loss of the wife/partner's supplementary labor that makes this "cost" seem so astronomically high. The subtext is "I have to manage the details of my own life? All the time? In a home cared for by only myself? This is literally an impossible burden to bear." That the wife had been bearing it-- and more, assuming there were children-- up until that point is irrelevant-- it is not "his job" to manage his own life and he resents the implication that he should be tasked with it.

Second, and worse-- when men murder their entire families because of a job loss or an imminent/recent separation, I think this is sometimes the subtext. It isn't just the humiliation, but the specter of a life lived unaided, a vision so horrifying that MULTIPLE MURDERS OF LOVED ONES are preferable to it.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 12:37 PM on August 22, 2018 [13 favorites]


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