About Care Talk
Welcome to Care Talk!
This blog was founded by Nancy Folbre to engage researchers, students, journalists, and others interested in the “care sector”– an important part of our economy devoted to the direct care of others through the family, the community, the market, and the state. In collaboration with Jocelyn Olcott and the Revaluing Care in the Global Economy network, the blog now features posts by researchers working in the quantitative and qualitative social sciences as well as the humanities to explore the problems of:
1) how to measure economic contributions made by families and communities;
2) the shortcomings of the standard “business model” based on profit maximization and consumer choice as a means of delivering effective care services through the market;
3) poor institutional design in the U.S. public sector, which often fails to deliver equitable, efficient, or politically sustainable systems of care provision; and
4) the analysis of alternative models for ensuring equitable access to and valuation of both paid and unpaid care.
The Rape of the Yezidi
Rape is often a conspicuous feature of the conduct and aftermath of violent collective conflict. But seldom, if ever, has it been explicitly organized and religiously justified on a scale comparable to the ISIS sexual enslavement of non-Muslim Yezidi women.
The Opt-Out Elite
Hersch’s research does explain why trends at the very top are not representative even of the college-educated, much less the majority of the population of working mothers.
Options Other than Opting Out
Joan Williams of the Hastings College of the Law at the University of California has some very specific advice for lawyers considering career “pause”
Millennial Women and “The Pause”
Guest Post by Myra Strober, Professor of Education and Economics, Emerita, and founding director of the Michelle Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Kicking in the Door.
In Defense of Valuation
I think that estimates of the market value of non-market work are a worthwhile exercise (as my last two posts suggest) as long as they are done carefully and presented as an approximate lower-bound. But conceptual resistance to valuation remains remarkably fierce–which is a big reason we don’t see more of it.
The Temporal Constraints of Child Care
Fortunately, the American Time Use Survey includes a question that asked respondents to indicate times when a child under the age of 13 was “in your care.” This makes it possible to measure the amount of time devoted to supervisory child care.
The Dollar Value of Grown-Up Care
Work is no less valuable if it’s fun (I’m working for fun right now).
Elect for Child Care
What can policy researchers do to help shape the upcoming U.S. debate? I can think of a lot of interesting possibilities
Bargaining up to $15
home care workers joined the national Fight for $15 about a year ago, forming a political coalition with other low-wage workers.
The Best Care Work Reporting of the Year
The British newspaper famous for its courageous investigative journalism on many different fronts wins my prize for the best reporting of the year on paid care work.
When Family-Friendly Journalism Backfires
Poorly–designed policies that may initially appear “family-friendly” can impede progress toward gender equality in two different ways—by making it costly for employers to hire or promote workers suspected of having costly family commitments (e.g. women of childbearing age) or by encouraging workers with such commitments to drop out of paid employment for so long that their prospects of advancement on the job are permanently damaged. In other words, increases in women’s job tenure and/or reductions in work-family stress may be purchased at the expense of women’s earnings and career advancement.
Jobs for Whom?
Despite efforts to increase women’s participation in traditionally male jobs, such as construction, occupational segregation in the U.S. remains significant. Why not advocate for “pink jobs” as well as “green” ones?
Theories of Value
What if all the parents in the U.S. got up one morning and went on strike, demanding more recognition and support for the work they do?
Care and the Commons
Much of my work focuses on the social organization of care. I am especially interested in the parallels between care work and other economic resources that are not privately owned or priced on the market. For more on these parallels– including some videotaped lectures by six great speakers, check out the Forum on Social Wealth.