Care Talk
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.
All the Child Care Workers in the USA
All the child care workers in the U.S. combined earn less than the top 25 hedge fund managers and traders. Wow. Even a jaded old care-work researcher like me finds this pretty startling.
Care and the Great Transition
Because I think there are fundamental similarities between care and ecological services, I look for opportunities for dialogue with environmental researchers and activists.
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.
Recovering from the NYT
I started this blog in 2008, but soon let it lapse as I became an almost–weekly contributor to the New York Times Economix blog from 2009 to 2014. This felt pretty demanding on top of my regular job and I needed a while to recover and reconfigure.
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?