Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  11

  CITIZENS WHO CARE

  We Americans love self-help. The New York Times devotes an entire separate bestseller list to self-help books. Manuals that tell us to lean in or stand up or climb over others as a way to enhance our personalities, overcome our flaws, and assure our progress speak to a national religion of self-improvement. After all, if it’s only up to us, then change is within our control. It doesn’t depend on organizing or mobilizing others within a political system that many of us see as dysfunctional.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’ve bought as many of those books as anyone else has—from how to lose weight to how to find inner peace. But when we’re talking about the kinds of changes I am calling for, the only way each of our lives is going to get better is if we work together. We can’t do it on our own; we have to exercise our collective political power to change the system. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again now.

  I’m trained as a lawyer and a policy expert; I know as well as anyone that “policy” is just another word for a set of guidelines as to what we should do in a particular situation—e.g., “Honesty is the best policy.” Public policy means the principles we decide as citizens that we want to live by, principles that our elected representatives translate into regulations and laws. It’s the crystallization of what we can do if we come together and decide how we want our tax dollars to be spent. We can renew America, in line with the best of our history and ourselves, as a country that values work and family equally and enables its citizens to live full and happy lives.

  BUILDING AN INFRASTRUCTURE OF CARE

  BUSINESSES CANNOT COMPETE AND CREATE value for themselves and society as a whole without roads, bridges, tunnels, ports and airports, railroad tracks, electricity, water, waste disposal, and, today, high-speed broadband. That is what “infrastructure” means: the skeleton of a functioning economy that everyone needs but individual citizens either cannot or will not provide on their own. The infrastructure of travel and transport—either through physical or virtual space—is the infrastructure of economic competition. We need an equal infrastructure of care: a set of arrangements and institutions that allows citizens to flourish not only in the pursuit of their individual goals but also in their relationships to one another.

  We used to have an infrastructure of care: it was called women at home. But with almost 60 percent of those women in the workforce, that infrastructure has crumbled and it’s not coming back. We need to build a new infrastructure of care for the twenty-first century, one that meets the demands of our society and our economy. Writing about the “elder boom” and its enormous impact on the growing need for care in the United States, Ai-jen Poo makes the point that although “an infrastructure for care may seem different than an infrastructure for railroads, highways, electricity or the Internet…care always comes first.” If you can’t “feed, bathe, or clothe yourself,” none of the rest of it matters.

  Poo talks about the “Care Grid,” just like the energy grid. I like the image. Just as we draw on different types of energy delivered through a variety of different grids, we will need many different approaches to providing and supporting care. Here are some of the possible elements of such an infrastructure, drawing on the policies of the United States and other countries:

  • High-quality and affordable childcare and eldercare

  • Paid family and medical leave for women and men

  • A right to request part-time or flexible work

  • Investment in early education comparable to our investment in elementary and secondary education

  • Comprehensive job protection for pregnant workers

  • Higher wages and training for paid caregivers

  • Community support structures to allow elders to live at home longer

  • Legal protections against discrimination for part-time workers and flexible workers

  • Better enforcement of existing laws against age discrimination

  • Financial and social support for single parents

  • Reform of elementary and secondary school schedules to meet the needs of a digital rather than an agricultural economy and to take advantage of what we now know about how children learn

  The specifics of policy proposals on each of these issues differ from state to state and often by party affiliation and political philosophy; a comprehensive catalogue is thus impossible. But for those of you who want to know more, you can find plenty of additional information in the endnotes of this book, including links to organizations where you can get directly involved and campaigns that you can support.

  A major argument in favor of building a universal infrastructure of care by mandating things like paid leave and job protection for pregnant and even part-time workers is that it levels the playing field for those businesses that are trying to do the right thing. Putting these policies into place in an individual business, rather than achieving the same results through a tax-financed insurance program, can be expensive. In an economy of tight margins and litigious shareholders, taking on those expenses may cede a crucial advantage to the competition. A short-term advantage, to be sure, as firms determined to do right by their employees find themselves rewarded with higher engagement, productivity, and retention rates. But still, enough of an edge that we can’t rely on corporations to make the necessary changes themselves, business by business. We need the kind of political change that establishes a new floor and a new set of standards to aspire to.

  THE POLITICS OF CARE

  OKAY. YOU KNOW I’M A Democrat. So if you are a Republican you may well be thinking that I’m in left-wing la-la land. But the politics of care are not so predictable. Consider Megyn Kelly, a Fox News anchor and working mother, who strongly agrees on the need for paid maternity leave. In a live segment on her Fox show, she reminded Mike Gallagher, a conservative talk show host who had called her three-month maternity leave “a racket,” that the United States is one of only four countries in the world that does not require paid maternity leave, adding, for good measure, that his reaction was “moronic.” “We’re populating the human race,” she said. “It’s not a vacation. It’s hard, important work.”

  Strengthening American families and supporting caring communities garners support across the political spectrum. On the left, President Obama put forward proposals to expand access to affordable, high-quality childcare in his 2015 budget. Right now, only 10 percent of children receive what’s known as “high-quality care.” Childcare workers make a median annual salary of less than twenty thousand dollars a year, yet families with two children in center-based care pay more money for childcare than they do for rent in all fifty states. Obama also called for more states to expand paid sick and family leave.

  On the right, one of the few states that currently offers paid family leave (workers pay the cost out of a small increase in their payroll tax) is New Jersey, under Republican governor Chris Christie. Republican senators have sponsored a law that would allow employers to offer employees paid leave hours instead of overtime pay; some polls show that a majority of Republican women voters support paid family leave. Republican senator Kelly Ayotte co-chairs a bipartisan caucus across both the Senate and the House devoted to assisting family caregivers. She follows in the footsteps of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who successfully sponsored legislation to allow homemakers to contribute to retirement accounts the same way that salaried workers can.

  We Americans differ, as always, on ways and means. The specific disagreement around care is not as much about whether we should be devoting resources to caring as it is about who, in fact, should be doing the caring. Conservatives prefer family, church, and community. Liberals worry that those approaches let far too many Americans fall through the cracks, that they reinforce inequalities for those who are often most vulnerable and in need, with no family, church, or community to turn to.

  My feeling is that our problems in this arena are so severe that we need to be trying both at the same time, recognizing a role for gov
ernment and business, church and state, states and the federal government (and municipalities too). Moreover, why not encourage a little competition over care? Left and right should challenge each other to see whether market solutions or government solutions for the care crisis work better. Different states can adopt different solutions; we can develop common metrics to see where children, seniors, and others needing care are better off. Different cities can do the same. Whatever works best.

  At the federal level, Congress should be able to pass a variety of measures that will allow states and workplaces to develop competing approaches. To get there, however, we will need compromise—recognition of the validity of multiple points of view and at least the possibility that a plan other than the one you favor just might work better. To get that compromise, in turn, we need more members of Congress with direct experience of caregiving.

  Indeed, given the wide-ranging support from everyday Americans of both parties for more government help for caregivers, it often seems as if our legislators are the only ones who aren’t getting the message. There’s a simple reason for that: we are electing too many men. When I write that sentence, you may well read it as a sexist, essentialist claim about how men care about national defense and the state of the stock market and women care about families and a social safety net. It’s never comfortable when reality confirms stereotypes, but at least for the moment, strong empirical evidence documents that it’s the women in Congress who are pushing for affordable daycare and paid leave. What is new is that we now have reason to believe that reaching a critical mass of women in any group that operates by majority rule, including a legislature, may well cause men to behave differently.

  Vote for More Women

  AMERICA’S REVOLUTIONARY RALLYING CRY WAS “no taxation without representation.” We still haven’t really achieved that goal. Men can represent women, of course, just as women can represent men, African Americans can represent European Americans, and older Americans can represent younger Americans. Still, the radical under-representation of women in our legislative bodies has dramatic implications.

  If asked why we should vote for more women, most voters would be likely to think about the distinctive qualities they associate with women over men. In The Athena Doctrine, John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio surveyed 64,000 women and men in thirteen countries about what is most important to “leadership, success, morality, and happiness today.” In all thirteen countries, people of both genders picked stereotypically feminine traits—like collaboration, sharing credit, and patience—as the ones that will solve today’s global challenges. The majority also admitted to being worn out by a “world dominated by codes of what they saw as traditionally masculine thinking and behavior: codes of control, competition, aggression and black-and-white thinking.” Amazingly, to me at least, two-thirds of respondents believed the world would be a better place if “men thought more like women.”

  At first glance, these assertions seem just as sexist as claims that the world would be a better place if women thought like men. They are riddled with stereotypes that ultimately do not benefit either sex. On the other hand, after conducting multiple experiments, political scientists Tali Mendelberg and Christopher Karpowitz find that women in politics do in fact tend to pay more attention to caregiving issues and to the disadvantaged in general. But the numbers of women in legislative bodies don’t matter on their own, in terms of actually passing laws that move the needle on these issues. As Mendelberg and Karpowitz write in their 2014 book The Silent Sex, summarizing their findings, “Women’s percentage in deliberating bodies matters little—in itself.”

  What matters is whether women speak up. If they sit in town hall meetings, policy planning sessions, and general discussions and no one hears their views, nothing will change. Here numbers do matter, but only insofar as the number of women reaches a sufficient critical mass that women are actually prepared to say what they think. Once they do, all sorts of things change.

  Mendelberg and Karpowitz conducted an experiment. Participants, both men and women, were separated into groups and told they would be doing tasks to earn money. They would then be deciding, as a group, how much of that money to redistribute to the members of the group who had the least. The observers recorded the results and also kept track of the participants’ speech: how often speakers mentioned issues of caregiving versus economic issues and how often women spoke.

  The results were surprising even to the researchers. First, Mendelberg and Karpowitz found that all-women groups were much more generous than all-male groups—the guaranteed income of all group members was higher by about seven thousand dollars for all-female groups. Indeed, “groups chose a more generous safety net under majority rule as the number of women rose.” Unsurprisingly to any woman, they also found that women speak less when they are in the minority.

  Most striking, however, Mendelberg and Karpowitz discovered that at least in some circumstances, when women are the majority in the group, men speak more about caregiving issues. In groups with one man and four women, 62 percent of the men raised the topic of children, compared with just 19 percent of men in groups of four men and one woman. Of course, an experimental lab setting isn’t the same as the floor of Congress. Still, these findings underline the point that when women’s voices are not heard, the issues women care about are not considered relevant or essential. They are considered separate women’s issues instead of everybody issues.

  When women’s voices are heard, as Mendelberg and Karpowitz put it, they are doing “more than naming a problem; they are including marginalized or disadvantaged groups in the conception of ‘us.’ ” In other words, women actually represent a broader spectrum of citizens than men do. Equally important, “when women have greater standing, men share the floor more equally, adopt the language of care for children more often, endorse more generous safety net support for the poor, are less likely to interrupt women in hostile ways, and provide more positive forms of support and encouragement to female speakers.”

  The implications for American politics—and indeed politics all over the world—are stunning. If we can elect enough women—women who will of course have different personalities and political views themselves—we will stand a far better chance of representing who we really are as a nation. By adding enough women to the mix, we will not only add female voices and perspectives, we will make it possible for the men we elect to be their true selves, to speak and vote as fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers as well as warriors, competitors, winners. They will not always agree with each other, of course, just as the women we elect will not. That disagreement is what democracy is about. But they will all do a better job of representing the full spectrum of who we are as a people: citizens who both compete and care.

  THE CARE ECONOMY

  INVESTORS SHOULD BE PAYING AS much attention to care trends as politicians. The demand for jobs in the care sector is growing as a function both of increased awareness of the difference that good care makes and of demographics. Remember that the ratio of retired adults to working-age adults will increase by almost half between today and 2030. Even by 2020, one in six Americans will be over 65 and more than one in three Americans will likely have eldercare responsibilities.

  Americans also have strong views about how we want to age; almost 90 percent of us believe that we should not end up in institutions. But aging at home, with dignity, requires an entire industry of home healthcare, which is why the demand for home careworkers is skyrocketing. But if we want higher-quality care, we will have to pay for it. Better wages, higher social value, and regulated working conditions are a good start. If we value the quality of our children’s care, our parents’ care, and indeed our own care someday, we must pay much more attention to the care economy.

  A farsighted group of economists have been working on these issues for decades. The dynamics of the care economy are complicated by the definition of care itself, with its unavoidable intertwining of love and effort, paid and unpaid work.
Reducing care to a pure commodity, like grain or steel or anything else we pay for, destroys its value. But pretending its emotional reward is so great that it should not be paid for at all, or paid for at a very low rate, ignores its value and reduces the quantity and quality of its supply. The economist Nancy Folbre and a group of her colleagues in sociology, political science, and demography have outlined an entire agenda for “care policy and research.” More studies along these lines are still needed in order for us to build up the intellectual and practical foundations of the care economy as a specialized version of the larger twenty-first-century service economy.

  Interestingly, it is our military that already best understands the value of investing in the next generation of American children. Children’s brains are shaped most in the first five years of their lives, so it’s not an exaggeration to say that the care and education of our children from birth to age five is a national security issue for the United States that ranks alongside the Islamic State, terrorist networks generally, Russian expansionism, and China’s rise.

  The Pentagon walks the walk. It offsets the cost of high-quality childcare for servicemen by subsidizing on-site daycare. Fees are based on family income. This assistance has been available to military families since 1989. Equally important, the Pentagon pays teachers in its early care and education programs the same wages that other Defense Department employees make based on training, education, seniority, and experience. In other words, the part of the U.S. government most directly responsible for upholding national security recognizes the need to pay wages that can attract and retain college- and graduate-school-educated workers to provide care and early learning to the children of all employees from birth onward.