BoomerGirl Diary

... Or Which Women Want What?

Every once in a while I like to read the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. I know I’m not likely to agree with most of what’s there, and I’m never disappointed. Nevertheless, it’s always well-written and thought-provoking. Sort of like the Fox “News” Channel for people who can read. But what I came across a couple of weeks ago made me really nervous! It was a piece, by Kimberly Strassel, on how the Republicans can spin issues of importance to women so that it looks like the GOP is better on said “women’s issues.” I’ll summarize, but you can check it out here.

She says that the Democrats (and by Democrats, she really means Hillary Clinton), are stuck in a time warp. Reproductive rights? Family leave? Violence against women? That is all time-capsule stuff, she says, mere side issues (of course, where I’m from, those white Republican men in the legislature—the only Republican men we have--spend an inordinate amount of time chasing after one of the state’s three abortion doctors, and virtually NO TIME on homeland security, social service issues, etc.). Then she launches into a litany of the real “women’s issues” of this election, followed by her preferred Republican rejoinder:

• Equal pay: Ms. Clinton, she says, “likes to bang on about inequality in pay.” Strassel doesn’t dispute that there is inequality, only that the problem is not discrimination, but a progressive tax code. You see, most married women are second-earners, which means that their income is added to their husband’s, and thus their joint taxed at a higher rate. The answer? Eliminate this odious tax bias against married women with a flat tax.
• Flexible labor laws: Unions, Strassel says, are standing in the way of a repeal, or at least a revision, of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, the law which mandates overtime pay. Most women, she says, would rather have time off than overtime, or a flexible schedule. But when a Republican tried to change the law to allow more flexibility in scheduling, the Democrats killed the effort. Some smart Republican nominee, she says, should take this up as his cause.
• Health care: neither of the major Republican candidates (Giuliani or Romney) has explained how their “innovative proposals” to put individuals back in charge of their health care would help women in particular. How do these plans help women in particular? She doesn’t really explain, but I’m guessing that she’s talking about some tax breaks and health care vouchers as the paved road to women’s empowerment: only through “private Social Security accounts” will women ever see the fruits of their payroll taxes, she says, and the fellas ought to make this clearer!

OK, Ms. Strassel. You’ve done your part for the cause. Now I get to do mine, point by point.

Take her first argument, the Republican plan for a more regressive (or flat) tax code that would benefit married women. This really is a perfect Republican talking point. Here, Strassel ignores the fairness factor (that is, that there ought to be some proportionality in our tax code, which is why it is as progressive as it is), ignores the fact that a joint income that moves you into a high tax bracket is, well, relatively high, and ignores as well the other breaks that married women get (e.g. insurance coverage through a spouse, rights of survivorship, etc.). If Republicans really want women’s issues to be a winner for them, then I think they ought to be looking at the unmarried females, the fastest-growing gender/marital status segment of the population (Current Population Survey, 2006). Unmarried female citizens comprise almost one-quarter of the entire adult citizen population. I repeat: if Republicans want a winning issue, they had better start thinking about these women.

Strassel’s argument that it is the tax code, and not discrimination, that accounts for the unequal pay problem simply does not stand up in the reality-based community. If discrimination is NOT in play, then how does she explain the fact that both married and unmarried MEN have higher mean personal incomes than either married or unmarried women, with unmarried women, of course, ranking lowest on the pay scale?

Proceeding to Point 2, I concede that many women would like a more flexible work schedule. So would a lot of men, I’m guessing. In 2006, women were slightly less likely than men to be able to do so. However, this difference was largely attributable to race, wherein women of color were less likely than their White counterparts to have flexible schedules, controlling for other attributes.

But this isn’t even the issue, because more than flexibility, women want security and, at this moment, with economic concerns over the housing and credit markets, they certainly don’t feel it.

Moving on to Point 3, it’s not clear exactly how Republican plans for health care favor women. Strassel does point out that women make most of the health care decisions in a family, and seems to believe, ipso facto that privatization will be especially empowering to them. One can only hope, although if she’s right I hope she’s talking about unmarried women too: again, according to the 2004 General Social Survey, it is unmarried women, who are more likely than any other gender/marital group to have been “unable to afford needed medical care in the previous twelve months (15.4 percent), almost double the rate for married women (8.4 percent).

Finally, from a political standpoint, even if these facts were not in evidence, the Republicans would have a tough time pushing the argument that their tax proposals are the surest way to economic prosperity for women: in the GQR Unmarried Women’s Agenda Survey from January of this year, the most compelling proposal that unmarried women wanted Congress to address was to “enact legislation to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work by improving protections for women who face wage discrimination.”

In one way, Strassel and I are talking past each other: her focus seems to be primarily on married women, while mine is on unmarried women, a much higher-risk group. Furthermore, her focus is on spinning Republican ideas in a way that is likely to make them more palatable to the female masses out there. It is notable that there are so few of those ideas that are spinnable, by a crowd that has been able to so successfully spin a conflation between 9/11 and Iraq, a curtailment in civil liberties as a security hedge, and stern treatment of a gay senator as evidence of zero tolerance for “crime.”

NB: I am grateful to Lake Research Partners for sharing their data sources.