Change.org petition to Toys"R" Us

[BlueRidge]

What is an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner? Sounds vaguely Soviet.

It does, don't tell the Tea Party about it.

Its actually a good little institution we have in D.C. We have Advisory Neighborhood Commissions with unpaid but elected commissioners that hold meetings that provide an opportunity for citizen input into all manner of local issues from parking to rats to business to public transportation and so on and so forth.

[maatTheViking]

Is this a US ad or one in Denmark? (I thought you lived in Denmark.) I think it makes a difference. They are going to cater to their market with their ads.

Maat is Danish but she lives in the US right now (for work, I think.) She's out there on the west *coast with you.

Correct, this was a Seattle area catalog. I'm sure they are different by region.

But actually what I see happening is that the middle class is vanishing. So the CEOs and top execs will make good wages (and those seem predominately men because of the glass ceiling) and everyone else will continue to drop in wages so that there becomes this big gap with hardly anyone straddling it. I think that women having more degrees will contribute to that.

I find this interesting. I am. Software engineer, which is definely middle class, and I not see those wages dropping. In fact, it is still hard for companies like Microsoft and Google to hire skilled engineers.
What I seen are larger number of visa holders (like me and my husband - however it wa his job we moved for, and his green card application)

And also what gender you are. Which is why I don't see women entering traditionally male fields as necessarily impacting the wage gap in a straightforward way. I see that, as women enter a profession in larger and larger numbers, the perception of that profession changes and wages drop relative to what they have been.

I find this very interesting. Is it that ingrained to value women's work less?
There has been changes. My grandmother was a 3 language correspondent (German, French and English and she spoke Danish too), an earned less than her less qualified male co workers. I think the wage differences are more subtle today.

I also find it personally interesting, as more and more women are doing software engineering, but minor large numbers. I don't see demand drop, though.

[MacMadame]

My Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, a gay man, was quite intense about it in fact. This is quite a few years ago now.

I find that strange because it's just a picture of a beautiful women with some cleavage.

I find this interesting. I am. Software engineer, which is definely middle class, and I not see those wages dropping. In fact, it is still hard for companies like Microsoft and Google to hire skilled engineers.
What I seen are larger number of visa holders (like me and my husband - however it wa his job we moved for, and his green card application)

This is my take on it:

With the economy the way it is, companies can be picky. So they have gotten so picky they can't find anyone. The other factor is that they want to hire the cheapest labor they can get away with. So they are interviewing young grads, immigrants, persons of color and women mostly.

It's not that qualifie dpeople aren't out there no matter how much they whine and moan about not being able to get qualified people. The end result is that wages have frozen. I haven't gotten a real raise in years, for example, and now I have to take this contract job because the cool places to work want young grads and not people within 10 years of retirement.

I find this very interesting. Is it that ingrained to value women's work less?
There has been changes. My grandmother was a 3 language correspondent (German, French and English and she spoke Danish too), an earned less than her less qualified male co workers. I think the wage differences are more subtle today.

I think it is ingrained. I remember when my mom was involved with hiring people at a university where they assigned everyone points for their prior work and then hired the person with the most poinst. If you were a fly on the wall in those committees with any kind of social awareness, you'd have been appalled.

For example, a guy candidate is a part-time HS music teacher for 10 years. He gets 7 points for teaching experience (more than half of the 10 he would have gotten if he'd been a full-time teacher). The woman candidate for the same job has been teaching piano for 25 years out of her home. She gets 0 points beause "that's not real teaching." Then they hire the guy and say "we want to hire women but there just aren't any qualified ones out there." It used make my mom tear her hair out.

I don't know if they are so blatant today with this sort of practice but I do think that the tendency is still there.

[Jenny]

For example, a guy candidate is a part-time HS music teacher for 10 years. He gets 7 points for teaching experience (more than half of the 10 he would have gotten if he'd been a full-time teacher). The woman candidate for the same job has been teaching piano for 25 years out of her home. She gets 0 points beause "that's not real teaching." Then they hire the guy and say "we want to hire women but there just aren't any qualified ones out there." It used make my mom tear her hair out.

Part of that might be because the woman worked in her home rather than in a school, or even going to students' home. I work out of my home, and it's amazing the number of otherwise intelligent people who think that I'm sitting around watching soaps all day because it's not a real job, when in fact I do actually work full time. I'm sorry about your mom's experience, but in my case people can think whatever they want - I'm laughing all the way to the bank.

[Prancer]

But actually what I see happening is that the middle class is vanishing. So the CEOs and top execs will make good wages (and those seem predominately men because of the glass ceiling) and everyone else will continue to drop in wages so that there becomes this big gap with hardly anyone straddling it. I think that women having more degrees will contribute to that.

I see that as a separate issue. If wages drop all around, then everyone makes less, men and women.

Again, the men in the high-paying jobs are retiring and younger men are not coming along behind them. There are very few men who will have the skills to be CEOs and top execs.

And also what gender you are. Which is why I don't see women entering traditionally male fields as necessarily impacting the wage gap in a straightforward way. I see that, as women enter a profession in larger and larger numbers, the perception of that profession changes and wages drop relative to what they have been.

It seems highly unlikely to me that every profession will become "less" because women enter in greater numbers--unless wages drop across the board. And that's a different issue. But as women continue to move into the top slots, it will be women deciding how much women make.

That is, obviously, no guarantee that women across the board will make more.

If you look at the chart you provided, you can see that the gap hovered around 60% for decades and then start rising at a certain rate starting around the early to mid 80s. But soon after, while the rate is still going up, the rate of growth has slowed. There's nothing to say that the rate of growth will hold steady. It could slow down or stop or it could accelerate but I vote for it leveling off at some point. I don't believe it will ever close, at least not in the near future. (And I also think predicting past 10-20 years is fruitless. I'm a bundle of optimism today.)

I guess we will all see how it unfolds.

I also don't think it's fair to "correct" for taking time off for maternity leave because again that's something that our culture and economy dictates that women do not something that women have to do. In other countries, parents often share that burden because there is family leave that's equal for both men and women. Also, in families where the woman makes more than guy, that puts pressure on the guy to stay home with the kids over the woman.

Yes? They are measuring the wages earned by women in the US. What is done in other countries is irrelevant, as is what is done if men are the ones to stay home. Women who don't take time off earn more and are, on average, wthin nine percentage points of men. Women who do take off earn less and suffer a higher wage gap. No one is smoothing anything over; if anything, it is pointing out the rather glaring problem of maternity and flex-time policies in US companies.

The wiki entry seems to indicate that it became Toys R Us in 1957.

Even better. We've come a long way, baby. Bring on the pink aisle!

I find this interesting. I am. Software engineer, which is definely middle class, and I not see those wages dropping.

My husband is also a software engineer and he makes very good money, and always has. But he's a white male, so I would guess he's not a good example.

Part of that might be because the woman worked in her home rather than in a school, or even going to students' home. I work out of my home, and it's amazing the number of otherwise intelligent people who think that I'm sitting around watching soaps all day because it's not a real job, when in fact I do actually work full time.

ITA. I got the same thing when I worked at home. And I can easily understand why people wouldn't consider teaching piano lessons at home the same as teaching in a school. For him to teach in a school, he has to be degreed and licensed, and he has been assessed as a teacher for all those years. The woman? Yes, she's been teaching for 25 years. Does she have a degree? Is she licensed? Is she a good teacher? How do you know? Can she teach anything besides piano? Just based on what was posted, we are not talking about an apple and an apple. I'd give him more credit, too, unless there is a lot more to this example.

[MacMadame]

ITA. I got the same thing when I worked at home. And I can easily understand why people wouldn't consider teaching piano lessons at home the same as teaching in a school. For him to teach in a school, he has to be degreed and licensed, and he has been assessed as a teacher for all those years. The woman? Yes, she's been teaching for 25 years. Does she have a degree? Is she licensed? Is she a good teacher? How do you know? Can she teach anything besides piano? Just based on what was posted, we are not talking about an apple and an apple. I'd give him more credit, too, unless there is a lot more to this example.

I would give him more credit per year but I wouldn't give her ZERO credit. That's just silly. She's been teaching for 25 years and get NO credit for it. If she got even 25% credit, she'd only get 6.25 points but it will still be more than 0.

[agalisgv]

Came across this article that spoke to many arguments made thus far regarding men and women in the workforce. Some of its key points are despite women outnumbering men in higher education for over a decade or two now, the same employment patterns prevail--women and men are hired at equal rates, but women drop out by 10 years out. Why? Women want more time to have babies/families. It also argues that flextime and generous maternity benefits may give rise to women falling behind at the upper echelons rather than aiding them. Some of the ways women transform certain professions is to make them more family-friendly, but less profitable (and thus, pay less). It concludes that men will likely remain at the top of corporations/academia/start-up companies for the foreseeable future because women prioritize families over career moreso than men.

Are we witnessing “the end of men”?

...[W]omen have been the majority of college graduates for over two decades now, even as corporations and nonprofits have made diversity a guiding principle, introducing mentoring and networking programs for women and telling human-resources offices to make hiring and promoting women a priority. In corporate America, the two sexes move into entry-level jobs at a similar rate....A longitudinal study of Booth School of Business graduates at the University of Chicago found men and women launching careers in equal numbers and, if you take into account differences in their industries and subspecialties, earning about the same amount of money at the outset. Ten years later, though, barely half of the female grads—52 percent—were working full-time, compared with over 90 percent of the men.

...Why do ambitious, educated women moving into their mid-career years, usually in their thirties and early forties, slacken their work pace? The answer doesn’t take a scientist—male or female—to figure out. That’s typically the do-or-die moment for starting a family. Asked why they went part-time or left the labor force, the Booth women invariably cited family. As a number of studies have noted, academics usually get on the tenure track in their early thirties, just as female fertility is beginning to drop. To move to the next level—actually getting tenure—requires years of teaching, research, grant applications, committee meetings, and conferences abroad. No wonder female academics often make other career plans. Law professor Mary Ann Mason has studied these trends extensively and calculates that mothers in academia are 35 percent less likely to get on the tenure track than fathers are and twice as likely as academic dads to work in part-time or non-tenure-track teaching positions. As for women who do accept fast-track university jobs, about two-thirds never have children.

...Work/family academics and policy mavens have a list of family-friendly policy ideas that, they believe, would help women resolve the tension between parenthood and career, patch the leaky pipeline, and ease the gender gap in Alphaville. These include lengthy paid leave for new mothers and fathers—the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act mandates only unpaid leave and only for 12 weeks—universal child care, laws requiring work flexibility in hours and location, part-time jobs that include benefits, and regulated work hours. Such policies, especially paid maternity leave, are the norm in much of Europe. Work/family articles usually begin with some version of the sentence “The United States is the only country in the developed world with no paid maternity leave,” or, more dramatically, “America has the most hostile-to-family policy in the world.”

...Can such family-friendly policies admit more women to the executive suite? Not on the evidence. Consider two countries with some of the most highly touted family policies in the world, the kind that the work/family advocates are always calling for: France and Sweden...Yet the top of the private economy in both countries remains an alpha-male preserve. At none of the 40 big companies listed in France’s CAC 40 stock-market index does a woman sit in the CEO’s office. The Lawyer reports that more than half of the associates at large French law firms are female—yet women are still only half as likely as men to be partners. There are only ten female presidents at the country’s 87 universities. In Sweden, so few women are in the top ranks in the private sphere that labor economists have been scratching their heads.

The conclusion that a number of them have reached provides a textbook case of unintended consequences: the very family policies that make it easier for women to combine work and family discourage them from pursuing career Olympus. In a paper called “Is There a Glass Ceiling in Sweden?,” James Albrecht and colleagues speculate that the country’s maternal benefits are so generous that they “may discourage strong career commitment” by women. The paper also points out that Sweden’s liberal wage policies, elevating incomes at the bottom of society, make it prohibitively expensive for many ambitious mothers—and mothers still do most of the child care, even in Sweden—to hire outside help during hours when day-care centers are closed. In many countries, including the United States, professional-class dual-income families have become dependent on cheap immigrant labor to mind the kids and clean the house; researchers Patricia Cortés and José Tessada trace the increase in the work hours of highly educated American women to the 1990s, when immigration pushed down the cost of household services. The Swedish welfare state may reduce income inequality, but one consequence may be fewer women at the top.

Unintended consequences happen in America as well. One study of 70 top law firms by The Lawyer found that the most competitive, least family-friendly, “super-elite” firms had more female equity partners than did firms with heavily used family-friendly policies. “The results seem counterintuitive,” one commentator on the study wrote. “Who would guess that women would fare better on the equity barometer at firms where the odds of making partner are ridiculously slim for everyone? By the same token, wouldn’t you expect that at the less competitive, two-tier firms (especially those with well-established part-time or flexible policies), there’d be women equity partners popping out at every corner?”

This response fails to take into account how alphas make it. Take a long maternity leave and work part-time for a while, and you’ve seriously handicapped yourself if you hope to be chief someday. A 2007 McKinsey study concluded that what correlates with high levels of female leadership in a country’s economy isn’t the percentage of women in the labor force; it’s the percentage of a country’s total hours worked that women are on the job. If women work less—whether their countries require it or their companies allow it—their chances of becoming top dog plummet.

...Do we really need to regret that so few women want to live this way, treating a baby as a momentary interruption to an all-important job and keeping a foot on the career gas pedal after the kids come? Ever since they entered the labor market in large numbers, mothers have consistently shown a preference for shorter hours. In their thirties and forties, women with children are typically looking for ways to work less, not more. They’re twice as likely as men to work part-time, and surveys show that that’s the way they want it. Female physicians have been avoiding emergency-room medicine and flocking to dermatology and pediatrics, which bring fewer emergency calls and night hours. Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have demonstrated that women’s preference for fewer and more flexible hours has transformed a number of professional occupations, including veterinary medicine, pharmacy work, and certain medical specialties. The group practices that have all but replaced lone practitioners in these fields allow women to limit their night and weekend hours, work three or four days a week, and avoid the headaches of ownership.

The rising generation of women doesn’t look likely to change any of this. One recent survey of students by four University of Wisconsin psychologists found that college women, as they planned their careers (and they did expect to work), were already thinking about cutting back hours when they had children. A recent Gallup poll showed that 44 percent of women wished that they didn’t work at all, compared with 22 percent of men.

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_4_alpha-female.html

Interesting food for thought...

[Angelskates]

Welcome back, agalisgv! Nice to see you posting again!

[Jenny]

Here's another one - sounds like it's gaining traction in the chef community: http://www.change.org/petitions/hasb...easy-bake-oven