I originally wanted to title this:
How Are Women In The Helping Professions Compensated? Like Shit
But I decided I wanted to allow for a somewhat broader discussion, and not limit myself merely to what we call the Helping Professions.
Let me preface what follows by saying that I believe in the value of volunteering and sharing information freely. I grew up in a small town where men and women volunteered broadly and often, and it made life better for everyone. The Volunteer Fire Department; the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; workshops at the library on quilting; staffing the weekly sales at the Historical Society--all of that and more was powered by positive volunteer hours and energy. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts. It all came together to make our little town a great place to grow up and to live.
That having been said, there are many instances in which work goes unpaid or underpaid. To me, it seems that much of this uncompensated work is done by women.
Thoughts and observations:
1. Most internships are absolute bullshit. They’re great for employers, but deeply suboptimal for interns. In many cases, an employer gets full-time work for zero pay or for nuttiness like $2.08 an hour (e.g., with stuff like a quarterly $500 stipend for half-time work); the intern gets experience—and probably an intern often learns much of value--BUT he or she is frequently expected to work for free or almost free. And yet, many professions require internships or periods of minimal employment—in some cases, for years—before licensure or certification or professional registration. Clinical counselors, music therapists, and horticultural therapists all have to intern for little or no $$ before they can earn whatever professional designation their field bestows. So it does turn out that a lot of helping professions, which women tend to gravitate toward, require internships, and thus by definition, they also require uncompensated or undercompensated labor.
2. I started taking a Landscape Construction class last fall. The class was taught by an experienced Bay Area landscape contractor who has worked in the field for the past 30 years. In the first few classes, he emphasized the importance of drawing up a careful, thorough budget when one is submitting a proposal because if you forget something—uh oh! You can’t add it later without really pissing off your client. Anyway, this guy includes everything in the budgets he compiles to inform his bids. He amortizes the truck he bought for his business six years ago, and adds in a fraction of the cost of the new truck he will have to buy to replace this one after twelve years of use. He amortizes the cost of all his tools. I found this all really fascinating because in my field—horticultural therapy, which is largely populated by women practitioners—female horticultural therapists are doing hours and hours of prep work that they don’t invoice for; they are using materials and tools from their own homes that they are not compensated for; and their planning typically goes uncompensated. That’s just the way it is. People expect to pay their landscape contractors a lot of scrilla when they put down new pavers or build a pergola, but many women therapists of various sorts are expected to donate a lot of time and energy to whatever program employs them. Again, I’m talking about the helping professions.
3. There seems to be an assumption afloat that women are available to volunteer; I don’t think the same assumption is made about men’s time. A friend of a friend had a long-standing association with a private school. When an administrative position opened up, the head of the school asked my friend’s friend if she would volunteer in the position!! (The man who had held the job before had earned well over $100,00 per year for it.) She said no, and they paid her--and well--but wow. Just the idea that he thought it was OK to ask her to volunteer boggles. Recently, I did a talk as part of a speaker series that a former colleague organizes. I knew I wouldn’t be compensated, and that was fine; I thought of it as a one-off and I was happy to do it. Then a guy in the audience who works for the county comes up to me after and says that he’d like me to do the exact same talk all over Alameda County, but he doesn’t have the “fiscal capacity” to pay me. I said I was open to the proposal, but the whole idea didn’t sit right with me. The more I thought about it, and after discussing it with friends, I decided that I really don’t want to spend my time volunteering in this way; my emphasis right now is on building business opportunities for myself, not lining up freebies that eat up my time and energy. Again, Dude: How come you think you can ask me to dedicate time and energy for free? And would you make the same proposal to a man without outlining what’s in it for him? Damn.
4. I appreciate that Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang is talking about the hours of unpaid labor that (mostly) women do in our country raising children, caring for the elderly and ill, and taking care of and nurturing loved ones with disabilities. This conversation comes up in the context of interviews where Yang discusses his Freedom Dividend idea—the most prominent plank in his political platform that proposes that every adult in the United States receive $1000 per month from the government. He always cites the unpaid work his wife does raising their children, one of whom has autism, pointing out that that work is important and should be compensated. I agree, Andrew Yang. And I like that there is no proving worthiness or need with his Freedom Dividend; it’s just something every adult would get, without a lot of cumbersome bureaucratic hoops to jump through.
5. I spend a lot of (uncompensated) time doing other people’s jobs, or pointing out where they have failed in doing their jobs. Two examples: Yesterday, I spent a total of 2.5 hours on the phone (I am not making this up) in two separate calls, one with the IRS, one with my health insurer. We got a letter from the IRS last week telling us that we owed an additional $3,603.37 in taxes over and above what we had already paid for 2018. They “found miscalculations” on our 2018 return having to do with the the child tax credit; credits for other dependents; and my student loan interest deduction. The IRS 1040 form has space for four dependents; if you have more, you need to attach an additional sheet with those other dependents’ names and social security numbers. After waiting half an hour to talk to someone, I learned, over the course of an hour on the phone, that whoever had keyed in our tax information (I mailed our form in, didn’t e-file—my mistake) neglected to include the information about the dependents on the additional page. So that explained the discrepancy with the child tax credit and the credits for other dependents. The student loan interest deduction, which my lender sends to me and the IRS every year, was completely unaccounted for. So we don’t owe them extra money, but now I need to xerox our whole tax return; copy my worksheet for the child tax credit and credits for other dependents; print out the student loan interest form from my lender; and write a letter explaining it all for the next person at the IRS who takes it on, because I can’t simply send it to the person I talked to for 60 minutes today. I also need to schlep it to the post office and mail it out, with a proof of mailing, on my dime. Meanwhile, I got a bill from a doctor I saw last March saying that I owed him $75. Except my highest copay is $35, so I was puzzled. I called Blue Shield, spoke to someone fairly quickly, but then spent a total of an hour on and off hold as that person sorted out my case. Turns out this doctor’s office had submitted the claim twice to Blue Shield. Blue Shield paid up the first time, and denied the claim the second time because they had already paid. So I owe that $35 copay, not $75. Tomorrow, I need to call the doctor’s office and set it straight with them. I can tell you that, as the mother of a child with a lot of medical needs and therapeutic interventions throughout his childhood, I have spent more time than I care to calculate sorting out shit on the phone and through the mail with Blue Shield over the years. In this case yesterday, they were not at fault, but gracious, it took so long to get to the bottom of the issue, it raises a lot of questions about their recordkeeping. I HATE spending life energy and taking up mental real estate with this kind of buffoonery. I’m not going to say that this junk is always the exclusive purview of women, but I know many households where it is, or where it mostly is.
There’s a lot more to say on the topic. Let’s call this Round 1.
Beck’s song, “Soul Suckin Jerk,” while not exactly about the situation I’m describing, captures a kindred feeling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTZd8dq2iGI