The hapless, bumbling father is a stock character in product marketing. He makes breakfast for dinner and is incapable of handling, or sometimes even noticing, a soggy diaper. He tries desperately to hide the crumb-strewn, dirt-streaked evidence of his poor parenting before the mother gets home.
This is an image that many fathers who attended the Dad 2.0 Summit — a meeting of so-called daddy bloggers and the marketers who want to reach them — have come to revile. They are proud to be involved in domestic life and do not want to serve as the comic foil to the supercompetent mother.
In the past, consumer-product marketers weren’t all that concerned with what fathers thought — women, after all, make the majority of purchasing decisions for households. But men are catching up: In 2012 men spent an average of $36.26 at the grocery store per trip, compared with $27.49 in 2004, according to data from Nielsen. Companies see an opportunity to reach a new demographic.
The dad bloggers, for their part, are using their influence to change the way marketers portray them. To put it another way, while the mom space is crowded with players, the dad space has room for more. So there is big money to be made, both by companies looking at fathers as consumers and by daddy bloggers looking to ride a wave of brand sponsorship just as mommy bloggers have.
The film is narrated by three-time Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep, and includes movement leaders such as author and feminist activist Gloria Steinem and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton; opponents like conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly; celebrities including media leader Oprah Winfrey and journalist Katie Couric; political figures like former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and currentSecretary of State Hillary Clinton; business leaders like Sheryl Sandbergand Linda Alvarado; and many “ordinary” women who confronted the dramatic social upheaval in their own lives.
The broadcast of MAKERS: WOMEN WHO MAKE AMERICA comes on the heels of the launch of MAKERS.com earlier in 2012. This landmark multiplatform video experience from PBS and AOL aims to become the largest and most dynamic collection of women’s stories ever assembled. The AOL-developed interactive video platform has become a source of inspiration for millions of people, having received more than 26.7 million video views to date.
The Wall Street Journal reports that McKinsey, the big consulting firm, is quietly reaching out to female employees who left some years ago—presumably to start families—to see whether they are ready to return.
Details of the initiative, still in its early stages, are sketchy, and McKinsey offered no further information, except to say it isn't a companywide policy. But the effort is one small signal that at least some companies are re-examining some of the most basic terms of women's working lives.
The issue of lost women workers remains a delicate one for many companies, particularly in highly skilled professions, such as consulting or banking. After spending their 20s in high-intensity jobs, many women leave or switch to part-time work when they have children.
Most companies simply acknowledge the departures and move on, but some of them are starting to recruit talented women who are ready to resume work. The other Big Three consulting firms have their own programs targeted at current and former female employees.
A 2009 study of female attorneys in New Jersey, conducted by Rutgers University's Center for Women and Work, found that 29% of the respondents said they left their previous firms because they had "difficulty integrating work with family/personal life."
And in a 2010 McKinsey report, female senior executives cited the "double burden syndrome" of balancing motherhood and work as the main obstacle to women attaining more top roles in companies.
To be sure, reactivating workers who have been off the job for years presents big challenges for both employers and the returning worker.
This is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s international best seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” which has been widely credited with igniting the women’s movement of the 1960s.
In 1963, most Americans did not yet believe that gender equality was possible or even desirable. Conventional wisdom held that a woman could not pursue a career and still be a fulfilled wife or successful mother. Normal women, psychiatrists proclaimed, renounced all aspirations outside the home to meet their feminine need for dependence. In 1962, more than two-thirds of the women surveyed by University of Michigan researchers agreed that most important family decisions “should be made by the man of the house.”
Over the next 30 years the emphasis on equalizing gender roles at home as well as at work produced a revolutionary transformation in Americans’ attitudes. It was not instant. As late as 1977, two-thirds of Americans believed that it was “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” But during the second half of the 1990s and first few years of the 2000s, the equality revolution seemed to stall.
Between 1997 and 2007, the number of full-time working mothers who said they would prefer to work part time increased to 60 percent from 48 percent. In 1997, a quarter of stay-at-home mothers said full-time work would be ideal. By 2007, only 16 percent of stay-at-home mothers wanted to work full time.
One study cautioned that nearly 30 percent of opt-out moms who wanted to rejoin the labor force were unable to do so, and of those who did return, only 40 percent landed full-time professional jobs. In “The Price of Motherhood,” the journalist Ann Crittenden estimated that the typical college-educated woman lost more than $1 million dollars in lifetime earnings and forgone retirement benefits after she opted out.
Today, the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie in people’s personal attitudes and relationships. Instead, structural impediments prevent people from acting on their egalitarian values, forcing men and women into personal accommodations and rationalizations that do not reflect their preferences. The gender revolution is not in a stall. It has hit a wall.
Is it any surprise that American workers express higher levels of work-family conflict than workers in any of our European counterparts? Or that women’s labor-force participation has been overtaken? By 2010, according to an economic research paper by Cornell researchers Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, we had fallen to 17th place, with about 30 percent of that decline a direct result of our failure to keep pace with other countries’ family-friendly work policies. American women have not abandoned the desire to combine work and family.
Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders.
"Men look at themselves in mirrors while women look for themselves."*
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO (February 11, 2013) -
From Sleeping Beauty's looking glass, to the middle school bathroom, to the department store dressing room, we are surrounded by mirrors, images and reflections.
The Mirror Monologues (TheMirrorMonologues.com) seeks submissions from women of all ages about the role mirrors play in their lives. The best and most representative stories will be woven into a 90-minute script that will be presented in New York City in the spring of 2014.
The Mirror Monologues was created by four women -- Judith Estrine, Nancy Gall-Clayton, Donna Guthrie and Linda Rathkopf. The women met when Gall-Clayton and Guthrie put together a short play festival called "6 Women Turning 60" in 2006 after they met at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
"We want both serious and humorous pieces about a time when you looked in a mirror and felt a strong emotion. Examples include: your first eyeglasses, braces, graduation, wedding day, pregnancy, important job interview and your changing self-image on milestone birthdays," says Donna Guthrie, co-creator of The Mirror Monologues.
The founders of The Mirror Monologues agree that the final script will inevitably include both painful as well as celebratory stories; they intend for the overall message to be positive, life-affirming, and inspiring. They also hope this project will lead to collaborations with theatrical communities across the country.
The Mirror Monologues competition is open to women ages 16 years and older. Submissions will be accepted between February 1 and March 31, 2013. Playwrights may submit only one monologue. Monologues must be unpublished, unproduced, and between one and three pages in length. For more information on The Mirror Monologues, submission guidelines and mailing instructions, please visit http://www.themirrormonologues.com/.
*Quote from Elissa Melamed, author of "Mirror, Mirror: The Terror of Not Being Young."
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