Low-Income Women Getting Left Out, As Usual

Since I last wrote about Obama's most recent set of policy proposals [1], I ended up in an argument with a guy who said that supporting transportation spending over a child care tax credit promotes structural sexism by favoring a mostly male employment sector over a mostly female employment sector. Ahem.

So sure, let's talk about structural sexism and transportation, and how the presentation of this non-refundable tax credit continues the usual class warfare against the poor. Particularly if we're being forced to choose between tax credits for a small number of people and good public transit for a large number of people.

Getting From Point A To Point B

Let's assume that you're a woman without a college degree working in one of those pink collar jobs that pays dirt and has no advancement opportunity. Let's say you're a receptionist, a restaurant employee, or maybe a daycare worker.

If you don't have a car, it's miserable living in an area with poor public transit, such that you have to leave the house an hour and a half before work and stand at an uncovered bus stop in all kinds of weather and transfer a time or two, just to go 15 miles. It's exhausting, demoralizing, tedious and a disincentive to any type of continuing education so you can get a better job. It's even worse to have to do that when you're sick, particularly if it's why you ended up sick in the first place.

If you have a car, it's going to be hard to afford one that runs right on the pittance you're earning. Insurance and gasoline are expensive. Mechanics overcharge you because they can. No one's ever willing to step in to defend your right to take a personal day to pick up your miserable clunker with its balding tires at the shop.

This is all even worse if you're a part-time shift worker who needs a car because the public transit in your area shuts down before you can clock out. Not only is any car you can afford even likelier to be a lemon, if you can't cough up for one, who's going to come pick you up at midnight when you're finally done washing those floors?

Relieving people in low-paying jobs of the expense of owning a car by providing safe, clean, reliable public transit is a benefit that I'd argue from my experience is of tremendous potential benefit to low-income women.

Health(, and Other Diffuse Benefits)

To repeat and extend what I said last time:

... [A]s with the education example, public transportation provides so many benefits to even those who don't use it that it could be said that "a train running a profit is charging too much" [2] to its individual riders. By decreasing congestion, decreasing health damage from pollution [3], providing reliable backup transportation for car owners and allowing employers to access the talents of people without cars, among other things, public transit improves the lives of entire communities.

If you really want to argue about whether or not public transit enriches entire communities, we're probably not on a similar enough page to have a discussion about the perpetuation of structural sexism and women's continuing economic disenfranchisement. But for form's sake, I include again the point that "a train running a profit is charging too much" [2], and also not creating the biggest economic benefits that it could.

Though the issue of health, both for workers and their children, is one that deserves more than passing reminder.

Asthma and respiratory disorders [4] are firstly more common in low-income and non-white neighborhoods, secondly, they're often caused by particulates and other pollution that are found in higher concentrations in these neighborhoods.

More polluting sites are located [5] in neighborhoods where the residents have less political power. That includes bus depots, granted, but also the freight traffic [6] and older automobiles more likely to be concentrated in poorer communities.

Low-income families are also often likely to be concentrated in communities with low tree density [7]. Trees can reduce respiratory illness [8], likely by filtering numerous transportation-related pollutants [pdf] [9] out of the air, but this just underscores to me the importance of reducing traffic in these communities through investments in rail and public transit.

I'm very much in favor of planting trees, doubly in favor of cutting health-damaging pollution in urban communities whose members' health is already compromised [10], and whose workers are less likely to be able to afford to take time off in the event of illness.

Further, every woman is well aware that she'll be judged more negatively for taking time off to care for a sick child than a man. It's even worse if you're in a job that's traditionally majority female [11], where perceptions of your competence and value are minimal at best. So if a woman has a low-paying job with limited advancement potential, and lives in a low-income neighborhood, and has to have an older, more polluting car in a community full of similar cars, that deals a triple threat to the health of her career prospects, her children and her children's futures.

Policies that force car ownership among low-income workers are therefore all kinds of FAIL. Not to mention, it makes people's kids sick. People hate that, including people who are women.

The False Choice of Pink Collar Vs. Blue Collar

Taking the issue of wage differentials head on, the top solution to women being trapped in low-income, low-opportunity jobs isn't creating more of them. Just, no.

Nor is the solution more access to four-year college educations. Plenty of women with college educations still get trapped in pink collar jobs with limited, if somewhat better prospects.

Women need access to the same living wage, blue collar jobs [12] that men without college degrees have consistently dominated. Not everyone's going to go to college, and that's just fine. But when men and women of similar education levels have such divergent access to high-wage occupations with good benefits, that's the true root of structural gender bias.

Women make less money, so they have less negotiating power in all aspects of their lives.

Consider the article, "A Matter of Degrees", in the December issue of Grid [13], a magazine about sustainability efforts in and around Philadelphia. The subject is a new solar panel installation training program in Northeast Philadelphia, it contained this paragraph about the class demographics:

The class is a diverse bunch. The average age is 40, and the ethnic breakdown is about 60 percent African American and 40 percent Caucasian, with one Latino student. The group includes six veterans, six ex-offenders and a mix of manufacturing experience, from extensive to none. One exception: There are no women in the class--the few that did apply didn't make it pass the entrance exam.

Whether because of space constraints or disinterest, nothing further was said in this article about why such a diverse assortment of working class men were all, every one, capable of passing an entrance exam that flunked every woman who took it. There's either something wrong with the test or something wrong with what we're teaching girls and women of every class, and at every level of education.

There may also be something wrong with how men perceive women's competence and characters [14]. This problem, a child care tax credit isn't going to correct, even if it's a generally unobjectionable policy.

Though the fact is that everyone is happier and marriages are stronger [15] when women have more opportunities and earning power. So if you want to make life better for women, don't pretend that what they really need, first and foremost, is more opportunities in the daycare sector--the income differential between that work and traditional 'male' employment for skilled, non-degree-having labor can often be large enough to swallow this tax credit whole--because that will just make me all kinds of irritated.

Taxes, Taxes, Taxes

And as to the harm of pushing taxes as the primary solution to all our problems, while at the same time calling (even if disingenuously) for a spending freeze, what she said [16]. The whole policy package, the whole way it was presented, and the climate in which it was offered, do nothing but undermine the political forces working to chip away structural inequality of all kinds.

When your premier policy for helping families helps only a narrow band of families with very young children and a certain level of taxable income, you're sending a very clear message about who deserves help and who doesn't. It isn't a liberal message. It isn't a progressive message. It's a class warfare message that mollifies the middle class at the expense of the poor, once again.