Ezra Klein is often in the news writing about economic policy.  Recently, this excerpt from one of his columns appeared in the Washington Post.

In the traditional view of marriage, write economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “the joining of husband and wife yields a more productive firm, because it allows one spouse to specialize in earning income from working in the market, while the other specializes in the domestic sphere. The division of labor allows for greater productivity, just as it does in the workplace. The different skills required for these separate roles provide an economic rationale for the advice your grandmother may have offered, that ‘opposites attract.’” Romantic, right?

But in recent decades, the marriage-as-firm view has crumbled — and not just because social mores have changed. “Washing machines, dishwashers and microwave ovens have reduced the value to the family ‘firm’ of employing a domestic specialist,” say Stevenson and Wolfers, who are, themselves, married. “Cheap clothes can be imported from China, rather than sewn at home. Healthy meals can be purchased from the freezer at Trader Joe’s. What’s more, legal and social changes have broken down many of the barriers keeping women out of the labor market … All these developments have increased the opportunity cost of having a spouse stay home, because that spouse now has greater value in the marketplace.”  (emphasis added)

Determining  the value of paid employment is very straightforward. The amount of compensation for the work performed pretty much settles the question. But fixing the worth of an activity that the marketplace  doesn’t value is harder. Take family care – how much do your children gain by being loved, read to, bathed, taught, fed and raised by you full time? Is it worth what you could have earned had you worked flat out and full time for 18 years? Is it worth more? The marketkplace doesn’t have a number for that. The only way to measure it is what it may have cost you in terms of wages you could have earned had you not been busy doing full-time care work. The opportunity cost, in other words, is the dollar value of the earnings you passed up.

The limits of the market’s ability to accurately measure activity values are what makes life so perilous for parents or other family caregivers. The economy tracks the exchange of money for goods and services. This narrow view punishes any other activity and drives the devaluation of family care. Personal transactions between parents and children, or adult children and elderly parents, or spouses, take time, energy and effort, and result in a variety of positive outcomes. But in monetary terms, there is no price tag, no accounting, for what is given and received. It simply falls outside the record.

It’s not that family care is non-productive. It is actually the MOST productive activity, and no society could endure without it. The failure occurs in the marketplace, which can’t find a way to assign a value to it. So paid work takes priority, pushing everything else to the margins as less important, less deserving and less desirable.  Consequently, those engaged in family care are widely perceived as less important, less deserving and less desirable. No leap of imagination is needed to get from women’s connection to family care to the bottom of the gender pay gap, family responsibility discrimination, and disproportionate rates of poverty for women in old age. It  costs women individually an awful lot. It costs the country a great deal more.

We need a new sort of economics that can capture and assess the value of the whole range of human activity, not just the exchange of currency for goods and services.  Measuring one activity solely in terms of the extent to which it prevents you from doing another simply promotes a race to the bottom. We reward only paid employment, and we impoverish those who nurture, comfort, tend to and care for others. Is this sustainable in the long term? Is it the best way to promote the individual achievement of human potential? Is it fair?

’til next time,

Your (Wo)Man in Washington

Click here to read more posts from Your (Wo)manInWashington blog.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women only make 77 cents on the dollar compared to what men make. For women who are mothers, that pay gap is compounded by what is commonly referred to as the “Motherhood Penalty,” which amounts to approximately 5% per child on average.

To illustrate how wide this gap is, Catalyst compared the median income of a working single mother ($24,487) with that of a working single father ($36,290) and found working single moms make just 67 cents on the dollar compared with their male equivalents.

This is a particular problem as more and more women with children are joining the workforce and are contributing significant portions of their household incomes. As Catalyst reports, as of 2010, 70.8% of women with children under the age of 18 worked outside of the home and 39% of working mothers are primary breadwinners. In New York alone, women head more than 1 million households (15 million nationally) and it’s estimated that because of the wage gap, New York families are deprived of $8,600 a year, or as much as $10,784 nationwide.The National Partnership For Women And Families estimates this could purchase 2,751 gallons of gas, 13 months of rent, or food for 1.8 years.

As I wrote on Equal Pay Day last month, the gender wage gap is not just about inequity, it’s about economic security, and not just for women, but for their families as well. So, for working mothers, the lack of economic security means putting less food on the table, it means feeding their children less healthy food, and it means having less access to quality health care for their children.

As a mother myself, I know that nothing means more to moms than the health and well-being of their children and I can’t think of a better Mother’s Day gift for American moms than the promise of economic security for their families. One important step we must take is to close the gender wage gap.

In 2009, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for victims of wage discrimination to pursue compensatory damages. That was a good start, but now, I’m pleased that Senator Reid intends to bring The Paycheck Fairness Act up for another vote. This important piece of legislation would amend the Equal Pay Act of 1963 to provide more protections for women in the workplace and punish companies that discriminate against women. Republicans blocked this legislation before and appear poised to filibuster it again.

So, to all mothers this Mother’s Day, I urge you to make your voices heard. Talk about this issue with your friends. Call, write and tweet your senators to support The Paycheck Fairness Act. Post this blog post to Facebook, sign our petition, and share them with your friends. Also, make sure that you and all your friends are registered to vote in the November elections and make sure that you support candidates that have your best interests at heart. And when it comes time to vote, remember, it’s not just about the Presidential or Congressional elections. Use your voice on the local level where it has the potential to be more widely heard. And, of course, if you feel you can make a difference, run for office yourself.

We must overcome GOP opposition to closing the gender wage gap and together I know we can, not only for all working women, but on behalf of our children whose health and well-being depend on it.

Cross posted with author permission from The Huffington Post.

Should Mother’s Day just be about nice cards and pretty flowers? Or should it be about giving the people who care for us, and the essential work they do, real worth? How did we do this Mother’s Day?

Mother’s Day Tea in the East Room of the White House, May 10, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Sonya N. Hebert)

In our wealthy nation, millions of mothers – largely women who devoted all or part of their lives to taking care of others – face an old age of poverty. U.S. Census data show that they are twice as likely to be poor than older men. We would all agree that they deserve better, that mothers should be rewarded rather than punished for caring for others. Yet despite all the rhetoric about motherhood and apple pie, our present economic system does not reward this essential work in any way that helps us put food on the table or a roof over our heads. We need a more caring economy

The work of caregiving in families, whether it’s done by women or men, is not even included in measures of economic productivity such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – which instead count work that destroys rather than nurtures life such as making and selling cigarettes, the medical costs and the funeral costs as “productive.”

This makes no sense. We need new economic measurements that take into account that caregiving is essential for children’s welfare and development, that there would be no labor force without this work, and that both our short and long-term economic health depend on the work of care. We need Social Wealtheconomic indicators.

Women are still the main caregivers both at home and in the labor force. And why would men want to do this work when it is given so little value? Professions that entail caregiving such as child care and elementary school teaching, where women predominate, are lower paid than jobs that do not involve caregiving, such as construction work or plumbing, that are predominantly male.

Even though over half of mothers are now in the labor force, in the U.S. there is no government supported paid parental or sick leave and only a small number of businesses have policies that support caregiving. By contrast, in all other industrialized democracies, there is paid family leave. Not only that, there are also government subsidies for childcare and home elder care, not just tax credits. It is sometimes claimed that such policies will encourage people to stay home and not take outside jobs and will lead to a high birth rate. But nothing of the sort has happened in nations with such mothering-friendly policies. For example, Scandinavian nations have a low birthrate, a high rate of women in elected positions, no huge gaps between haves and have nots, and prosperous economies.

The lesson from this is that when caregiving is valued, everyone benefits. And only when caregiving is valued can we realistically expect more caring social policies.

That is why Congress recently introduced the WORK Act, for Women’s Option to Raise Kids, to allow low-income mothers on public assistance to provide the essential work of full-time caregiving for children during their first three years.

Investment in caregiving will pay for itself in less than a generation — and make a huge profit in the bargain. Consider the enormous community expense of not investing in good childcare — from crime, mental illness, drug abuse,and lost human potential to the economic consequences of lower quality “human capital.”

What is, or isn’t, economically valued and rewarded is a matter of values and policies, not of any fixed economic laws. Let’s take a good look at our values and policies this Mother’s Day, and see to it that our policy-makers do the same by valuing the work of caregiving and our true social wealth. We need to join together in a Caring Economy Campaign. This is the real gift we should give mothers – and fathers and children – this Mother’s Day.

Riane Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Studies , and author of the international bestsellers The Chalice and the Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations. Shireen Mitchell is founder of Digital Sisters and Vice Chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations.

A Rachel’s Network report entitled “When Women Lead: A Decade of Women’s Environmental Voting Records in Congress,”  compares the environmental voting records of Congresswomen and Congressmen from the 107th through the 111th Congress.  The conclusion:  in both houses of Congress, whether red or blue, women are greener!

Here’s Annie’s personal account of a moving conversation:

How did a girl raised and hardened on the streets of New York City become a passionate environmentalist, geeky master gardener and full-fledged compost queen? I read Rachel Carson’s bestseller, Silent Spring.

Overnight, I became a Rachel Carson groupie and went searching for my teammates. I found them at Rachel’s Network, a nonprofit that builds productive alliances among women funders who care deeply about the environment and women’s leadership.  These impassioned leaders and agents of change have collected the latest statistics showing that women are uniquely positioned as environmental stewards and that women in policy-making positions will vote to protect the environment more than their male counterparts.

This is all swell, you may be thinking. We can stop worrying about clean water, safe food and the ubiquitous barrage of industrial and agricultural chemicals. But American women account for only 23 percent of state legislators and 17 percent of Congress, and the United States ranks 73rd in the world in gender parity in governance.

I contacted Laurie Syms, co-director of Rachel’s Network, to ask how both women and men could earn some badly needed extra-credit points from Mother Earth.

To read Laurie’s answers to Annie’s thoughtful questions, see their interview in the Huffington Post, or learn more about ways The 2012 Project is propelling women into the political pipeline here.

And as you celebrate Mother’s Day, consider the influence you could leverage by running for office yourself.  Whether you’re most moved by education issues, toxic chemicals, family-friendly workplaces, or health care for kids, there’s no more effective way to effect lasting change than by setting the policy agenda yourself.

Don’t get me wrong:  breakfast in bed is dandy.  But a seat at the decision-making table is invaluable!

The answer is, as soon as you have a baby, YOU ARE MOM ENOUGH!

TIME is sadly out of touch with what Moms really want. It’s time to ask, “Are we Mom-friendly enough?”

In my circle of “Mom” friends, we largely think that the “Mommy Wars” are over. Until, of course, some stupid news outlet uses the Mommy War to try and sell magazines. We trust that the choices that you made about parenting your children were made based on the information that you had at the time. “We do better, when we know better” is a phrase we often share with each other as we gather new information and work to improve our lives and the lives of our children.

But the question is not the only insult. The cover photo is also offensive. Not because the mother is breastfeeding an older child, but because the picture does not represent the actual relationship that this mother has with her child.  To the many mothers, physicians, and public health advocates, who have strived to bring breastfeeding back into the mainstream, it is offensive to have such an exploitative and staged photograph become emblem of what is a normal part of motherhood.

In my 12 years of motherhood, having breastfed all my children into preschool, I have never seen another mother of a toddler or preschool aged child, pull up a chair, stand like a mudflap girl and nurse her child, while gazing off into the knowing eyes of the camera. I wonder how this picture would have looked if there was a little girl standing on that chair, as opposed to a very boyish boy?  Typically, mother’s who are extended breastfeeding an older child, reserve their nursing for the needs of the child, not the needs of the photographer.

I have seen mothers, whose children have fallen down, with a bloodied knee, comfort their children with nursing. I have seen mothers of children with severe diarrhea, comfort and hydrate their children with nursing. I have seen mothers of children, who have been scared and frightened, comfort and love their children with nursing.

I am not opposed to the beautiful pictures of women nursing older children, as was represented within the article and video, but the cover photo that TIME chose was intended to inflame and misrepresent.  TIME’s use of this inauthentic representation of what extended nursing “looks like” is simply a lie.

Some families choose to breastfeed beyond infancy because of the evidence-based health and neurological benefits. Yes, I said families, because very frequently, it is the fathers that see, support and promote the nursing relationship.

But the reality is that many women never breastfeed beyond the first weeks of life, because of the many barriers that prevent them from achieving their dream. Women need accurate and timely information, not hypersexualized hyperbole.

TIME, here are the questions you should have asked:

-                Where can we get the best information to make an informed choice?

-                Are we supporting a Mom’s choice to breastfeed for 1 minute, 1 day, 100 days or 1000 days?

-                When are we going to get paid maternity & paternity leave?

-                How can we get more flexible work options?

-                How can we ensure our children are educated?

-                How can we get health care?

-                When will we expand lactation accommodation rights for all working women?

-                Are we providing Moms with real food to feed their children?

-                Are we supporting families in the workplace to parent their children?

If you are ready to opt out of the Media-Industrial Mommy War Complex, please join us here.

Here’s a hilarious Mother’s Day fantasy just for you!

Click here: http://www.momsdaycard.com/index2.php

Happy nearly Mother’s Day!!!

- Kristin, Joan, Monifa, Elisa, Ashley, Nanette, Sarah, Julie, Sarah, Anita, Ruth, Claire, Donna, Mary, and Gloria

1) A pregnant woman can be fired for carrying a water bottle on the job to stay hydrated and prevent bladder infections.

2) A pregnant activity director at a nursing home can be terminated because she requires help with some physically strenuous aspects of her job to prevent having another miscarriage.

3) A pregnant delivery truck driver can be forced out on unpaid leave because she has a lifting restriction and needs light duty.

The answer to all of these questions is true. These scenarios are based on actual cases, in which courts interpreted existing law to deny these pregnant women protection.

Unfortunately, this happens all too frequently in America. Across the country, pregnant women who request minor adjustments are forced out of their jobs unnecessarily and denied the minor modifications to workplace duties, rules, or policies that would enable them to continue working and supporting their families.

Over thirty years ago, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) in order to eradicate discrimination against pregnant workers. The PDA prohibits discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions and directs employers to treat pregnant women as well as any other temporarily disabled worker, as long as they are similar in their ability or inability to work. Despite these protections, pregnant women are still routinely treated worse than workers who are temporarily disabled and/or covered by the American with Disabilities Act.

In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, I wrote about the economic and public health consequences of this form of discrimination against pregnant workers and the need for legislation to close legal loopholes. Today, women make up nearly half of all workers on U.S. payrolls, and working women’s salaries are critical to their families’ economic security. They need income but sometimes cannot perform some aspects of their usual duties without risking their well-being or the health of their pregnancies. If they lose their jobs, their families suffer. This is simply unacceptable.

Fortunately, in the midst of the now familiar War on Women, some Congressional leaders are really listening to women’s needs and developing solutions. Today, Representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Jackie Speier (D-CA), Susan Davis (D-CA) and Marcia Fudge (D-OH) will introduce the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) to address this problem. This critical legislation would ensure protections for pregnant workers who face being pushed out on leave or terminated when they ask their employers for even the most minor workplace accommodations. It would also require an employer to make a reasonable accommodation for pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, unless this creates an undue hardship on the employer. The PWFA is common-sense legislation that would help millions of women, especially those who are economically vulnerable, to keep working and supporting their families.

Let’s be clear — plenty of women can and do work throughout their pregnancies without issue. However, pregnant women who cannot — predominately low-wage and blue-collar women in physically demanding jobs — should be able to request and receive reasonable adjustments to work duties and should not be forced out on leave unnecessarily or fired. These women desperately need a clear right to ask for what they need to stay healthy and on the job.

The PWFA has already garnered broad support from prominent women’s groups, unions and dozens of other organizations across the country. Similar protections for pregnant workers are on the books in several states, and a comparable bill pending in New York State is gaining momentum. Such laws help countless women maintain income and work-related benefits without unduly burdening businesses. They also save taxpayers money, because pregnant women who stay on the job need not turn to public assistance to stay afloat.

This Mother’s Day, stand up for expecting mothers and their families and tell your Senators and Representatives to support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. No pregnant worker should be forced to choose between her job and a healthy pregnancy. Ensuring the well-being of pregnant women and their babies should be a nonpartisan issue.

This blogpost was originally published on the Peaceful Revolution column at The Huffington Post by MomsRising.org and CustomFitWorkplace.org. The Peaceful Revolution presents innovative ideas to strengthen 21st Century American families through public policy, business practice, and cultural change.

We are powerfully, substantially, fully “Networked Moms.”

Increased Internet access, coupled with new communication technologies–like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and even emails– allows women to reach dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of other women at one time with a quick press of a button.  It’s an unbelievably fast moving tool that significantly accelerates communication, education, organizing, and impact.

One example of these rapidly growing networks is the fast growth of MomsRising due to networked friends telling friends: We started with just a handful of members in 2006, and we’ve grown to over a million members today.  MomsRising’s highly trafficked blog and social media networks have also grown at a fast pace. We’re delighted to share that MomsRising now has over 700 bloggers, including Congresspeople, Cabinet Secretaries, moms with amazing personal stories, policy experts, and more. There’s an amazing variety of well-written perspectives, resources, and action links in ONE place: The MomsRising blog. 

Networked moms are powerful and we’re everywhere.  And we Networked Moms are creating our own new media online– and are bringing forward topics that have too long been ignored in traditional media outlets.

So in celebration of the growing power of Networked Moms to bring forward critically important topics, for Mother’s Day we’ve gathered together the most popular recent blogs posted on MomsRising right here (Scroll down this page to check it all out).

Click here!

How to Make a Superhero Cape by Lara from HowDoesShe

Food Revolution! A Blog Carnival On School Food and Fighting Childhood Obesity, Diabetes by Monifa Bandele

Mother Takes on Monsanto, Wins Global Prize by Kristin Schafer ***Shared over 1,000 times on Facebook!

The Real View of Free Formula Samples—Open Your Eyes by Melissa Bartick, MD ***Shared over 1,000 times on Facebook!

The Story Behind My Film “Entre Nos” by Paola Mendoza

Coke Turns 125: Why I’m Not Celebrating by Mike Jacobson

130 Death Row Inmates Have Been Found Innocent Since 1973: Troy Davis’ Execution is Set for Tomorrow  by Monifa Bandele ***Shared over 1,000 times on Facebook

Wal-Mart’s Sick Sick Day Policy by Katie Bethell

It’s Not a “Mommy War,” It’s a War on Moms by Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner

The Execution of Troy Davis–A Mother’s Story by Martina Davis-Correia

TIME: Ask the RIGHT Questions! by Genevieve Colvin

I am a teacher today because the government of the United States of America invested in me. My country gave me money to go to college.

In 1976, I applied for a National Direct Student Loan to pay for my expenses at the University of Utah. There was no expensive middle-man bank. I owed the government the loan. I owed 3% interest. I had ten years to pay it back. And I did.

I graduated and became a teacher. I paid higher taxes than I did when I was a secretary. I did work that was important to my community. My husband and I were able to save a little money for our children’s college. We bought a little house. We saved something each month in a retirement account.

My country understood that with an investment in my adult education, I would be better prepared to take care of myself, my family and participate as an engaged member of society and not be a burden to the economy. President Obama gets that.

He sees higher education as a national investment. As a national imperative. And I’m sure he’s a nice man. But he doesn’t see affordable college as a nice thing to do. Affordable college is not a charitable contribution. It’s an investment and brings in a return on that investment that benefits the country for generations.

Some folks don’t get that.

There have been recent political debates on whether or not the purpose of a student loan program is to enrich a middle-man bank. Thank goodness the President put an end to that. He convinced Congress to refocus on the true purpose of the federal student loan program: To help college students pay for their education without incurring crippling debt.

It never was to help a bank make a big profit by increasing the costs of college to individual students and their families.

There have been debates on whether or not student loan interest should double. Or there should be fewer Pell Grants for low-income students. Or that states should continue to starve basic funding to state universities and community colleges, which simply shifts costs to students in ever-higher tuition and fees with the assumption that families can make up the difference.

When they can’t, they are forced to either abandon their dreams or take on crushing, sometimes bankrupting debt.

My government invested in me. It gave me seed money, and I bloomed. And I paid my country back with interest.

Today, it’s even more important to our students than it was in 1976. Today, families are struggling to stay in the middle-class. Today, our children will have to have some level of higher education, (trade schools, community colleges, universities) to live a middle-class life that their parents might have achieved with a high school education. Affordable college is not a luxury. It’s the foundation of a thriving middle-class.

Parents will do their part. Students want to do their part. But today, college is not affordable for too many middle-class families. Higher education is becoming a possibility for the lucky few.

Luck, however, is a lousy business plan when our economy depends on a healthy middle-class, and a healthy middle-class depends on the level of education a middle-class or poor person can access.

Today, this is even more important to our students than it was in 1976. Every country understands how important this is to their future.

EVERYWHERE families are struggling to stay in the middle-class.

Who doesn’t get that?

(Watch this video from Chile where students and teachers are organizing to ensure an affordable, quality and public education for all)

by Rachel Sarnoff, Executive Director & CEO
Healthy Child Healthy World
www.healthychild.org

Happiest Babies Are Soothed by 5 S’s

Can simple soothing take the place of sugar? That was the takeaway from a new study published this week in the journal Pediatrics. In a study involving more than 200 infants, researchers found the “5 S’s” baby-calming tactics worked better than the sugar-water supplements traditionally given to infants after experiencing pain, according to ABC News. The 5 S’s tactics were developed by Dr. Harvey Karp, a founding board member of Healthy Child Healthy World and author of “The Happiest Baby on the Block” book and video series. Yet another reason to “shh-shh-shh”!

Carcinogens in the House

On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives will hold an investigative hearing on the Report on Carcinogens of the National Toxicology Program, a government program that identifies cancer-causing chemicals. The Subcommittee on Science, Space & Technology will meet to assess the impact of the Report on small business jobs. Healthy Child has signed on to a group letter urging the Committee to continue funding the Report; we’ll share more information as it emerges.

The Story’s Not Over on BPA

The FDA’s recent decision not to ban BPA has been criticized by scientists who are concerned that low-dose exposures may be linked to health problems, according to the Washington Post.

Earth Week is for Mothers

Earth Week started Sunday and there’s nothing more powerful than moms doing their part for the Earth. In addition to the awe-inspiring “Mom on a Mission” finalists and all the incredible hosts teeing up for Healthy Child Party Week, we wanted to take a moment to recognize…

Lori Popkewitz Alper of Groovy Green Livin’, who took on P & G with a petition that’s racked up nearly 75,000 signatures encouraging the company to strip carcinogenic 1,4 dioxane from its Free & Gentle detergent.

Jenna Elfman, Kelly Preston and Laila Ali, who kicked off the Healthy Child Party campaign with a bang and showed the world ALL moms fight for children’s health.

And green living leader Sara Snow, who recently launched a petition to get cancer-causing flame retardants out of Graco baby products—for her baby daughter’s health and the health of children everywhere.

Go team!