When we talk about barriers to the entrance of women in the American workforce in the 20th century, the story we tell is largely cultural and economic. Married women with career aspirations had to contend with wage discrimination, marriage bars, and the perception that a working woman was ipso facto a degenerate wife and mother. A neat new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that we often understate the role of basic medical advances when talking about that sudden, collective jump from home to workplace. It's easy to forget how dangerous childbirth used to be; complications associated with sepsis, toxaemia and obstructed labor could ravage a body well into middle age. "Many maternal conditions had very long lasting or chronic effects on health," the researchers report, "hindering women's ability to work beyond their childbearing years."

Using historical data to quantify the effects of various maternal conditions, economists Stefania Albanesi and Claudia Olivetti find that medical advances like the introduction of antibiotics, the standardization of obstetric practice, and the hospitalization of childbirth were absolutely critical to the rise of married women's participation in the labor market over the last century. They also find a very large effect for the introduction of formula as a mainstream alternative to breastfeeding in the 1930s. A typical woman in 1920 between the ages of 23 and 33 would be nursing for something like 40 percent of her potential working time. As Hanna has so forcefully illustrated, our cost/benefit calculations change when we start to consider the possibility that a mother's time might have some kind of value.

Tags: economics, pregnancy, pregnancy discrimination, work life balance, working families, workplace equity

Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis taught me a fascinating term: unconscious overclaiming. It turns out that we unconsciously overestimate our contributions or skills relative to other people's. Because we know and value our own contributions, we exaggerate how much we've contributed and undervalue what other people do. In one study, for example, when business-school students in a work group estimated their individual contributions to the team effort, the total was 139%. Is there a work situation where you've probably been unconsciously overclaiming? (How I love the word "overclaiming.") Tell us in the comments.

Gretchen Rubin blogs at The Happiness Project and will publish a book by the same name in January 2010.

Tags: Gretchen Rubin, happiness project, question of the week, unconscious overclaiming, work

Double X's Emily Bazelon has been writing an ongoing "recessionitis" series on how the recession is affecting family, work, and life. At the end of her last piece, she asked readers whether they'd been forced to move homes, cities, or even countries because of the economic downturn. She'll be posting her piece with the results next week, but there were too many moving stories to include in one article. So this week, the On-Ramp will be running serialialzed excerpts of emails from readers who were kind enough to share with us their stories of the recession and mobility.

"I am a native New Yorker and marketing and communications executive. I was recruited in 2001 to go to Hong Kong to work for a huge multinational agency. It was right about the time the dot-com bubble started to burst in the U.S. and I figured it would take a while to hit Asia. It did take a while, and in 2003 I left that position to study Chinese and picked up work as a newspaper copy editor in Taiwan. Until recently I was the country manager for the Taipei office of a different multi-national communications consultancy. Several months back, on an optimistic bender (I had a few interviews lined up), I decided it was high time to give New York another try. Well, I've been back in the city for four months now. Those opportunities all went away. Have had very few leads of value. Now, this 15-year P.R. and communications veteran is going to go BACK to Taiwan and work as an English teacher (something I had dabbled in previously) because at least it's a paycheck. I will also be able to join my fiancee there. We had applied for a K-1 fiancée visa for her to come here, marry me and for us to start a life in New York. But of course that was just a silly dream. If I don't have a job, I can't get her the visa. I wouldn't even be able to support myself, let alone her for a while, in the U.S. anyway"—Jon

"Until 3 weeks ago I had lived in Delaware all my life. I moved to Maryland, away from my family and my fiancé, in order to accept a job. It's just a retail position, but it seems like a godsend to me now. I had been working for a temp agency since July of last year, quite happily filling office positions throughout New Castle County. Then, a few days before Christmas, my last assignment ended. I waited a week or two for a call about a new assignment that never came. I stopped calling the agency after about a month, thinking that I had pestered them enough, and that if they couldn't find work for me I'd have to find it for myself. I went through the newspapers, online job search engines, Craigslist; every resource you could imagine, and I couldn't find a job anywhere. I put in an average of three applications/resumes each day for months. I am so lucky that my wonderful fiancé, Jeff, was willing to help me pay my bills while I tried to find work. By March I began to believe that there was no work in Delaware. That's when I went to visit my cousin in Maryland and began to pepper my resume throughout the Gaithersburg area. Within a week I had a job interview, and within two weeks I had a job. Jeff and I absolutely hate being apart, but we're getting married in September and we both need to have a steady income in order to pay for the wedding."—Sarah

"I am a 25-year-old college grad living and working in Ukraine on United States Government-funded technical assistance projects. My job security seems high and the income tax-free nature of my compensation makes my salary very good. After being in the region doing this kind of work for the last three years, my long-time girlfriend finally laid down the law. I must return to the U.S. if this were going to continue to work (yes she is a very very patient person). I was all set to move back to New York, and take any job I could find while I waited to get into law school. Then the economy tanked. Now there is no way I can support myself living in New York. I could burn through my hard earned savings, but I will need every penny of it and more for my law degree. No, your last article hasn't deterred me from following my dream. My position is too good to give up in this economy. So instead of moving back, I have accepted a new posting and will be moving to Paraguay in a few months after my project here closes. My girlfriend has managed to survive the first round of layoffs at her firm. She has very little work experience and rightly doesn't think now is the time to drop out of the job market to move with me to Paraguay. So it seems the job market in New York is just good enough to keep her there, but bad enough to keep me from getting back. After a recent trip to visit her, she has finally decided that this won't continue to work long distance. In any other economy, I could pick up, move, and try my luck in New York, but not in the worst economy in my entire lifetime. While my bank account and job prospects seem like they are still in the year 2007, my emotional state is closer to the Dow the day Bear Sterns went under. "—Ryan

Tags: family, homes, mobility, moving, recession, relocation, work

I get what you say, Meghan, about the benefits of broadening the range of publicly-noted female roles beyond those old standbys, “nurturer” and “supporter.” But I can’t share your pleasure in the finding that 40 percent of workplace bullies are women. After all, isn’t “bitch”—or even “office bitch”—just as much a stereotype as “nurturer”? Judging from The Devil Wears Prada and Working Girl, two of many fictional studies in the vicissitudes inflicted by female bosses on their (ultimately triumphant) female underlings, this particular stereotype is well established in the cultural consciousness. We even know without thinking what these witchy characters look like, right down to the thin lips and the pointy, expensive shoes.

This is part of what Catalyst found in Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don’t, its report on the challenges faced by women trying to ascend the corporate ladder. Viewed as either too soft or too tough depending on their willingness to practice stereotypical feminine—read “nurturing”—behaviors as opposed to more aggressive, stereotypically masculine ones, the report notes that women have great difficulty avoiding the perception that they’re either nice but not very competent or competent but not very nice, especially in the rarefied upper echelons of the corporate world. (Another striking Catalyst finding: only 2 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women).

In light of the bullying study, though, I think Catalyst may be letting women off easy by suggesting that they’re tagged as aggressive, tough or mean simply because they act male. It seems likely that the awkwardness for women of finding comfortable and acceptable ways to operate in male-dominated fields contributes to their bullying. But at base, women who bully are just women behaving badly—something for which they should be criticized, not cheered. While I’ve been lucky enough to work with many supportive women, few things in my professional life have been more upsetting than encountering women, usually in positions of authority, who seemed determined to keep other women down. (It should be noted that, as the study suggests, they did not exhibit the same behavior toward men.) These women’s reasons were no doubt many and various, but their meanness was unmistakable, and it felt like a particularly exquisite betrayal.

Tags: bullies, work, workplace

Despite the sour economy, mainstream music has been remarkably free of songs about tough times. Country music seems to be the exception. (Associated Press)

Dollar stores are cleaning up: Nearly half of all U.S. households now shop at the low-price stores each month. (Los Angeles Times)

Faced with tough economic realities, more adult children are moving back into their parents' homes. The AARP found that 11% of adults between 35 and 44 were living with their parents or in-laws. (New York Times)

More than half (55 per cent) of employees are working from home more frequently since the financial crisis began. (BusinessWeek)

New unemployment claims rose to 637,000 last week, despite expectations that they would fall. Ongoing claims also set a record at 6.56 million. (Bloomberg)

With a growing number of people competing for a dwindling number of job openings, some employers are driving down pay and benefits for new hires. (Associated Press)

Not so long ago, three-button power suits - slickly conservative, oversize and overpriced - blared of Wall Street success. Now, with banking out of fashion, the suits are remaining on the racks at retail stores. (New York Times)

Responding to the recession, many top universities are shrinking their PhD programs. (Inside Higher Ed)

Many Americans are driving less in order to save money, but with gas prices down from last summer road trips are poised to make a comeback. (Wall Street Journal)

Retail sales fell unexpectedly in April, indicating that rising unemployment is prompting consumers to conserve cash. (Bloomberg)

Tips for using credit to help you manage your cash flow and get back to the work of delivering great products and services. (Recessionwire)

Direct-sales businesses that rely on home-based representatives to peddle their wares are seeing their sales forces rapidly expand. (USA Today)

Tags: country music, dollar stores, flex time, jobless claims, news briefing, recession, recessionwire, road trips, work

Vanessa, I agree that we don't gain much by adding the office bitch stereotype to the working woman's repertoire. And like you and lawyer-mom, one of our first commenters, who writes astutely about her bullying female boss, I also have a story of an older and more experienced woman who put me down rather than pulled me up. I wonder, though, if we notice these failings more in a women boss or professor or superior more than we do in men. Do we call out the women we look up to because we expect more from them, and then nurse our justifiable grievances, when they turn on us, with especial vigor? I tell my female bullying story more often than I tell one of the many I have about a male former boss, now that I think about it.

Also, even if women bully women more often than they bully men, as the survey stats that Meghan started us out with showed, they're still less likely to bully than men are. If 40 percent of office bullies are women, than 60 percent are men. I suppose women could still be disproportionateloy represented in the bullying ranks since they probably don't comprise 40 percent of bosses and supervisors. But I still wonder if we're extra preoccupied by our disappointment in them.

Tags: bullies, work, workplace

Double X's Emily Bazelon has been writing an ongoing "recessionitis" series on how the recession is affecting family, work, and life. At the end of her last piece, she asked readers whether they'd been forced to move homes, cities, or even countries because of the economic downturn. She'll be posting her piece with the results next week, but there were too many moving stories to include in one article. So this week, the On-Ramp will be running serialized excerpts of emails from readers who were kind enough to share with us their stories of the recession and mobility.

"I have quite a history with living overseas due to economic circumstances. My mother raised three children with no outside support and only a high-school education. My siblings and I all earned scholarships and college degrees from reputable schools (the first in our family), but none of us have earned more than $30,000 per year. Living overseas was the only feasible way I could support my brother's education and my mother's bills. I worked for seven years as a teacher in Korea, as an actor in the Philippines for one year, and for several months teaching in Japan as well. I recently decided to attend law school and have returned to the U.S. for the first time in 8 years, but now I have to go back to work in Japan in order to make my mother's mortgage payments; she was laid off last year; my sister last week. Korea's exchange rate has bottomed out so badly that I would need to double my paycheck there just to make the same amount in dollars as I did 15 months ago. My sister has followed work from Chicago to North Carolina to Arizona. I have followed work from Seoul to Manila to Tokyo and back again. Almost all of my extended family has dispersed in order to find work which barely puts them above the poverty line, if at all. —John

"My husband and I are actually stuck in a place we don't like because of the recession. We're both originally from Maryland, and when we graduated from college there three years ago we decided to strike out. I got a job in New York and he got one way out in New Jersey, so we settled in a New Jersey suburb. Our jobs are okay, but we hate New Jersey and miss Maryland. We had planned to stay in our current jobs for about 2 years to get some experience under our belts, then start looking for jobs in DC. Right after we hit year 2, the economy went into free fall mode, and now there are no jobs to be had. We might be able to get one back in DC, but can't survive on one of our incomes. I know that we're lucky to have jobs, especially because more than 20 percent of the workforce at my company has been laid off, but to look at the foreseeable future in a place that we don't like that's a four-hour drive away from our families and friends is really bleak."—Marie

"I have been looking for a job in Atlanta, GA (my hometown) for months now. I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, went to the University of Georgia, got a job in Atlanta and moved 25 miles away from my entire family. Next week I am moving to Baltimore, MD. It is the only place that was actually hiring. It was a horrible decision. I had to choose a job over my family, all my friends, and my boyfriend who has a great job in Atlanta and can't even consider moving anytime soon. In this economy, though, I had to take the job. It was an increase in salary for essentially the same job I was doing. And I didn't know if anything would present itself in Atlanta. So this Southern girl is packing up and moving above the Mason-Dixon line to Maryland where I know no one. It was economic stability versus people, and in these times unfortunately I had to go with the job."—Jennifer

Tags: family, job hunt, life, mobility, moving, recession, relocating, unemployment, work

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Double X's Emily Bazelon has been writing an ongoing "recessionitis" series on how the recession is affecting family, work, and life. At the end of her last piece, she asked readers whether they'd been forced to move homes, cities, or even countries because of the economic downturn. She'll be posting her piece with the results next week, but there were too many moving stories to include in one short article. So this week, the On-Ramp will be running serialialzed excerpts of emails from some of those readers who were kind enough to share with us their stories of how the recession has shifted their mobility.

"In August of last year more than 200 people overflowed the largest conference room available in my office in 30 Rockefeller Plaza. We were all told that our job was being outsourced to another provider based in Malvern Pennsylvania. The delivery was so well-crafted most people left with a smile on their face. After digesting the information, and analyzing their incessant requests to not consider the move a ‘layoff' I began to get suspicious. They promised everyone that if they want to keep their job, they would have a position for them in Malvern. I assume they were expecting most people to decline the offer since most people living in New York would not willingly move to suburban PA for a mediocre job. They even offered a sweetheart deal for most along with several bonuses and a relocation package. Originally I expected a large wave of notices after each retention bonus was paid out, but other than a few people, no one left and waited out until the bitter end. I'm a 23-year-old with no debt or obligations and parents in the immediate area, so I had no objection to hitting up the job market again. I started applying in September and after a few interviews I realized the bonuses I was promised were not reasonably going to be matched by competing firms so I stopped looking until the bonus paid out. A month before the final bonus I started looking for jobs again and noticed a dramatic reduction in the job postings. Not every job posting especially promising but without them I just felt that all hope was lost. Two weeks before my last day with the firm I decided on the whim to forgo the 8 weeks severance I was promised, along with unemployment, for the mediocre job in suburban PA. It took a lot to swallow my pride but at least I'm in good company, as a significant amount of employees took the job. Now I just hope all those large relocation packages my firm offered don't sink the bank!"—Branko

"In 2006, I changed jobs and moved from the New York suburbs to Atlanta, partly for a job opportunity and partly to be closer to my father, who was having health problems. (He died about six months later.) The small company where I was working ran into financial problems, and I was laid off less than a year after I started. A few months later, I got a job at a larger company that I hoped would be more stable. I moved from Atlanta to Philadelphia. Less than a year later, the company "reorganized" and I was laid off again. I've been unemployed since late last year. Happily, I was just offered a new job, and I'm about to move to Washington DC. I'm hoping that will be my last move for a while! Even though I was glad to find new jobs in new cities, moving has some significant down sides. After I was laid off the last time, I had some health problems. My family was far away, and since I'd only been here a few months, I hadn't made any close friends yet. Most of the people I'd met were co-workers, and many of them had been laid off as well, and had moved to find new jobs. It was very hard to be in the hospital and have no one close to me to call on for help. It made me realize how important it is to have people around you who care about you, something that's difficult if you have to move every year or two. Phone calls and email aren't the same. I'm hoping that my next job will be more long lasting, and I'll be able to meet people and settle down in my new city. "—Karen

"The reason I'm writing: I'm part of a distinct demographic of young individuals who have left my home state in droves. I'm a former video and television producer and even used to do my job directly for the government of Michigan and helped our Governor tape video messages imploring young folks like myself to stay. I was an intern, and my need for health insurance and benefits started to become an issue. The state didn't have the ability to hire me full time. So off to the private sector I went; working at a TV station in Lansing, MI making the saddest TV commercials ever for G.M. and Hummer dealers who couldn't sell their wares, with an office window that looked across the street at a G.M. assembly plant being torn down. I shotgunned my resume and went from the state of highest unemployment to one of the lowest--Wyoming. I was gobbled up by a high tech/video production hybrid firm that provides stock footage and makes iPhone apps for NCAA sports and all sorts of high end video logistics. I guess my story is this: I couldn't find a job in Michigan if I tried. Even the people who WANTED to hire me couldn't, and even Governor Granholm who wanted to keep a burgeoning creative class in state couldn't pull any strings - the money and bureaucratic agility just weren't there."—Craig

Tags: Emily Bazelon, life, mobility, recession, relocating for the recession, unemployment, work

Meghan, thanks so much for posting about the importance of female mentorship. I'm no physicist (anymore) but with many friends plus a mom in science, I am especially sensitive to the need for and frequent lack of XX mentorship in these disciplines. We've all heard reports that Americans lag behind in the hard sciences generally—but less reported is the fact that women rarely take on the quant-heavy jobs that do exist, or that tenured female science and engineering faculty are almost nonexistent. Then there are the other, real disadvantages talked about in the Fisman/NBER report.

Some of this, of course, has to do with lifestyle choices (cough, kids) that take female mentors out of the workplace. Some of this has to do with a distinct confidence deficit among junior and mid-level female workers that keep them from being top brass (one former employer told me that the women who interviewed for jobs often had better resumes than the men, but couldn't sell themselves in person, and lost the job). But can't we also blame men in these disciplines who are less willing to mentor young women? Perhaps they are just not that into helping women along; or fearful that accusations of impropriety might fly. But in male-heavy fields, what's wrong with dudes lending a hand?

Enter "Smart Girls At The Party." This may seem like an oblique reference, but somehow, this regular ON Network show—featuring Amy Poehler and friends supporting young women in hilarious, Christopher-Hitchens defying fashion—really speaks to me on the issue of underrepresentation and female mentorship. In this episode, a charmingly gregarious second-grader named Ruby broke it down on friendship, feminism and more, while Poehler and company, veterans of improvisational comedy, provide a real-time example of their craft to the little tot. That is to say they offer an enthusiastic "YES" to her every suggestion—including weeping on demand. Watch:

May Ruby grow up to have a fine career in psychotherapy, or pop stardom.

Tags: feminism, mentors, smart girls at the party, women, women in the workplace

Well, I'm glad the famous ones have off-days, too. Susan Orlean (staff writer at The New Yorker, author of The Orchid Thief, Meryl Streep muse) has been tweeting this morning about how hard it is to be an at-home writer—especially if you're a woman and a mother. She first posted: "When I was pregnant people said, Yr job is so flexible—perfect w/a baby! Clearly, they knew nothing about writing and/or kids." This has touched off a conversation between Orlean and other Twitterers about women and writing, a favorite topic here at the XX Factor. Orlean and her readers are discussing whether women have different styles of focus than men do, the extent to which writing is different from other professions, and why there are no "queens of non-fiction."

I certainly sympathize with the difficulties of being an at-home writer—which is why I'm currently sitting in a drop-in freelancer's cubicle here at the Slate Group's swanky new West Village office. (Thanks Slate Group!) Part of me thinks that working from home might actually be easier with kids around, since my problem has always been how vast and echo-y my apartment seems to become whenever I have to shift from, say, television-watching into work mode. The emptiness of the apartment begins to reflect the emptiness of the page, both start freaking me out, and then I just go back to watching television.

Of course, you can't tactfully avoid kids with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, the way you can tune out office-mates when you really need to concentrate. (At least, I'm guessing you can't?)

Work-at-home XX-ers, what are your coping mechanisms? And do you think it really is worse for women—and moms? And finally, what's your verdict on Twitter and writing: helpful social lifeline, or insidious procrastination tool?

Tags: freelance, office, Susan Orlean, women writers