Gender Equality and Social Security Neil Gilbert hen the Social Security system took shape during the New Deal in the 1930s, American family life still embodied the traditional values of division of labor--husband at work, wife at home caring for children--and hierarchical gender relations. Since that time, the declining birth rate, the rising numbers of divorce, and the increasing participation of women in the labor force have eroded traditional family arrangements on which the benefit structure of Social Security had been predicated. With the traditional framework all but dissolved, alternative models of family relations are being advanced which recommend not only the way that husbands and wives should divide their labor to fulfill domestic responsibilities, but also the appropriate reform of Social Security in support of these new conventions. These prescriptions for family life and their implications for the future course of Social Security stem primarily from two schools of feminist thought which adhere to radical egalitarian and neoconservative views of gender relations.
W
Radical and Conservative Outlooks To liberate family life from the traditional male dominance, radical egalitarians espouse a model of gender relations that is marked by complete functional equality. This model represents a system of beliefs which are organized around four tenets: 1) negation of gender roles; 2) devaluation of traditional activities;
3) celebration of paid employment; and 4) recognition of the individual as primary unit of concern for policy. The elimination of all gender distinctions is a basic prerequisite for functional equality. Among feminist groups, the radical egalitarian contingent is quite explicit on this point, calling, as Cynthia Fuchs Epstein notes, "for destruction of the traditional family in order to restructure society and abolish all gender roles." Susan Okin, for example, expresses this view in Justice, Gender, and the Family, arguing that in a just future "one's sex would have no more relevance than one's eye color or the length of one's toes. No assumptions would be made about 'male' or 'female' roles." Since the radical perspective views innate or natural differences between men and women as trivial, the fact that women tend to be more involved than men in care giving and domestic activities is credited almost entirely to socialization. Advocates of functional equality denounce the traditional activities of care giving and domestic chores as servile, tedious, mind-numbing work of limited value. The liabilities attributed to domestic work contrast sharply with the presumed benefits of wage labor. From this perspective, paid employment imparts autonomy and self-respect as it liberates women from the repressive confinement of child care and household chores. The low regard in which this work is held by radical feminists creates a curious dilemma. "If work
28 / S O C I E T Y 9 M A Y / J U N E 1994
in the family wraps one in a haze of domesticity and enrolls one in a cult of domesticity that blunts all talents," Suzanne Gordon inquires, "why would any man volunteer for this social Iobotomy?" Assuming that women can achieve self-determination in the labor market but not in the family, equality between husbands and wives is only possible if women participate in the paid labor force to the same extent as men. Several policy initiatives have been advanced to facilitate the shift of women's labor from the household to the market economy. An infrastructure of public family services is required to provide social care and perform other traditionally female tasks. At the same time that women are freed to compete on the labor market, men must be encouraged to increase their involvement in domestic activities through, for example, parental leave policies.
W o m e n are freed to c o m p e t e in the labor m a r k e t and m e n must increase i n v o l v e m e n t in domestic activities.
More generally, efforts to liberate women from the bridle of domesticity are guided by the principle that the individual rather than the family unit should be taken as the focal point for policy design. This principle has been advocated for some time. Almost twenty years ago, Constantina Safilios-Rothschild, in Women and Social Policy, suggested the United States adopt the Swedish model and advocated the abolition of all social policy distinctions based on family status, so that the law would always treat women and men as independent individuals. This principle has been endorsed in recent years by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). As the OECD Group of Experts on Women and Structural Change in the 1990s reports: "In most OECD countries the tax system is now based on the individual as the unit of assessment. Applying the same rule to Social Security enhances consistency and protnotes the principles of personal autonomy and economic independence." Beyond stimulating autonomy and independence, the OECD officials see social policies focused on individuals as a way to discourage role differentiation in family life "with regard to the division of time between paid employment, domestic duties, and leisure." To achieve this state of affairs, they acknowledge the need to engage in the "social construction of
gender," a process through which individual-oriented policies are reinforced by media messages that encourage men and women to adopt a functionally equal division of labor in family life. The ideal model of functional equality is characterized by a family in which both spouses work, maintain separate accounts, pay separate taxes, and contribute more or less equivalent sums to their financial support; domestic tasks and caring functions, to be performed after work, are divided equally between husband and wife. Each will contribute the same amount of time to the full range of domestic responsibilities, taking care not to fall back into the traditional division of labor in which men take out the garbage and protect the household, while women clean the floors and change the diapers. Domestic tasks and caring functions the couple cannot attend to are performed through arrangements with state-subsidized public or private service providers, any remaining charges of which are born equally by each parent. In the more intimate realm of sexual activity, Safilios-Rothschild's model marriage contract posits that "half the time she uses a diaphragm, the other half he uses a condom." As an alternative to both functional equality in marital life and the traditionally conservative hierarchy of male dominance, neoconservative feminists embrace a model of family relations based on a domestic partnership. Unlike tile individualistic orientation of radical feminists, for whom the family represents a voluntary union in which the members' rights are derived from their status as individuals, neo-conservarives regard the family as a corporate entity that confers certain rights and duties upon its members. In the neoconservative perspective a marital relationship is a partnership built o11 economic interdependence, mutual adjustment, and self-realization through a combination of domestic activity and paid employment. A couple decides how to divide their labor so both personal needs and family responsibilities are satisfied. This contrasts with the functional equality model of family relations, which prescribes a division of labor that encourages economic independence, personal autonomy, and self-realization through a career of paid employment, while domestic responsibilities are split evenly down the middle. The egalitarian assumption is that the particulars of a satisfying life are entirely the same for men and women. The traditional hierarchy of marital relations and the tenets of functional equality both subscribe to a more restrictive view of gender roles than the partnership model, which assumes that a productive and fulfilling division of labor in family life can take many forms.
GENDER EQUALITY / 29
In some families a wife or husband may want to stay home to manage chiidcare and domestic affairs for an extended period of time; some families may find it convenient that one partner's labor be divide between the household and part-time employment in the market. Some partners may choose for both to work parttime in paid employment and part-time at home; others may opt for both members to work full-time and employ alternative arrangements for caring and domestic functions.With regard to the family unit, the domestic partnership acknowledges that however members decide to allocate their labor, both are contributing to the management of a joint enterprise and deserve to share equally in the benefits that accrue over time, which has distinct implications for social policy. Each of these models of family relations--traditional hierarchy, functional equality, and domestic partnership--advances, and is reinforced by, different policy choices. The case of Social Security is instructive, since in the United States, as in many other Western nations, old-age pension policies are based on the traditional model, which no longer represents the
DEPENDENT
ALLOWANCE
Averaged Monthly Earnings
typical division of labor in family life. Among various proposals to reform Social Security benefits, the two major options lend impetus to alternative views of gender equality. Separate A c c o u n t s or Split Entitlements
Under social policies that support the traditional hierarchy in family relations, a married woman's right to old-age pension benefits is typically derived from her dependent status as a wife. The dependent's benefit remains a basic feature of most public pensions schemes in modern welfare states. Besides reinforcing the traditional view of the stay-at-home housewife dependent on her husband for financial support, this policy is often criticized as inequitable on several accounts. In the United States, the dependent's supplement equals 50 percent of the worker's retirement benefit. When working wives compare the size of pension benefits they would receive based on their contribution records with the amount of the dependent's supplement they are entitled to based on their husbands' earnings, they often gain little or nothing from their
AND BENEFIT
Benefit as Worker
INEQUITIES
Benefit as Spouse
Total Monthly Benefits
Jones Family: Husband Wife Combined
1,290 200 1,490
626 180 --
-133 --
626 313 939
Smith Family: Husband Wife Combined
1,290 -1,290
626 ---
-313 --
626 313 939
Green Family: Husband Wife Combined
645 645 1,290
368 368 --
----
368 368 736
Source: Social Security Administration calculations, adapted from Jane Ross and Melinda Upp, "The Treatment of Women in the U.S. Social Security System," in Treatment in Social Security: Studies and Research, No. 2Z Geneva: International Social Security Association, 1988.
30 / S O C I E T Y 9 M A Y / J U N E 1994
own contributions beyond what they are eligible for simply as dependents. Thus, with average lifetime monthly earnings of less than one-sixth her husband's, the employed wife in the Jones family is eligible for the same total monthly benefit as the unemployed wife in the Smith family, who received only the dependent's allowance. A wife's paycheck must account for at least one-third of the couple's lifetime indexed income before the retirement benefit based on her earnings is larger than that to which she is entitled as a dependent.
Proposals for separate pension accounts are part of a broader movement for institutional change.
However, even if the wife's earnings amount to close to half the couples joint income, the dependent's benefit may still discriminate against two-earner couples. Compare, for example, the total benefits received by the Smith and Green families illustrated in the Table. Both couples have the same total income, but for the Greens it represents the combined equal earnings of the husband and wife and for the Smith family it represents the total earnings of the husband. The one-earner couple's retirement benefit is higher than that of the two-earner couple. The dependent's benefit not only creates inequities among married couples with different patterns of work and income, it also provides the one-earner married couple a return on their Social Security contributions, which is 50 percent higher than that received by a single worker at the same income level. Besides these inequities, concerns have also been expressed that spousal allowances may encourage dependency and reduce the incentive for women to become economically self-sufficient. From the perspective of functional equality, wives are independent individuals who should earn their own income and accumulate their own pension benefits in separate accounts. The OECD advocates taking the individual as the unit of assessment for pension benefits because it not only promotes the principles of personal autonomy and economic independence, but "also helps to reject the notion that women's incomes are supplementary to and therefore dispensable portions of overall family income." The main difficulty with this approach derives from the fact that, as things stand, women earn considerably less than men. The reasons for this are well recognized having to do with delimited opportunities, bias in
employment, childbirth, and the fact that women continue to assume a disproportionate share of household duties and caring functions. Although the intent may be to advance functional equality, the establishment of separate pension accounts would result in highly unequal pension benefits for men and women. Thus, as the OECD Working Party on the Role of Women in the Economy explains, the movement to secure equality through a system of individual pension rights for women "will have to go hand in hand with measures in other policy areas to improve women's position in the labor market." These other measures aim to eliminate wage and employment discrimination against women, develop daycare and other public services that reduce the burdens of family maintenance, and stimulate greater participation by men in caring and domestic activities. In the drive toward functional equality, proposals for separate old-age pension accounts are tightly connected to a broader movement for institutional change. Instead of discouraging role differentiation between men and women, policies that foster domestic partnerships enable husbands and wives to divide up the chore of running the family enterprise according to their preferences while they share equally in its benefits. With regard to retirement income, these family benefits include all public and private pension assets and rights accumulated by both parties. Though not immediately liquid, pension entitlements represent major financial assets for most families. Applied to old-age pensions, the principles of domestic partnership thus translate into policies that dictate the splitting of benefit entitlements. In 1977, both Canada and Germany enacted reforms that involve splitting pension credits between spouses. Credit sharing in Germany was initiated within the framework of family legislation, whereas the Canadian scheme was introduced under Social Security law. Compared to the Canadian provisions, which entail splitting entitlements solely to public pensions, the German scheme is broader in scope, encompassing all entitlements acquired in both public and private pensions. Although spouses have legal rights to equal shares of their combined pension credits, in both countries the tangible division of old-age pension entitlements occurs only in cases of divorce. Of course, the actual sharing of a pension need not be contingent upon divorce. One can imagine a creditsharing arrangement based on a system of joint accounts that combine both partners' pension credits. An exemplary policy for old-age pension reform would include establishing joint accounts that cover all public
GENDER EQUALITY / 31
and private pension entitlements from which checks of the Economic Equity Act introduced in Congress in are issued in both parties' names on their retirement. 1992, the immediate prospects for this type of reform Pension benefits might also be allocated through sep- remain faint. The choice of individual versus shared arate checks for equal amounts issued to each party credits for retirement benefits could be finessed by from their joint account. Indeed, some would argue providing universal or means-tested public pensions that by conferring explicit recognition of their contri- that are disconnected from employment records. Ausbution to the family enterprise, separate checks pro- tralia, New Zealand, and several other countries have vide a psychological benefit to wives, which men who such uniform payment systems, which extend benefits are more accustomed to the breadwinner's role might to all elderly citizens. But these uniform pensions not entirely appreciate. provide only a minimum level of support, forming the Among the issues about credit sharing sometimes first tier of systems that are then topped by employraised is concern that it might dissuade people from ment-based public schemes and occupational penmarriage because the scheme embodies an egalitarian sions, which still must contend with the issue of approach to pension entitlements not fully accepted by separate accounts versus split-credit. society. But there is no indication that marriage rates in Germany and Canada have suffered in comparison Employment or Family Policy? to those in other Western countries where pensions Vying to replace the traditional hierarchy of male include dependence allowances or separate accounts. dominance, functional equality and domestic partnerGermany and Canada are so far the only countries ship are models of family relations which form differwith credit sharing arrangements for social security, ent templates for social policy. To .judge the relative but both the Netherlands and the United States have merits claimed for these alternative frameworks one expressed serious interest in the German and Canadian must assess how they affect social choice, economic schemes. The 1977 National Women's Conference independence, self-realization, and family stability. gave its support to the basic tenet of domestic partnerOn the issue of choice, the domestic partnership ship and called for federal and state legislatures to base model has the apparent advantage that it does not laws relating to property, inheritance, and domestic prescribe how families should organize their labor relations "on the principle that marriage is a partner- between household and market. Policies that encourship in which the contribution of each spouse is of age domestic partnerships allow couples who want a equal importance and value." In 1979, the Advisory relation of complete functional equality to organize Council on Social Security likewise recommended their family life along those lines without loss of social consideration of credit-sharing arrangements. benefits. Policies that support functional equality, by The concept was generally attractive, but efforts to contrast, prescribe a shift of women's labor from the reform Social Security stalled for various reasons, household to the market in order to benefit from, for including the fact that credit sharing meant a reduction example, separate Social Security accounts and statein benefits for the traditional one-earner family and subsidized child care services. divorced men. Substituting a credit-sharing scheme for Under policies associated with domestic partnerthe dependent's allowance would make Social Secu- ships, all couples are treated the same regardless of the rity benefits more equitable at the same time that it division of labor within their family units. However, would diminish their adequacy for certain groups. This some would say that this neutrality toward the division was a serious problem. If Social Security were rede- of labor in family life merely serves to perpetuate the signed along the lines of private insurance, with bene- traditional hierarchy of male dominance. That is, given fits directly related to contributions, one way to ensure "glass ceilings" and other sorts of employment disadequate support in old age would be to increase crimination, men's reluctance to share in household reliance on selective income maintenance schemes, chores, and the socialization of women into traditional such as the Supplementary Security Income program. caring roles, the so-called "choices" promoted by doBut many liberal interest groups and policy analysts mestic partnerships will inevitably result in traditional oppose switching from universal to selective provis- arrangements that leave women economically depenions, especially for the elderly. By the late 1980s the dent on men. In this view, the only way to guard against costs and conflicts attached to the various proposals reinforcing the traditional division of labor is through seemed to have eliminated earnings sharing reforms social policies that encourage women to join the labor from the political agenda. Although a proposal to split force and obliterate gender distinctions. As Susan Okin Social Security entitlements resurfaced under Title IV explains, "Any just and fair solution to women's and
32 / S O C I E T Y 9 M A Y / J U N E 1994
children's vulnerability must encourage and facilitate the equal sharing by men and women of paid and unpaid work, of productive and reproductive labor." Social policies should induce people to choose this mode of life, under which "a just future would be one without gender." There remains, of course, a question about the ultimate pliability of gender roles and the limits of resocialization. Conservative feminists would no doubt agree with Elizabeth Fox Genovese that "sex is a difference that enlightened social policies cannot be expected to wipe away entirely."
Autonomy of the paycheck heightens a woman's susceptibility to the vagaries of the marketplace.
Another reason why advocates of functional equality urge women to enter the labor force full-time involves a perception that, in Okin's words, "in terms of the quality of work, there are considerable disadvantages to the role of housewife." Despite the fact that full-time and part-time housewives work fewer hours per week (an average of 22 percent and 13 percent, respectively) than their employed husbands, Okin believes that women should prefer paid employment because much of household work is monotonous and unpleasant. The fact that relatively few men choose to be homemakers is evidence in support of this point. Contrary to these claims, however, various polls indicate that many married women would prefer not to work outside the home or not to work in full-time careers outside the home. In response to a nationwide Gallop survey in 1980, for example, 55 percent of the women who wanted to be married and have children did not wish to have a full-time job or career outside the home. In a similar vein, the 1989 Virginia Slims survey of 3,000 women revealed that if they were free to choose only 42 percent of the respondents would prefer to have jobs rather than to stay home and care for the family. Whether these surveys reflect true preferences or choices shaped by existing social constraints that women encounter in the labor market is a difficult question to answer. Critics of functional equality contend that respondents are expressing a natural desire to spend time at home with their children. Advocates of functional equality argue that the women's responses are influenced by social constraints. Both of these claims may have a degree of validity. The extent to
which many of the women surveyed are expressing an authentic preference for child care and domestic activities over the full range of paid work they are reasonably qualified to perform depends largely upon how much they gain in the way of self-realization and economic independence, which are often attributed to participation in the labor force. Unpaid family work may be described as shaping unformed personalities, nurturing relatives, and household management or, in more pedestrian terms, as caring, cooking, and cleaning. However it is portrayed, the variability of this work is relatively narrow in comparison to the range of jobs in the paid labor force, which include, of course, cooking, cleaning and caring. Participation in the labor force encompasses a vast array of activities from work that is low in status, boring, physically demanding, poorly rewarded, and dangerous to high status, exciting, physically light, well rewarded, and safe. One might expect those laboring on the more favorable end of this continuum, for example artists, writers, professors, lawyers, politicians, and media personalities, to choose full-time careers over housework activities. On the other side, given the choice of employment, for instance, as coal miners, factory workers, taxi drivers, sales people, clerks, guards, service workers, and mail carriers, one might prefer to engage in a combination of family work and paid employment part-time or as a secondary career (or not to work at all in the labor force if one can afford it). The view of participation in the labor force as the thoroughfare to self-realization idealizes paid employment as much as it impugns family work. As for economic independence, policies to achieve functional equality provide incentives for the development of families with two wage earners, which reduces women's financial dependence on men. However, the immediate independence gained through employment and contracting out of domestic work is paradoxical in a larger sense. As a paycheck enhances a wife's autonomy and economic independence within the family, it also heightens her susceptibility to the vagaries of the marketplace and the interpersonal constraints on wage labor. There are, of course, exceptions, typically successful artists and writers, tenured professors, law partners, media personalities, and those at the top of the pyramid in their business firms. But for most men and women in the labor force, freedom from economic dependence on relatives has its own price. On the job they are subject daily to the authority of supervisors, the normal discipline of the work environment, and the demands
GENDER EQUALITY / 33
of customers, all of which may be said to exercise their own form of oppression. In contracting out domestic work, the autonomy spouses may gain in relation to each other and the family unit is lost through increased social and economic dependence on the market economy for meeting many individual and family needs, which were previously satisfied through the division of family labor. If a major objective of social policy is to stabilize family life, policies designed to facilitate the domestic partnership model of family relations, it may be argued, will be more effective than those in support of functional equality. By prescribing an arrangement under which husbands and wives perform the same household tasks and divide their labor equally between housework and paid employment, functional equality strengthens the individual's ability to meet all social and economic needs independently. This reduces the degree of social and economic interdependence among family members, scraping away some of the basic adhesion of the family unit. What remains are emotional attachments which form necessary, though not always sufficient, ties that hold the unit together as it maneuvers the rough patches of life. While social and economic interdependence may not be the most desirable reasons for a family unit to stay together, they do thicken the glue. In any event, efforts to reinforce the stability of the family unit may involve sacrifices that do not always promote the individual happiness of its adult members. However one assesses the merits of domestic partnership versus functional equality, it is clear that with advances in women's rights and the changing division of domestic labor, the traditional hierarchical model of
male dominance no longer serves as an adequate guide for family-oriented social policy. As guides to policy, there are essential differences between these alternative models of family relations. The functional equality model rewards the shift of women's labor from the household to the market economy, which increases the labor supply as well as consumer demand for goods and services that were previously produced at home. At one level, it is basically an employment strategy serving the needs of the marketplace. At another level, it constitutes a blueprint for fundamental change of the structure of society. Emphasizing social choice more than structural change, the domestic partnership model focuses on the family unit and its members' mutual decisions on how best to allocate their labor between housework and paid employment. Rather than proposing a prescription for the wholesale transfer of household labor to the market, this model fosters a variety of paid and unpaid work that enables the family to meet the different needs of the life cycle stages and to accord with the partners' preferences. The domestic partnership lends resiliency to the family as it performs caretaking and other domestic functions while regulating the movement of labor from home to market.
Neil Gilbert is Chernin Professor of Social Welfare and Social Services at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Capitalism and the Welfare State; Clients and Constituents; and co-author (with Barbara Gilbert) of The Enabling State: Modem Welfare Capitalism in America; and (with Joel Duerr Berrick) With the Best of Intentions: The Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Movement.
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