NEWS: Give 'Til It Hurts?

CULTURE: Give 'Til It Hurts?

According to a new study (.pdf) by the Women's Campaign Foundation, women give only 25% of the money raised by Political Action Committees (PACs) and candidates. You can see a brief blurb summarizing the results over at Salon's Broadsheet if you don't want to download it.



Now, I would be curious to see these results compared to studies that show that women spend more of their money on children and family needs than men do -- see for instance this news article, which focuses on a UN finding about women's economic inequality worldwide -- and whether this holds true in the US, as I suspect it does. I'm also curious about what percentage of their incomes women give to PACs and political candidates; there's still a wage gap, after all, and you'd have to correlate those statistics with statistics about single moms for a start. Then maybe you'd want to do some research into how women and men view the ways m/f couples with kids allot mom's and dad's respective incomes -- does "her" money pay for daycare and summer camp and so forth, while "his" money goes towards things like housing and political contributions? Because even though in theory it's all the same pool, in practice I think a lot of couples don't view it that way.



Nonetheless, it's a sobering study, especially if you're at all concerned about the political power of fundamentalist anti-feminists, or the attacks on reproductive rights in the US. Equally so if you're inclined, as some very important men are to think that concerns about gender equity are themselves sexist or frivolous. I'd like to challenge guys who think that way to dedicate all their political giving to women candidates this year, and while they're at it, why not make a point of reading only women authors, women's blogs, and feminist news sources? Or at least making sure that that's half of what you're reading -- just in case you're not *quite* as gender-blind as you'd like to think you are?



And of course, at the same time, we chicks ought to take up the implicit challenge to give more fucking money, already, to women candidates -- even if it's only $20 or so a pop. How much do you pay a month to read this site, for instance?



If there are no women candidates running for office in your local or state races, try giving to Emily's List or the Women's Campaign Forum or NOW PACs. Or google to see if your state political party (which oughta be the Dems, natch) has a women's PAC.



Bitch_PhD hereby pledges to send $300 to various women candidates and/or women's PACs this year. Hopefully more.

interesting -- and nobody has a louder voice than cash...

Is there a dearth of research on this? Serious question -- I really don't know. I'd be sort of surprised if no-one had had a look at it.

I can tell you as a single data point (and we all know that the singular of "data" is "anecdote") that in our household, my girlfriend and I pool it all. And she has more direct control of the purse strings than I do.

I don't know that there's much solid research on this. All I know is a lot of anecdotal crap about women saying that they might as well not work b/c "their" income only goes to pay for daycare, so it's a wash. Also that this argument was used in bitching about the "marriage penalty" as a political issue, and it seriously chapped my hide.

Women aren't nearly as interested in politics as men. There are exceptions and activists but on the whole, and MANY studies have shown this, women aren't as interested until later in life say--mid 40's and above. I'm not being sexist. I was in marketing and adverising for a long time and every year reports said the same thing. Granted, politics these days alienates both sexes with rampant corruption and just plain stupid decisions.

Right. But that doesn't tell us whether the income is fungible or not, which is your issue.

Hypothetically, the household income in a totally pooled setting (like mine) might only rise enough when she enters the workforce to cover the costs of daycare, which would enable her to say "My income barely covers the daycare" -- this doesn't speak to how household incomes are partitioned (or not) according to who earns them, only that the net effect is basically zero.

I mean anecdotally, I could imagine m/f/ partnerships/households where the "husband" doles out money according to his rules, ones where the "wife" controls what gets spent on what, and gives hubby some spending money for his poker game, and others where it's pooled, or where the decision-making about allocation is based on mutual agreement.

More data here would be interesting to have, but hard to collect in a way that sheds a lot of light. (That's pretty much inevitable.) Even if a household reports that the wife's income is directly spent on daycare, that in and of itself tells us nothing about the actual decision-making process that led to that.

it seems to me that the sheer volume of money coming from institutions and wealthy old men would make it hard to guess how family budgeting factors into the whole equation. i think your average household is a drop in the campaign bucket compared to Big Money. in order for that 25% figure to be useful in that sense, 100% of campaign contributions would have to come from situations that fit the profile you're trying to examine.

also, why give money to "female candidates" instead of just the candidate you believe in? that sounds dangerously like the feminist-acting-against-true-equality backswing.

I guess there's not a great way to quantify "interest" in politics, but in fact, according to a report by the Rutgers' Center for American Women and Politics (The Gender Gap and the 2004 Women's Vote, Setting the Record Straight) women vote in higher numbers than men and have done so in every national election since 1964. In 2000, 7.8 million more women voted than men did.

In addition, women have voted at higher RATES than men since 1980. In 2000, 56.2% of registered women voters went to the polls, compared to 53.1% of men voters.

SOURCE (it's a PDF)

That said, I personally would never give money to/vote for a female candidate just because we both have ovaries. All things being equal, maybe I would favor a female candidate over an identical male candidate, but all things are NEVER equal, so I tend to leave gender out of the equation.

I dunno how economists feel about survey data - but I don't see why we just couldn't survey people on who makes financial decisions in the home? I imagine a pretty nice little scale from -1 (the husband makes all the choices) to 0 (equal decision making) to +1 (the woman makes most of the decisions). I guess that raises some questions for non-hetero situations - but I could imagine follow up questions that would get around some of that and also act as corroborating evidence (is financial decision making equal among parters or is decision making weighted based on how much each person earns; do you control your own finances or are they pooled etc). I'd be pretty satisfied with data like that for a first cut. But I'm a lazy political scientist.

Gimme a break. I addressed this issue SPECIFICALLY in the post.

I think the problem with this is obvious: people are notorious for false self-reporting. And when you put gender in the mix, it's even worse; there are all sorts of problems with perceptions that equality for women is "against true equality" or that people "leave gender out of the question" when it's very clear by looking across populations that that's bunk.

I think to do it right you'd have to focus not on who 'controls' spending, but on how people talk about their incomes, why they work, and so on.

I agree that's one of the big potential problems with this approach.

That being said, for this kind of broad question/issue, some kind of targetted "Likert scale" kind of questioning seems the way to go. But wording it to tease out the kind of stuff you're interested in is the real challenge.

Another single data-point for contrast is a good friend of my gf's. She semi-recently met a guy, moved cities to be near him, but they lived separately for a while. (He was divorced, had a young daughter.) They've recently moved in together, but they still do all their finances separately.

Whereas the moment I moved in with TheFuckOffGirl, whooooooosh! All male autonomy gone.

actually you didn't. you addressed a similar idea, but you still advocated acting based on gender instead of skill or charisma and in typical Bitch fashion, you wrapped it in a pointlessly extreme example.

but whatever, fine, you're right. i'd rather go to bed than put any real effort into this reply.

Not really. In order for that to be true, you'd need to give a good reason to do so. Voting and supporting somebody solely because they're a woman is no better than refusing to vote for them because they're a woman.

There is an art and science to doing a survey that correctly assesses the situation. Gallop polls and other reputable ones spend a lot of effort to perform a good survey. When I was in school I know that there were whole classes on research methods in political science. I don't know about this survey but if its done properly then its interesting. If it wasn't done properly then why even care?

BZZT. Illogic alert. Given that at the moment women are 16% of the elected members of the U.S. Congress, and that no woman has ever served as President or VP, clearly voting for women on the basis of gender is actually *not* analogous to refusing to do so.

So voting for Elizabeth Dole, for example, to up the number of women in congress is a good idea?

Also, if I'm not mistaken, doesn't Obama have a better record, abortion-wise and on other women's issues, than Hillary?

would it be misogynist to suggest that it's true- work inequality still exists and yes women do make less than men?
. . .

wait, what? voting based on gender does not equal voting based on gender?

supporting a shitty female candidate instead of a good male one simply because she's female is just as wrongheaded as supporting a shitty male candidate instead of a good female one simply because he's male. there is a real and valid problem of women being underrepresented in government, but the idea that attacking the symptom of people not voting for women will cure the disease of inequality is silly.

getting more women into government isn't, in itself, a good thing. getting more competent, qualified women into government and not caring that they're women because being able to do their jobs is what matters should be the goal here.

If by "addressed" you're referring to the part where you infer that that line of thinking is ignorant, yes, you've addressed it. Donating to women's campaigns simply BECAUSE they're women IS sexist. The definition of sexist is prejudice or discrimination based on sex. Explain to me how refusing to give to a male's campaign isn't sexist.

No, he doesn't. Hillary Clinton's record on choice issues and other classically-defined "women's issues" is pretty great (a 100% rating five years running from NARAL, leading the effort to get Plan B available over the counter, her health care work and getting access to good medical care for low-income women, etc.). I'm not denigrating Obama's record, but it's certainly not better than Clinton's.

Sen. Clinton has also been a lot more consistent and firm in her public support of choice rights and a lot less willing to play to people's desire to make moral judgments on abortion-havers than Obama has been, in my opinion.

Anyway, that's probably more for another thread, another time.

By definition if you specifically give money to one candidate over another because the first candidate is female, you are not being "gender-blind."

Do you think you deserve something specifically because you have breasts and a vagina?

The vast majority of political donors don't specifically give money to candidates with penises, they give money to candidates that advance their particular agenda. Far more candidates are men. What the hell do you expect?

Similarly, statistics show that fewer women pursue careers in math, engineering, and many of the sciences. Is that due to an inability to do those things? No. Is it possible that through a mixture of culture and genetic reasons they are simply less inclined to be interested? Quite possibly. And what's wrong with that?

If we found out that blonde people are statistically 95% less likely to go into agriculture, is that a national crisis? Do we need to start after school programs to get more blonde-haired folks to become farmers? Or should we just accept the more logical and reasonable conclusion that it's beyond retarded to expect that the proportions of every career field and general occupation should reflect the demographics of our overall population.

Our goal should be the growth and advancement of ALL people, and focus should be placed on the effective instruction and training of ALL children, regardless of race, gender, or economic background, to succeed in life. To single out one group over the others as being more "deserving" of different demographics destroys any possibility of being gender-blind. It's no different than picking teams in gym class and having the coach make sure that both teams have the same amount of girls. What do you think that tells kids?

Enough with your damn pity party. Men aren't the source of your problems.