Unfinished Business (25 page)

When women's voices are heard, as Mendelberg and Karpowitz put it, they are doing “
more than naming a problem; they are including marginalized or disadvantaged groups in the conception of ‘us.' ” In other words, women actually represent a broader spectrum of citizens than men do. Equally important, “
when women have greater standing, men share the floor more equally, adopt the language of care for children more often, endorse more generous safety net support for the poor, are less likely to interrupt women in hostile ways, and provide more positive forms of support and encouragement to female speakers.”

The implications for American politics—and indeed politics all over the world—are stunning. If we can elect enough women—women who will of course have different personalities and political views themselves—we will stand a far better chance of representing who we really are as a nation. By adding enough women to the mix, we will not only add female voices and perspectives, we will make it possible for the
men
we elect to be their true selves, to speak and vote as fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers as well as warriors, competitors, winners. They will not always agree with each other, of course, just as the women we elect will not. That disagreement is what democracy is about. But they will all do a better job of representing the full spectrum of who we are as a people: citizens who both compete and care.

I
NVESTORS SHOULD BE PAYING AS
much attention to care trends as politicians. The demand for jobs in the care sector is growing as a function both of increased awareness of the difference that good care makes and of demographics. Remember that the ratio of retired adults to working-age adults will increase by almost half between today and 2030. Even by 2020,
one in six Americans will be over 65 and more than
one in three Americans will likely have eldercare responsibilities.

Americans also have strong views about how we want to age; almost 90 percent of us believe that we should not end up in institutions. But aging at home, with dignity, requires an entire industry of home healthcare, which is why
the demand for home careworkers is skyrocketing. But if we want higher-quality care, we will have to pay for it. Better wages, higher social value, and regulated working conditions are a good start. If we value the quality of our children's care, our parents' care, and indeed our own care someday, we must pay much more attention to the care economy.

A farsighted group of economists have been working on these issues for decades. The dynamics of the care economy are complicated by the definition of care itself, with its unavoidable intertwining of love and effort, paid and unpaid work. Reducing care to a pure commodity, like grain or steel or anything else we pay for, destroys its value. But pretending its emotional reward is so great that it should not be paid for at all, or paid for at a very low rate, ignores its value and reduces the quantity and quality of its supply. The economist Nancy Folbre and a group of her colleagues in sociology, political science, and demography have outlined an entire agenda for “
care policy and research.” More studies along these lines are still needed in order for us to build up
the intellectual and practical foundations of the care economy as a specialized version of the larger twenty-first-century service economy.

Interestingly, it is our military that already best understands the value of investing in the next generation of American children. Children's brains are shaped most in the first five years of their lives, so it's not an exaggeration to say that the care and education of our children from birth to age five is a national security issue for the United States that ranks alongside the Islamic State, terrorist networks generally, Russian expansionism, and China's rise.

The Pentagon walks the walk.
It offsets the cost of high-quality childcare for servicemen by subsidizing on-site daycare. Fees are based on family income. This assistance has been available to military families since 1989. Equally important,
the Pentagon pays teachers in its early care and education programs the same wages that other Defense Department employees make based on training, education, seniority, and experience. In other words, the part of the U.S. government most directly responsible for upholding national security recognizes the need to pay wages that can attract and retain college- and graduate-school-educated workers to provide care and early learning to the children of all employees from birth onward.

In the private sector, some farsighted entrepreneurs are already stepping into the breach of the care economy.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo, a Harvard MBA/JD who found herself caring for two small children and aging parents at the same time, founded
Care.com
because she was having trouble finding quality caregivers.
Care.com
is a marketplace for caregivers of children and the elderly; it matches a caregiver and an employer every two minutes. And it's not just helpful to families and caretakers alike, it's big business.
The company raised $91 million in an initial public
stock offering, and when it went public in January 2014,
Care.com
had a market value of over $550 million.

Bright Horizons is another company that successfully monetizes care. They provide a variety of services from high-quality early-education centers to emergency childcare to coordinating on-site daycare at various companies, hospitals, and universities. Bright Horizons is also publicly traded, and when it returned to the market in 2013,
it was valued at $1.4 billion.

Real estate developers are also starting to respond to the caregiving needs of American families. In California, for example, developers are creating
townhouses geared toward multigenerational families. These townhouses include bathrooms and bedrooms on the ground floor so seniors don't have to use the stairs and then traditional nuclear family layouts on the upper floors. That way, the “sandwich generation” can take care of their parents, and the grandparents can help watch their grandchildren.

Seniors are also banding together so that they can grow old with their friends,
Golden Girls
style. It's called “co-housing,” and a housing consultant told
The New York Times
that it will be especially appealing to boomers. The “
social consciousness of the 1960's can get re-expressed” through communal living, she predicted. I can personally testify to the pleasure of these arrangements; I share an apartment in Washington two days a week with a dear friend whom I have known since college. She moved from her home base in New York to serve in government; her husband comes down regularly. It's just like having a college roommate again, complete with visits from the boyfriend!

Outside large-scale caregiving companies and real estate developers is a growing army of individual caregivers. Ai-jen Poo's National Domestic Workers Alliance joined with twenty other organizations to create
the Caring Across Generations movement. By focusing on changing U.S. demographics, particularly
around aging, and pioneering innovations in home- and community-based caregiving, the movement seeks “to transform the way we care in this country.”

Caregivers for adults with dementia—Alzheimer's disease and other forms—face special challenges. But as with children, education and specialized training can make a substantial difference both to the individuals being cared for and the caregivers. More broadly,
the Family Caregiver Alliance is a community-based nonprofit organization that addresses the needs of the families and friends providing unpaid, long-term care for their loved ones at home.

Look also for an explosion of jobs based on providing different types of specialized care. We have always had doctors and nurses; now we have physician's assistants of many different kinds and nurse-practitioners with multiple specializations. And therapists of every description for body and mind are proliferating: for balance, posture, gait, stress, and recovery from challenges ranging from joint replacements to stroke. These are not jobs that people take when they cannot get into “real careers.” They are jobs that require medical knowledge and skills as well as the ability to build a meaningful set of relationships with clients; they are essential to allowing all of us—from youngest to oldest—to lead better lives.

Beyond the market for high-quality paid care is a broader approach to thinking about our entire economy in a way that takes account of the value of care. How should we measure the social capital in our relationships and the human capital that we build through nurture and care?
The Caring Economy Campaign is developing economic indicators that track social wealth alongside traditional measures of money and property. At the very least, we should be able to measure the economic value of care for children and adults. After all, the entire idea of the gross domestic product
is a human construct; we can measure anything we think is important and seek to increase.

I
N THE FOREIGN POLICY WORLD
, and the political world generally, entire libraries have been written about American exceptionalism. As a nation, we have thought ourselves to be different from other nations from our very earliest days. In 1630, John Winthrop, who would become governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote, “We must consider that we shall be as
a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” We were to be the shining example of people who could govern themselves, who could establish freedom of worship and expression, who could explore and develop what was, to us and to our fellow Europeans, “the new world.”

In the realm of care, the United States is largely exceptional for what it is
not
doing. We are alone among all advanced industrial countries (and indeed virtually among all countries) in not mandating paid maternity leave; many of our peer countries in Western Europe, by contrast, provide quite generous maternity and paternity leave.
Britain, for example, even under austerity, provides up to a year of leave with at least some pay.

Beyond the early weeks and months of life,
other industrialized countries offer an astonishing array of facilities and services to support parents and caregivers more generally, from daycare for children to adult care for the disabled, the senescent, and the dying. Former Norwegian minister of children and family Valgard Haugland sums up his country's philosophy: “
We have decided that raising a child is real work, and that this work provides
value for the whole society.” It is only fair, then, “that the society as a whole should pay for this valuable service.”

These countries are already reaping the benefits, in terms of both competitiveness and social mobility. A decade ago, Andy, who has long studied European politics, told me that it was easier to move up from humble origins into the middle class in Europe than in the United States. I just couldn't believe it. It seemed preposterous; our history is replete with examples of immigrants fleeing hidebound class structures and religious prejudice to make it in America.

Today, though, it's impossible to deny. Multiple economic studies from a range of universities, think tanks, and international organizations have concluded that
an immigrant to Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, or Germany has a better chance of improving his or her lot than in the United States. Poor children in these countries have almost double the chance of climbing out of poverty as they do in the United States. To be sure, some of these countries are smaller and more homogeneous than America. But
Canada, for instance, has a higher percentage of foreign-born citizens than the United States does, yet Canadians are twice as likely to move up the social and economic ladder as Americans are. And though multiple factors are correlated with social mobility—segregation, income inequality, schools, and family structure—the ability of families, supported by communities, to
maintain a stable and caring environment for children plays a very big part.

We don't have to do exactly what other countries do. In fact, some evidence suggests that the ultra-generous maternity leaves in Europe can actually hurt ambitious women. Claire Cain Miller points out in
The New York Times
that
women in Europe are half as likely as men to be managers, while women in the United
States are equally likely to be managers. This disparity is due to a combination of
unintended consequences of long maternity leaves: women may put the brakes on their ambitions, and employers may be reluctant to put women of childbearing age in key positions because they fear they will be absent too much.

But here is what we
can
do. We can take our founding credo—“All men are created equal”—and understand it to mean that men and women are equal and that the work that was once divided between men and women—earning income and providing care—is equally necessary and equally valuable. We can also come to appreciate the many ways in which a caring society is a more equal society.

Psychologist Carol Gilligan points out that we hear children yelling “
You don't care!” just as much as “That's not fair!” “You don't care” reflects the fear of abandonment that all vulnerable and dependent people fear—young, old, sick, or disabled. “That's not fair” reflects the fear that those who have power will abuse it, will make or break the rules in favor of themselves.

Think about the implication of this point. It means that not being cared for is just as much a marker of inequality as being discriminated against. Both conditions are ways that those with power can take advantage of those without power—the young, the old, the sick, the disabled, the different, the structurally disadvantaged. “
That's not fair” can mean “You don't see me or hear me; you don't give me equal rights or regard.” “You don't care” can mean “You have abandoned me in my time of need and vulnerability, when I could not assert my equality with my fellow citizens.”

As Americans, we should take pride in defining ourselves as citizens who care. Who care about our country and care about one another. Who remember that our past was not just a saga of rugged individuals setting out to conquer the land of opportunity,
but also of barn raisings, quilting bees, grazing commons, and one-room schoolhouses. Who understand that we can only compete as a nation if we remember to care.