The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has released a report into gender inequality.  Gender equality: What matters to Australian women and men is the result of a nationwide “listening tour” and while it reveals some depressing data, it also shows that inequality is something that men also feel they suffer, too.

It doesn’t make for very pleasant reading. First, the economic stats for women:

• half of all women aged 45 to 59 have $8,000 or less in their superannuation funds, compared to $31,000 for men. [nb: superannuation funds are retirement funds. In Australia, employers are obligated to contribute 9.5% of an employee’s gross salary to a retirement fund]
• Currently, the average superannuation payout for women is a third of the payout for men - $37,000 compared with $110,000.
• In Australia, women working full-time today earn 16 per cent less than men.

Ouch.

Interestingly enough, when it comes to work/life balance, women and men both feel that the working culture of Australia forces unwelcome choices because of gender perception. While Australia is only one of two coutnries in the OECD not to have a paid maternity scheme (marching in lockstep with the US. Axis of Freedom my a$$.), there are arrangements for unpaid maternity leave. There are no legal allowances for paternity leave. Men told the HREOC that they feel they can’t access flexible working hours without significant career damage.

Since our trusted servants in Washington are expected to pass a $25 billion bailout, I thought it timely to share my own personal story regarding this housing mess.  My family is relocating 1200 miles away next week.  We’re very excited to be starting a new stage in our lives.  It’s the first time we’ll have two professional incomes,  the first time at least one of us is not in school full time, and the first time we’ll be able to save for a real vacation.  In a world where the economy is killing many of our family and friends, we’re feeling quite fortunate to have been living beneath our means for so long and we are now able to realize the benefits.  But as we pack our things into boxes and help our son adjust to the changes, we are dealing with the realization that we are homeless.  That’s right; we have no place to go when we get there.

Sometimes when single parents travel, it can be an isolating experience. The children tend to meet other children on the road, but their parents are left babysitting and with no one to talk to.

Newsweek recently profiled some organizations that cater to single parents by offering childcare and even discounts. Through Single Parent Travel, for example, Lisa Gentile, who was interviewed by the magazine, went on an all-inclusive trip with two dozen other single-parent families.

Lisa and (daughter) Claudia spent most days chatting and playing on the beach with other families, then meeting up again at night for dinner, a stroll or a variety show. They befriended a mother-daughter pair from their home state and have stayed in touch ever since. “The best part is the company,” says Gentile. “You’re meeting people you have something in common with, and their reason for being there is the same as yours.”

...A number of companies are taking steps to make single parents feel more welcome. Breezes resorts (breezes.com) in Curaçao and the Dominican Republic waive their single supplement from May through late December for one adult traveling with kids, and some Beaches resorts (beaches.com) offer single parent weeks, with discounts and activities that allow families to socialize with one another. In July, the Offshore Sailing School in Ft. Myers Beach, Fla., is hosting a weeklong class with special rates for single adults with kids (offshore-sailing.com; $2,893 for one parent and one child, July 13–18). For general advice, singleparenttravel.net publishes a monthly newsletter that includes travel specials and destination ideas. Gentile’s main tip is to just go for it. “You deserve a vacation and to have a good time with your child,” she says. “Don’t worry about what anyone else is thinking.”

Sounds good. How do you single moms decompress on the holiday? How do you decompress period?

Thank you all for your outpouring of support for our dear Round Peg In A Square Hole. I heard from her husband Pablo last night and his brother-in-law was undergoing surgery as his back was broken in at least six places from the fall. He thanked Melinda for the attorney lead and all the support shown here.

I will take food to them tonight, make sure to get in touch with local MTers who have offered to do the same and make sure to keep you in the loop. Please continue to keep this family in your thoughts and prayers.

Missing Children: Remember that case in Portugal, in which a four-year-old girl on vacation with her parents just disappeared? Police are suspending their investigation into the disappearance of 4-year-old Madeleine McCann, at least until new evidence is presented, according to the Associated Press.

The parents and a third suspect will not be charged.

In related news, the Washington Post ran a multi-part series on the Chandra Levy case. She was the D.C. intern from Modesto, California, who had gone missing eight years ago and was found murdered in a D.C. park. The series shared the story of how Levy's parents were able to keep their daughter's case in the news, partly because of the salacious news around her affair with Congressman Gary Condit.

More on New Yorker Cover of Obamas: The media trade publication, MinOnline, had a write-up of the public fallout from the New Yorker cover cartoon of the Obamas satirically portrayed as Muslim extremists. New Yorker editor David Remnick insisted to Charlie Rose that the American people are smart enough to recognize satire when they see it.

With all due respect to him and others who have defended the New Yorker, including apparently Jon Stewart, I have traveled widely this summer and run across family members, acquaintances and strangers who believe that Obama is a Muslim or is anti-American and did not say the Pledge of Allegiance. They looked at me as if I had three heads when I set the record straight and assured them that there are no pastors in Islam. "Obama's pastor is REVEREND Wright, not MULLAH Wright," I'd tell them.

God help us.

We have been so busy with family building, that we have yet to arrange for wills and guardianship of our children in the event of our deaths.  I know it's far from a cheery topic, but it's past time to make sure these things are in place.  The main issue is, we have 4 kids.  Our families are older and not an appropriate choice, and our friends all have intentionally small families with just one or two kids.  I can't imagine asking people who planned to have 1 or 2 kids (and think we're nuts for having 4) to suddenly have 5 or 6 kids in their family, even if they would say yes.  But we can't ask my 65 year old parents or dh's 80 year old parents to raise 9,5,2 and 1 year olds for the next 20 years.  

(more after the jump)

Ah yeah. Berkeley Parents Network is back! As are cranky letters by cranky parents ratting each other out:

Chore trouble. I am a SAHD and grad student. She works and is a grad student. She has rejected all my plans for division of chores, my request that we do dishes together, and my request that we pick up the floor for five minutes together. When pressed, she finally came up with her own plan, but has consistently failed to follow through with what she says she will do. The bar has been lowered and lowered, so that now she has committed to doing one chore a day, and she has a hard time following through with that. She asked me if I wanted her to prioritize doing chores over spending quality time with her, and I said, ''Yes!'' She was surprised, and I explained (as I have countless times in the past) that it's hard for me to feel loving towards her when: I feel like we don't help each other AND I can't count on her to do what she says she's going to do. From my perspective, it would be pretty easy to me feel like we are in an equal partnership, but she refuses to meet me halfway here. (Incidentally, I don't know why she can spend two hours watching a movie with me, but refuses to spend five minutes with me picking up toys.)

Am I nuts? Is it unrealistic to expect that my wife does SOMETHING to help around the house? She says she's too busy, or too tired... but dangit, I'm busy and tired, too! Is there any hope for this situation? Thanks!

Reliving my parents' problems

It's always nice to see a man -- and not just mom -- gripe about household chores. That's progress!

But it led me to re-visit and reconsider the division of labor in my own household. So far, so good. I do the food shopping and cooking. We both do dishes and laundry, although lately, none of us has been picking up the kids' room and it is a mess. Then again, this does not bother us. We figure we will get the house back when the kids are older.

What about you? How is domestic labor divided up in your home?

Ok, so I've written about the very unfriendly practices designed to mommy-track women in academia before. (See: Feeling like a career failure after baby...). However, one year later and still feeling the sting, I found an article in the NYT (Poor Economy Slams Brakes on Women's Workplace Progress) that confirms that this phenomenon of involuntary mommy-tracking extends beyond academia and into all types of work environments.  The article points out that many women are just thinking about giving up.

The blogosphere is abuzz with Olympic champion Marion Jones's request for a presidential pardon. Jones, who won three gold and two bronze medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, is serving an eight month sentence in Ft. Worth for lying to federal investigators about using performance-enhancing drugs and a check-fraud scheme.

From Fox Sports:

After frequently denying that she ever used performance-enhancing drugs, Jones admitted last October she had lied to federal investigators in November 2003. Jones also admitted lying about her knowledge of the involvement of Tim Montgomery, the father of her older son and a former 100-meter world-record holder, in a scheme to cash millions of dollars worth of stolen or forged checks.

Jones was sentenced in January to six months in prison and 400 hours of community service in each of the two years following her release. She was sentenced to six months on the steroids case and two months on the check-fraud case, but was permitted to serve those sentences concurrently.

The judge in Jones' case said the check-fraud scheme was a major crime, and the wide use of steroids "affects the integrity of athletic competition."

She has been in jail since March. As many in the Fox thread pointed out, she may have already served her term by the time the Justice Department gets to her application.

But I cringed to learn that Jones has two sons, a four-year-old and six-month-old. Not surprisingly, she is desperate to see them and the Celebrity Baby blog had a lengthy conversation about what she told her four-year-old and what it must have been like for the baby not see his mother. My heart breaks for her family.

Then again, this is no different than the many convicted mothers who are kept from their children and do not have Jones's name to remain in the press. Why oh why would a woman of Jones's talents be involved in a check-fraud scheme? I. don't. get. it.

What do you think? Should Jones receive a pardon or have her sentence commuted?

I could relate to the fears and uncertainty felt by the parents in this MSNBC article.

Mothers-to-be are receiving up to dozens of pamphlets urging them to bank their baby's cord blood. The cord blood contains stem cells, which are uniquely suited to the child and can help treat cancer and other childhood diseases.

But as MSNBC health writer JoNel Aleccia pointed out, the pamphleteers are private companies not upfront about the costs and low chances that a family will actually use the cord blood. Also, many hospitals are not equipped to handle donations for the public -- another option for families.

The vast majority of those parents — about 97 percent — will do nothing, and the umbilical cord and the cells it contains will be discarded as medical waste.

The tiny fraction that remain, however, will be caught in the sharp debate between private cord blood firms vying to cash in on an estimated $1 billion industry and public registries trying to boost diverse donations to fuel research and save lives in the community at large....

Overall, the chance that a publicly stored unit of cord blood will ever be used is about 650 times higher than the odds that a privately banked unit will ever be needed, (Dr. Dennis) Confer added....

The American Academy of Pediatrics last year urged parents to privately bank their babies’ blood only if they had an older child with cancer or a genetic disease that could benefit from a sibling’s donation. Otherwise, parents should donate to public banks, the panel said.

Because no one in our families had had the diseases listed on the cord blood registry, we opted against privately banking Eli's cord blood. We offered to donate it, but the hospital I delivered at was not equipped to take it. My midwife, however, assured me it was in the making, which is such a good idea IMHO.

I came across a thought-provoking and alarming diary on Daily Kos this morning, Infant mortality, race, and myths, comparing CDC statistics for American infant mortality between white and black babies, controlled for the education status of the mother:

                Infant mortality rates (deaths per 1000 live births)
Maternal years of education          White       Black
    0-8                                         6.3           13.4
    9-11                                        8.0           14.6
     12                                         6.1           13.2
   13-15                                        4.8           11.7
     16+                                        3.8           10.6

Certainly I realized that poorer babies were at greater risk for death, and the reasons seem mostly obvious: less access to health care, poorer nutrition, more pollution, more stress, fewer resources. But to see such a high infant death rate even for highly educated black women is heartbreaking.

I couldn't locate the study, but I remember, in the dusty corners of my mind, someone correlating infant mortality statistics to the previous generation - ie, that you could correlate infant health factors with socioeconomic status of their grandparents when the parents were born. Perhaps this is what is happening here. I don't know, but I hope someone is working on some solutions.

Uncle Bobby's Wedding, the children's book about a young guinea pig named Chloe and her uncle who marries his boyfriend, has received its first challenge.

A patron at Douglas County Libraries in Colorado asked that the book either be removed from the shelves, placed in a special area, or labeled “some material may be inappropriate for young children.”

Author Sarah Brannen alerted me to this via e-mail, saying "This is the first concrete evidence I have of the book being challenged." She also pointed me to the blog of James LaRue, the Libraries' director. His thoughtful and well-reasoned response to the patron is worth reading in full. It ends:

Finally, then, I conclude that “Uncle Bobby's Wedding” is a children's book, appropriately categorized and shelved in our children's picture book area. I fully appreciate that you, and some of your friends, strongly disagree with its viewpoint. But if the library is doing its job, there are lots of books in our collection that people won't agree with; there are certainly many that I object to. Library collections don't imply endorsement; they imply access to the many different ideas of our culture, which is precisely our purpose in public life.

Bravo.

This is likely the first of many challenges to the book. The ultra-right already had its eye on it, as evidenced by Brent Bozell III's shameless plagiarism of my review of the work. At least other librarians will have LaRue's letter as a starting point. Might be a good idea for all of us to print it out and keep ready to bring over to our local libraries, should the need arise.

(Crossposted at Mombian.)

Children are coming out at a younger age that gay straight alliance clubs are popping up in even middle schools, according to a story in the Washington Post.

But as the Post also pointed out, laws and protections against harassment of gays and lesbians have yet to catch up.

In recent years, 110 Gay Straight Alliance clubs, which are common in high schools nationwide, have sprouted in middle schools, including nine in Maryland and Virginia. Kevin Jennings, the founder of the first club, said he "never anticipated" they would also form in middle grades. His organization, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, is creating age-appropriate pamphlets to respond to the trend.

This year, students in 1,046 middle schools took part in the Day of Silence, a protest against LGBT intolerance, organizers said, double the participation level of the previous year....

While children are coming out younger, studies show that they are doing so in schools where staff members have received little training in the area, where their fellow students use such language as "That's so gay" every day to express dislike, and where anti-bullying policies often don't exist or don't specifically protect students on the basis of sexual orientation.

In May, Maryland became the 11th state to enact a law to protect schoolchildren from being bullied because of sexual orientation. The District has had such a law since 1973; Virginia does not have one.

But California's anti-bullying policy, which is among only a handful to cite gender identity in addition to sexual orientation, could not stop what happened in February to the openly gay eighth-grader in a computer class in Oxnard.

Lawrence "Larry" King was in that class when he was fatally shot twice in the head....Larry didn't dress like other boys. He wore purple eye shadow and high-heeled boots. The 14-year-old classmate he had considered a possible valentine is charged with his death.

On the one hand, openly gay students are not suffering the alienation their closeted forebears did. But on the other hand, their parents, including at least one mother quoted in the Post story, worry that their children will become the target of ridicule and bullying.

Have any of your children come out? What were or are their experiences in school?