More Than A Magazine, A Movement
It’s time to talk about women’s economics with attitude. It’s time to laugh at what is often absurd and call out what is dangerous. By focusing on voices not typically part of mainstream man-to-man economic discourse, Women Unscrewing Screwnomics will bring you news of hopeful and practical changes and celebrate an economy waged as life—not as war.
A trio of bank runs at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature and Silvergate Bank probably has you sitting up and paying attention, possibly biting your nails. Is this the beginning of another financial unraveling? How could a tech bank as important and big as SVB go broke? Wall Street goes by rules different from those applied to you and me.
Children bring us happiness and shared hope for our future. Yet, the surest route to U.S. poverty is simply being a child or a mother. Other developed nations on average contribute $14,000 a year for toddler care. The U.S. invests $500. That’s not only stingy. It’s stupid.
Taxing women and their wombs hurts all of us. It’s a better plan to tax those who can best afford it.
While the U.S. has created an omnibus Farm Bill for nearly a century, our mothers—especially when Native or women of color—have never had a say in where our government’s farm support money goes. Not until recently.
Now the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry is under the leadership of U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.). Her hearings will mark arguments on the horizon we’d all be wise to notice. A whole new generation of younger, female, Indigenous, Black, Latinx and queer farmers are contending with land prices out of reach, and old attitudes that minimize the healthier, more sustainable production they seek.
Since 2008, U.S. newspapers and media companies lost 60 percent of their newsroom jobs, diminishing our fourth estate’s ability to speak truth to power—”power” being in the U.S. another word for “money.”
The basic problem in many fields today, including politics, is the discounting of so-called feminine skills we all count on—but generally fail to acknowledge by anything more than annual flowers and apples. Both nurses and teachers of any gender are paid as little money as possible, and command too few resources for taking care of their tasks. Because they care, this matters.
Investing in weapons is like trusting in a house of cards: overdue for a universal collapse and destruction that seldom makes headlines. While the planet grows warmer and its climate more deadly, we’re adding to Earth’s refugee crisis by building and transporting more bloodshed.
Many think of search engines as a public service. They are not. Gender, race and ethnic analysis need to be at the heart of business tools and development of software and digital tools, along with regulation. Simple technical fixes can automate and elevate or surface women’s voices in online conversations, so women’s voices rank with men’s.
“Sadly, the fossils of historic gender segregation and the official exclusion of women from the public square have functioned as the new bones of digital technology and the public conversations they support.”
For centuries under common law, a daughter or a wife was the property of the family father or husband or, upon his death, the closest relative with a penis. Whatever was theirs was his, but most importantly the family patriarch oversaw her most valuable asset: her womb. In earliest medical thought, a womb was fertile ground in need of guarding and fences to make property rights clearer, and she to be plowed and planted with seed, quite literally semen.
We thought such laws and cultural metaphors were behind us. But now the cowboys of Texas have put a bounty on women’s wombs. The stakes are women’s civil rights as citizens, surely, but also financial ones.
Because we’ve been burning carbon for 200 years, we’ve sourced too much of it into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. The planet is warming, weather’s disruptive, and species are falling like dominoes. Dr. Sabine O’Hara, a distinguished economist, tells Ms. how restorative economics could make a difference as we rebuild.
Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill takes some important steps toward greater water safety, replacing lead pipes. He’ll have to overcome calls for budget cuts, but will he also confront our Pentagon and our water infrastructure’s reliance on unsafe or untested chemicals? Our children’s safety and our future—not corporate profit or government cost—must come first.