[Mb-civic] A blind eye to gender bias - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

A blind eye to gender bias

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist  |  October 12, 2005

FIRST LADY Laura Bush yesterday praised Supreme Court nominee Harriet 
Miers by saying: ''I know Harriet well. I know how accomplished she is. 
I know how many times she's broken the glass ceiling herself."

Bush made that comment in the context of being asked on NBC whether she 
detected sexism in the criticism of Miers's qualifications. ''That's 
possible. I think that's possible," Bush said. ''I think she is so 
accomplished. I think people are not looking at her accomplishments."

She is no doubt sincere in her singular defense of Miers. It also ironic 
that she invoked the glass ceiling while her husband's administration 
has quietly stopped collecting detailed information on women in the 
workforce.

In August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics discontinued its women worker 
employment series in the current employment statistics payroll survey. 
The women worker employment series ensured the most detailed monthly 
snapshots and long-term trends on the number of women workers in 
individual industries.

The bureau said it discontinued the series because it ''imposed a 
significant reporting burden" to ask 160,000 businesses representing 
about 400,000 individual worksites to note gender in their monthly 
reporting of employment, hours, and earnings of their workers. ''In an 
increasingly difficult data-collection environment," the bureau says on 
its website, ''survey response burden is a crucial factor in survey design."

The bureau also claimed the women workers series was ''little used." The 
agency said that ''extensive" data on women in the workplace will still 
be available in the Current Population Study, the monthly survey of 
60,000 households.

Critics of the bureau's action say there is little comparison between a 
survey of 60,000 households and a survey of 400,000 worksites, 
especially since there is no other reliable information on hours and pay 
on a gender basis. Vicky Lovell, study director for the Institute for 
Women's Policy Research, a Washington think tank that focuses on the 
condition of women in the workplace, said: ''In the current employment 
environment, where there's a lot of change, with rapidly fading 
industries and rapidly emerging industries, we need to know where women 
or men are concentrated to know if we need to develop certain policies. 
We need to know if economic growth or decline is being shared. Are men 
and women gaining or losing jobs at the same rate? There is plenty of 
research to show that men and women are affected differently in 
downturns and expansions in the public and private sector."

Lovell attended a July meeting with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to 
argue for the continuation of the gender data collection. ''The BLS 
produced no analysis to us to prove that collecting gender information 
from actual workplaces was a burden. They offered no evidence."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/12/a_blind_eye_to_gender_bias/
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