I’ve got a few half formed post ideas buzzing around my head, but the weekend’s gone by without a post, so here’s a meme (thanks for the tag third cat):

You’ve all done it by now, but here’s my answers:

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Hard to believe that 1998 really is 10 years ago. I was commuting every week or two to Wellington, NZ for work. Thinking about whether I wanted to move to Japan without Mr Penguin for 6-12 months (since I hardly saw him anyway!). Getting used to being in my 30s and the doubling in frequency of the question, “so when are you going to have children?”. Perfecting my answers (my favourite one is still, “my garden died - why do you want me to have children?”)

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

Chocolate, cherries, plain chips (crisps to you), sashimi, juicy nectarines

Actually my perfect world has less to do with weight gaining than the free availability of stone fruit and sashimi at any time of the day or night. 

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

Chocolate, biscuits that happen to be lying around, apples, cheese and sultanas.

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Give up my job. Try and decide whether its a feminist or a green charity that deserves my time and money most. Spend a year or two travelling the world while I decide. Give a good chunk of money to family and friends.

Five jobs that I have had:

Amusement park ride operator, envelope stuffer in the beginnings of Macquarie bank (before it was the Millionaire’s factory), gymnastics coach (only paid in gymnastics lessons), editor and actuary.

Three of my habits:

Blogging, skipping, snacking (see above)

Five places I have lived:

Manhattan (Kansas), Philadelphia, London, Sydney, Wantage (UK)

Five things on my to do list (for this weekend):

Tae Kwon do, blog post, change sheets, get gmail address book up to date, sort out bookshelves (those last two have been there months - unlikely to move soon)

I’m not going to tag anyone. I really don’t believe there is anyone left in the blogosphere who hasn’t done this one.

Those Hoydens at Hoyden about Town have published the first downunder feminist carnival! Lots of great posts there to read - just in time for a long weekend (shame the NZers have already had theirs).

A recent visit from Tall Cousin, one of my numerous cousins, made me ponder how different family mythologies can be, even in a close family.

After the obligatory catchup on what we’d each been doing with ourselves since we’d last seen each other, we started exchanging family gossip. Mr Penguin and I have been trying to collect stories about relatives and ancestors. Neither of us is that interested in dry lists of names on family trees, but we’re both fascinated when there is a story that lends colour to the name. Each time we quiz a member of the family enough, we’ll come up with a new one.

When Tall Cousin’s sister, Natural Cousin, was here, I heard the story of our three great aunts, and their madcap trip around the US in the 20s or 30s - one almost missing the plane home because of a motorbike accident. Since I had only known them was at the end of their lives in their 80s, when they were sitting in the sun, without talking much, this story was a revelation.

And Tall Cousin’s contribution was equally fascinating - our grandfather had fought in WW1, but I had always wondered why he hadn’t gone to Gallipoli. My father’s stories of him had made him sound as if he was one of those men from the land who had gone to the war in search of adventure - why not as soon as the war started?

It turned out that as he was running the family farm (Grandpa was 19 when the war started, but his father had died five or six years earlier), he decided not to go, until someone sent him a white feather in the post. That humiliation changed his mind. Even then, quite a few aunts and uncles tried to dissuade him, but he went, regardless.

We all have slightly different memories of those we have known, and remember the stories we are told by others with different emphases. And when a few of the family get together, the story improves in accuracy (not necessarily in interest!) I’m beginning to think I’ll need a family wiki to get some of these stories tied down.

The campaign for paid maternity leave in Australia has gotten renewed vigour following the recent change of government. The government has asked the Productivity Commission to enquire into what should be done.

And there are a lot of blog posts about it. Joshua Gans has written a series from an economic point of view, which culminates in a submission to the Productivity Commission’s Inquiry into Parental Leave and columns in the Age and AFR recommending that the government offer tax credits to employers who get employees to return to work after parental leave (whether the employer passes this on to the employee is up to them. James Farrell from Club Troppo had an excellent post summing up some of the arguments for paid maternity leave (and disagreeing with most of them).

As is often the way with tricky policy issues, the framing of the question has a big impact on the appropriate policy response.

The Productivity Commission points out that:

The risk of unintended consequences typically increases as the number of policy objectives increase. That risk can be exacerbated if the policy objectives are unrelated or potentially inconsistent. An example where two objectives of a parental leave system could be inconsistent are the potential objectives of increasing the time parents spend bonding with a newborn and maintaining parents’ work-related skills and expertise. Typically, the longer the time period spent away from work, the more likely it is that the work-related skills of a parent will decline. However, shorter periods away from work reduces the opportunity for a parent to bond with a newborn.

And everyone I read on the topic has a slightly different view on what the appropriate policy objectives should be. A few possibilities:

• Enable women to spend more bonding time with their children
• Enable parents (not just mothers) to bond with their children
• Maintain long term attachment to the workforce for mothers/parents
• To improve the chances of long term breastfeeding
• To keep babies out of childcare centres
• Encourage more children to be born

As the Productivity Commission points out, there is an inherent tension between the workforce aims and baby/child related aims of paid maternity leave. There is also a more fundamental framing tension - to what extent is paid maternity leave an extension of other forms of mandated leave which the government is happy to force employers to provide - long service leave, sick leave, jury service leave - leave which are not taken at equal levels by all employees, but rather are taken in varying proportions, sometimes by a subset of employees (I’m yet to see the libertarian website railing against the inequities of long service leave, for example, yet as a “Gen X” employee I’m less likely to stay at an employer long enough to take it than my older colleagues). If maternity/paternity leave should be an employment right, economic and behavioural arguments about the impacts almost seem irrelevent - the main question is who should pay for it and how long should it be.

So I’ll comment in two parts. First why should we have paid maternity leave?

In my view there are two main reasons:

• It is important for mothers to look after their babies for the first few months (say at least 3) and for babies to have an intense primary carer (preferably a parent) for a bit more (say up to 12 months)
• It is important for the economy and for the parents that they maintain their links to the workforce - both in keeping their skills up-to-date, but also in less definable ways - the longer a person is out of the workforce, the harder it is to find a job, as employers tend to discount previous experience.
• A subsidiary one - it is preferable that any paid parental leave does not lead to discrimination against women and parents in the workforce.

Everything I’ve read suggests that it takes mothers at least six weeks to physically recover from pregnancy and childbirth. Looking after a baby in the first three months of its life is enormously draining. I don’t know of many couples that want to swap any earlier than three months. So the first three months is pretty much always taken by the mother. It is much easier to establish and continue breastfeeding when in close proximity to your baby, so that is also a good policy outcome.

Most books suggest that babies become more used to routine, and lots of aspects of baby care become easier to cope with after three months. Three months doesn’t seem long enough, to me, for a public policy prescription. The twelve months of unpaid leave we already have seems more reasonable as a total amount of leave to aim for - but it does always depend on the child.

The other aim of paid parental/maternity leave, which is in fairly direct opposition to the first one, is to maintain the employment skills of the parents, and their attachment to the workforce. And this one is the main reason why employers have introduced paid maternity leave where they have (particularly in the private sector). It is worth their while to keep their trained and skilled staff, as recruitment of new staff costs a significant amount. So they pay their staff what is, in effect, a retainer, providing they come back to work for them.

In all the discussion of this issue, I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion of the issue of attachment to the workforce. In my experience of paid maternity leave schemes in the private sector, introducing paid maternity leave (which is generally only paid in full on return to work) significantly increases retention after the leave. And the increase in retention is long term, it isn’t just for the period required to keep the money. Most economic analysis I have seen discounts that kind of behaviour, because the amount of money involved is quite small compared with the much larger sums which might be earned by working or not working. But it does make a very real difference to people’s behaviour. And while many people who don’t come back from maternity leave have every intention of working again in a year or two, the longer you don’t work, the harder it becomes to get back in the workforce.

So a payment that bribes people back into the workforce has benefits for the economy as a whole, assuming that it is a worthwhile objective to have more people working.

Right now, Australia has a complex set of payments related to having children and being in or out of the workforce, including family tax benefits A (for families with low incomes) and B (for families with one low income out of two), child care benefits, and the baby bonus (recently means tested). Any introduction of paid parental leave must take all of those into account to avoid unintended consequences - especially high marginal rates of tax on returning to work (which are certainly a feature of the current set of policies at various levels).

So, without being willing to do the analysis, my preference is something like this:

• some level of means tested benefit for all babies - having a baby involves an enormous financial outlay for a parent, and a benefit for society at large (in long term investment). But the benefit should not be paid in a lump sum, but rather over the first year of a baby’s life.
• Some extra level of parental payment (while on leave) which depends on continuing employment. This should be clearly available to either men or women (although not both parents at once) This is where I quite like Joshua Gans’ HECS style loan - although I would want the repayment terms to be pretty generous.
• And finally, some form of compulsion on employers to at least consider permanent part time work when requested.  This is the form of employment that many mothers and an increasing number of fathers want, and it is extraordinarily difficult to find.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Just for background, my own experience is probably relevant. I have two boys, Chatterboy (now 6) and Hungry Boy (just 5). With Chatterboy, I took six months of leave (two paid) and hired a nanny after four months so that I could ease my way back into the workforce. Just about when he turned 1, Mr Penguin got offered the choice of a glamorous (read lots of travel) job based in the US or redundancy, and took redundancy to become a stay at home dad.

With Hungry Boy, I took three months of leave (two of them paid) as I felt a bit of pressure to get back earning money as our family’s sole breadwinner. In retrospect, we could have afforded more, and I would have felt a lot better about it. I worked from home one day a week for the first few months back, until the number of meetings I was going in on my day at home became ridiculous.

In both cases, I managed to breastfeed until about 9 months, which I was quite proud of, but breastfeeding is a lot simpler when you are with the baby the whole time.

Money was reasonably important in my decisions, but of more importance was the pressure I felt from my employer (not spoken but implied) that if I took too much time off it implied I wasn’t really serious about my career. That kind of pressure is impossible to legislate for, and will only change if it becomes common for both men and women to take parental leave.

Today the teachers went out on strike in NSW - over recruitment policies for schools. The SMH had two conflicting letters next to each other from teachers:

The Government’s tinkering with a fair, time-tested and successful transfer points system is just the latest unintelligent act that will make recruiting quality teachers more difficult.

and this one

As a public school teacher I am aghast at the bogus campaign waged by the NSW Teachers Federation. How can a union argue that maintaining a faceless bureaucratic system of staff appointments is helpful in getting the right staff for the right job? The NSW Department of Education, one of the largest centralised employers in the world, determines who goes where partly by using an unworkable points system. As a way to get the teachers they want, schools employ temporary teachers - full-time.

The Teacher’s Federation press release is here. From the teachers federation website, the main issue comes from this aspect of the renegotation of the “staffing procedures”:

Department proposes changes to staffing procedures that:

• abolish Expressions of Interest Mobility for executives and principals
• dismantle classroom teacher service transfers
• give “exceptional circumstances” power of veto to principals and education directors to block transfers to any school
• abolish teacher representation on selection panels for executives and principals and replace Fed Reps with teacher reps on classroom teacher panels
• abolish requirement to base wording of advertisements on staffing codes
• abolish the Tripartite Committee review of local selection processes

Fundamentally, to a layperson, it is making it easier for local principals to choose the staff they want. Given that there aren’t that many changes a principal can make in pay and working conditions in a state school, schools in desirable locations are likely to find it easy to find good teachers. Schools in horrible locations (either because of the student body, or where you are likely to live) will find it harder.

But that assumes that the current system works at the moment. At the moment, this document sets out how transfers between schools work. My paraphrase of what is a very beauracratic document is that schools have to fill every second position, at least, from the transfer list. They can choose whether to just take the top person from the list (prioritised by experience, date of transfer, points- of which more later, etc) or interview the top five and choose one.

Teachers get priority points from working in remote schools (I don’t know all of the schools, but they all seem to be remote country schools, rather than “tough” schools). For example, if you spend two years teaching in Wilcannia Central, you get 8 priority transfer points. While five years in Moree Public will get you 4 priority transfer points. In those schools, you will also get a rental allowance (if you can’t get government provided accommodation), extra leave, and extra training and development.

The result being that these schools are likely to be staffed with recent graduates who are desperate to get out of there. The monetary benefits are unlikely to be commensurate with the increased difficulty in the work - rents in most of those towns are low compared with Sydney. And the difficulty of the work, particularly for a fresh-minted young graduate, is likely to be much worse than a suburban Sydney school, particularly with very few experienced teachers on hand to help.

My own boys’ school (from observation of the process) tries very hard to avoid using the teacher transfer system. There are several teachers who are temporary (rather than permanent) as in the letter quoted above and apparently there are ways to reject the people who come up from the transfer list if you’d rather recruit directly. So the current system is not really getting the desired effect.

I know, as a manager, I would much rather recruit my people myself - I trust my judgement to recruit good people, particularly when I know I will be working with them for the next few years. But even though the labour market for actuaries is tight, I have the ability to pay people more (up to a point) and provide better conditions (like some control over the work they do, the ability to work from home, and access to training and development). The principal of Wilcannia Central doesn’t have that luxury.

So, I doubt if the current system works all that well in finding ways of staffing remote and hard-to-teach schools. Abolishing it without a replacement doesn’t make much sense either, but the teacher’s federation doesn’t seem to be having much constructive discussion about alternatives.

Finding doctors for remote country towns is also very difficult. But paying doctors serious money is politically possible. So serious money is paid to doctors willing to locate to country areas, particularly when staffing hospitals. Paying remote teachers more, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be an option that is seriously entertained by anyone - government or teachers federation.

Mr Penguin alerted me to this interested article in Wired. As you would expect, in the US, Republicans are more likely to be sceptical about global warming than Democrats.  Environmentalism has always been found more on the left than the right, and Republicans have more to lose from action that makes energy more expensive.

But college-educated Republicans are far more likely to be sceptics than their less educated political allies, while a college education makes a Democrat less sceptical. What is about the combination of education and right wing politics?

It’s quite strange, because in all other areas of life I can think of, conspiracy theories are more likely to be found at the loony left end of the spectrum. But in this one, the more educated a right winger is, the more likely they are to believe that the scientific establishment is holding something from them.

Via pretty much everyone in my feedreader (well so far Pavlov’s Cat, Ampersand Duck and the Hoydens), here is a book meme.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Confusingly, everyone seems to create their own code at this point, but I’m going to stick with this one (from the Hoydens).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The [A] Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 [I did my HSC in 1984. Say no more - and I copied this comment from Ampersand Duck!]
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - finished it for school (but a struggle - would never have finished it voluntarily)
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince - although it’s on my bookshelf ready…
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

I’m fascinated how much Jane Austen is on the list - I find it hard to imagine not finishing one of those you started. And I’m struggling to remember what I did read for school now. Not much, it feels like, going through this list.

*Edited - my formatting must have gone awry last night - I was claiming to have read 90% of these books! It’s now at a much more reasonable level.

As part of the carefully scheduled program of budget leaks, the government has leaked a likely change in the medicare levy in this weeks’ budget.

A few blogs have comments - Larvatus Prodeo, wonders whether this will increase the pressure on the public system with a long comment thread, covering all sorts of health economics ground, and Joshua Gans comments that it is important to understand the price elasticity of health insurance when assessing this kind of policy change.

Some commenters miss this, but it seems to me that most people look at this kind of policy from the lens of a healthy person. And for a healthy person, it isn’t really cost effective to take out private cover. The public system covers you for catastrophes, and the chances of you receiving more than you pay in premiums over the next year are pretty small.

However, much of current health policy (as it impacts private health insurance) is an attempt to force as many healthy people as possible to take out private cover. Why? The insurers are required to charge the same premium for everyone. As I discussed in these two posts, most people understand their own health pretty well. The unhealthy people (like my cousin with chronic asthma) know that they are at a reasonable risk of needing medical care. The healthy people - who are generally younger than the unealthy people - know that the value of their health insurance is pretty low, and are often prepared to take the risk of some nasty event catapulting them into the public system.

But health insurers desperately want those healthy people. Because it reduces their overall premium. So that’s why they give out silly things like gym memberships and payments for alternative therapies. Because it’s a marketing ploy for the young. And the government’s compulsion in the form of an extra medicare levy gave the private funds an extra way of attracting healthy people - those well enough off to earn enough to pay the extra levy are also more likely to be healthy and not suffering a chronic disease.

I imagine that the premiums will find a new, higher, equilibrium level, as the proportion of healthy workers in the funds goes up. And private health insurance will become slightly less of a tax on the better off and the sick, and instead become more of a tax on the very well off and the sick.

Because as several of the larvatus prodeo commenters noted, the public system is at its worst if you have a chronic, but not life threatening disease. For those people, private health care will make an enormous difference to their quality of life.

I’d like to think that the changes to the healthcare system that might come with this proposed tax change could improve the public experience for the somewhat unwell. But I’m not holding my breath.

Well actually, my title is ironic.

A teacher of a Year 1 class in Sydney has been sacked by the education department for posing nude with her husband and talking about their sex life in the sealed section of Cleo. You can read more here. This isn’t of course, political correctness as lambasted by the right wing, but a ridiculous overreaction by the Education Department.

As she said herself, if she was a high school teacher, what she did might have been inappropriate, as her pupils might read it. But a parent of any Year 1 pupil reading the Cleo sealed section should be first criticising the person who gave it to them (after celebrating their excellent reading) before criticising a familiar person for being included.

But apparently some parents (of children aged around 6) complained that their child’s teacher revealed herself to be a sexual being in a loving and committed relationship in a magazine aimed at teenagers.

In my professional life, I get quite involved in industry forums (fora?). Today, for me, was quite a big day. I had set up a workshop for my peers around the industry - roughly one per company, plus a few guest speakers - to discuss a professional issue. All up, there were around 30 of us. I was facilitating the session from the front.

After about half an hour, when I’d started to relax as the discussion got going, I suddenly noticed something. I was the only woman in the room. While I often have the experience of being the only woman in a meeting, generally the total number of people in that case is in the single digits.

It’s ironic. Two years ago, when I took on my current role, I had a few old codgers congratulate me, and comment how women were taking over the profession. At that stage there were four of us in that group. Now the other three have moved on (one is now a CEO, the others have different roles), and I’m the only one left.

Ten, even five years ago, that sudden realisation would have given me stage fright. Now I have the confidence to be quietly amused. But I bet none of the men in the room have ever been close to being the single representative of their gender in a business context. They would find it extraordinarily confronting, if they had.

All those people who confidently say that gender equality at the top of companies is a matter of time? Take a closer look. It’s not going to happen without serious cultural change. This isn’t about helping women manage families. To get serious representation of women at the top of companies,  the culture of large organisations needs to genuinely include women.