Saturday, August 14, 2021

In Her Words: ‘Caregiving needs are real’

Child care in the post-Covid workplace
Libby VanderPloeg
Author Headshot

By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

Gender Reporter

"Companies finally recognize that caregiving needs are real."

— Katherine Ryder, chief executive of Maven Clinic

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In June, In Her Words and DealBook invited readers to share their questions about returning to the office. Over the next few weeks, we'll be putting those questions to experts and publishing the responses.

A reader writes:

I am afraid of losing time with my kids. Even during the lowest moments of 2020, I was grateful to have every meal of the day with my kids. What will new flexibilities for child care look like? Will we ever see our kids again?

A lot of major stakeholders have woken up to the fact that what was once considered "normal" — rigid 9-to-5 working hours, face time in the office and parents so consumed with work that they were barely spending any time with their children (just over two hours a day in 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) — really wasn't normal at all.

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"'Work-life balance' has always been a high-stakes tightrope walk with no net," said Reshma Saujani, a former chief executive of the nonprofit organization Girls Who Code. She is also the founder of the grass-roots campaign Marshall Plan for Moms, which recently published a handbook for companies with ideas on how to reimagine the workplace.

But the good news is that you, as an employee and a parent, have more leverage now to ask for work arrangements that work best for you, because in the past year, child care has become too difficult to ignore. As schools went remote and large parts of the child care system crumbled, kids in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of calls and Zooms became just another part of the workday. The hard line between private life and work life was thoroughly dissolved.

Hundreds of thousands of women left the workplace altogether in the past year because of increased child care duties, and in an effort to try to stave off an exodus of more employees with children, companies felt increasingly compelled to expand existing child care accommodations or offer new ones that had once felt almost unthinkable in America: offering extra money for child care costs and paid time off for caregiving duties (Verizon, Google, Microsoft, Bank of America); creating learning pods where employees' children attended remote schools together, sometimes with a teacher hired by the company (UnitedHealth Group, KPMG); or offering flexible schedules for those who had to spend most of the hours between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. helping children with remote school (Walmart, Visa).

But those were, in a way, quick fixes in a difficult time. Tax breaks for companies that offer paid family and medical leave, for example, are expected to expire in September.

In May, executives from nearly 200 companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Patagonia and Spotify, acknowledged that the caregiving crisis was affecting their operations — and ultimately their bottom lines — and that they needed to craft workplace policies that would better support caregivers in the long run. What might that look like? Potentially a lot more flexibility. Shorter workweeks and greater control over work hours, free or subsidized on-site or center-based child care facilities and expanded paid parental leave — policies for which advocates, grass-roots organizations and voters from both sides of the aisle have long been clamoring.

But smaller companies and start-ups are also looking at how to fill the void at the local level. A new start-up, Otter, which was founded in October, connects parents who need child care with stay-at-home parents who can look after those parents' children and pays the stay-at-home parents to take on the extra caregiving. In July, the barely-a-year-old company raised $23 million in funding — an indication of the unprecedented demand for creative solutions.

"Honestly, the main post-Covid trend that I think is a really positive one for parents is that companies finally recognize that caregiving needs are real," said Katherine Ryder, chief executive of the family health and benefits company Maven Clinic.

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In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Maura Foley.

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Thursday, August 12, 2021

On Politics: Marginalized groups look to get on the (redistricting) map

Underrepresented communities are mobilizing to stay intact and influential in newly drawn districts.
A demonstration at the Supreme Court in 2019 over rulings about the census. Gerrymandered maps could entrench Republican power in statehouses and stifle the influence of Black and Latino voters at local, state and federal levels.Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The Census Bureau released a huge trove of data on Thursday that will guide the redrawing of district lines for Congress, state legislatures and local offices, opening a rushed and politically volatile edition of the decennial redistricting process.

All eyes are on how severely state legislators will gerrymander their maps for partisan gain, and for good reason. With Republicans at an advantage in legislatures — including in states like Texas and Florida that are gaining seats in Congress — redistricting could flip control of the House in 2022 without a single voter switching sides. Gerrymandered maps could also entrench Republican power in statehouses and stifle the influence of Black and Latino voters at local, state and federal levels alike, and advocates for Black and Latino voters will be pushing back forcefully.

But there will be other forces at play, too: marginalized groups like Asian Americans, Native Americans and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans that received comparatively little attention in past redistricting cycles but are now mobilizing to try to keep their communities intact, and influential, within newly drawn districts.

"Most people don't totally appreciate how much redistricting predetermines the results in most elections," said Neil Makhija, the executive director of the advocacy group Indian American Impact, referring not only to gerrymandering but to the fact that people with common backgrounds and views tend to cluster geographically, which means even neutral mapping decisions produce a lot of noncompetitive districts.

Based on data from the National Conference of State Legislatures, Asian Americans — who helped fuel the country's growth in the past decade, according to the census — are one of the most underrepresented groups in state politics, with a share of state legislative seats less than one-fourth their share of the U.S. population.

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The Impact group plans to use the new census data to identify where Indian Americans are clustered and to lobby state legislatures and redistricting commissions to treat them as "communities of interest," a technical term that refers to communities with shared needs and policy interests — whether cultural, historical or economic — that make it important for them to collectively choose their representatives.

Redistricting authorities are supposed to work to keep communities of interest intact. In some circumstances, splitting them can be a basis for legal challenges, and organizations representing a wide array of demographic groups — including Impact, the Native American Rights Fund and others — say they are prepared to file such challenges against maps they believe are discriminatory.

But keeping a community intact depends, before politics ever come into play, on defining its boundaries, and that isn't always simple.

"Tribes are communities of interest that should be kept together in most instances," said Matthew Campbell, a staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, but "we can get caught in thinking about the reservation, on versus off reservation. There may be communities that are off reservation but just near the reservation that really should be tied together with the rest of the community. Some cities or towns may be close to reservation boundaries, and they should be included as well."

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NARF is working with organizers statewide in Alaska, Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota, and at the local level in parts of Michigan, Minnesota, Utah and Wisconsin, on a new project called Fair Districting in Indian Country. They will use mapping software to define communities down to the street level, helping them suggest to redistricting officials where to draw lines.

As early as June, the advocacy group Western Native Voice was telling its organizers in Montana — which is getting a second House seat as a result of population growth — to use that software and send data about their communities to NARF. In a three-day training in the southern Montana city of Bozeman that month, W.N.V. leaders emphasized that communities of interest could be defined not only by race and ethnicity but also by something as specific as a shared water source threatened by pollution.

Now that the census data is out, the first order of business is "explaining it to the organizers and the field team, because it's going to come likely in a somewhat messy format to the general public," Keaton Sunchild, the political director at Western Native Voice, said in an interview on Thursday morning. "We'll explain what it means to them, and then we're going to go use that data to form our message" for a state redistricting commission hearing in October.

Before that hearing, Sunchild said, Western Native Voice organizers will talk to tribal leaders about their priorities. For example, he said, the Crow Tribe and the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in southern Montana share a state legislative district and don't want to be separated in redistricting.

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Beyond mapping, advocates who want redistricting officials to treat specific groups as communities of interest need to show that those groups are cohesive, meaning they have shared interests that justify keeping them together.

Makhija cited a study that Indian American Impact did in Georgia, which found that large majorities of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders — and even larger majorities of Indian Americans — voted Democratic in the presidential election and the Senate runoffs. He said the group planned to do similar research in other states and would focus its efforts on California, Georgia, New York and Texas.

The L.G.B.T.Q. Victory Fund is also planning to push redistricting officials in states with independent commissions to treat L.G.B.T.Q. people as communities of interest, as my colleague Aishvarya Kavi reported on Wednesday. The Victory Fund cites as a success story the creation of a San Diego City Council district centered on the Hillcrest neighborhood; that district elected San Diego's first openly gay official in the 1990s and has been represented by a member of the L.G.B.T.Q. community ever since.

Makhija pointed to New York's Sixth Congressional District, in Queens, as a success story for Asian Americans: They are a plurality of voters in the district and helped elect Representative Grace Meng, a Democrat who is the first Asian American to serve in Congress from New York. She has worked to elevate issues like a huge backlog of green card applications, which is one of Impact's biggest policy concerns.

But "until you get a critical mass of elected leaders," Makhija said, "the public doesn't even know what those issues are."

The military side of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul in June. The American Embassy urged Americans on Thursday to "leave Afghanistan immediately using available commercial flight options."Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

The U.S. is preparing to evacuate Americans in Afghanistan.

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes and Eric Schmitt

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Pentagon is moving 3,000 Marines to Afghanistan and another 4,000 troops to the region to evacuate most of the American Embassy and U.S. citizens in Kabul, as the Biden administration braces for a possible collapse of the Afghan government within the next month, administration and military officials said.

The sharply deteriorating situation in the country, as the Taliban rapidly advance across the north and Afghan security forces battle to defend ever shrinking territory in the south and west, has forced the Biden administration to accelerate plans to get Americans out.

President Biden, after meeting with his top national security advisers on Wednesday night and again Thursday morning, also ordered additional expedited flights out of the country for Afghans who have worked with the United States, so that their applications for special immigrant visas could be evaluated.

The embassy sent the latest in a series of alarming alerts, urging Americans to "leave Afghanistan immediately using available commercial flight options."

And in Washington, the State Department spokesman, Ned Price, announced what he described as a drawdown of an unspecified number of civilians among the roughly 4,000 embassy personnel — including about 1,400 American citizens — to begin immediately.

"As we've said all along, the increased tempo of the Taliban military engagements and the resulting increase in violence and instability across Afghanistan is of grave concern," he said. "We've been evaluating the security situation every day to determine how best to keep those serving at our embassy safe."

But, Price added, "Let me be very clear about this: The embassy remains open."

American negotiators are also trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the U.S. Embassy in Kabul if they take over the country's government and ever want to receive foreign aid, three American officials said.

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