The Other Kind of Girl Math | Nobody tells you that when you turn 30, your social feeds suddenly begin to split at the seams. Half the people I follow are sipping extra dirty martinis at 2 a.m. and the other half are filling sippy cups with breastmilk — also at 2 a.m. It’s a strange, albeit enlightening algorithm. I’ll be honest: I had no idea just how difficult it was to simply keep another human alive! The burp cloths, the breast pumps, the sleepless nights … moms truly are beasts, and we ought to be appreciating them way more often than one measly Sunday in May. Yet the working world seems to be headed in the opposite direction. Instead of recognizing the extra household burdens that women so often carry — literally! —bosses are tightening the leash on the flexibility that working moms enjoyed during the pandemic. “Many of us warned that mothers would be pushed out of the job market,” Beth Kowitt writes (free read). “That prediction is becoming reality: The percentage of women in the workforce aged 25 to 44 with children under five plummeted nearly three percentage points between January and June.” Some have argued the culprit isn’t merely corporate America rolling back the work-life balance — Bloomberg Opinion contributor Matthew Yglesias argued in a blog post today that there are broader macroeconomic forces at work, while others have hinted at the growing appeal of the “trad wife” life. But Beth says there’s a larger point to be made that’s not up for debate: Women are being ignored by the US government. So-called “girly statistics” — a term used by University of Kansas professor Misty Heggeness — “are indicators that relate to the unpaid labor that takes place inside the home,” and they are not available in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report. The result of this girl math gap? “All the attention goes to the ‘manly’ spaces of the economy … the paid work that takes place outside the home,” Beth says, and “we end up making all sorts of stereotypical and incorrect conclusions about women in the labor market.” In reality, women have been doing all kinds of unpaid labor for centuries, with some of it happening outside of the home, too. (Those orange slices during the halftime of your little league baseball game didn’t cut themselves!) Data journalist Matthew Zeitlin refers to it as a subsidy of sorts: “We would all have a better grasp of the value of the care economy if we paid attention to those pesky girly statistics,” Beth argues. “One study that Heggeness cites found that unpaid care work in the US in 2020 was valued at $5.3 trillion, or about 25% of the GDP. ‘The economy we do measure does not function without this underbelly of unpaid care work,’ she wrote in a 2023 paper that calls for a more wholistic definition of economic activity.” Perhaps the US could learn a thing or two from one of the world’s most-educated female workforces: Australia. From her perch in the land Down Under, Andreea Papuc says “the prevalence of part-time jobs shows employers offer flexibility to keep women — who still do the bulk of juggling family and other career responsibilities — in the workforce.” Yet more could be done to help them reach their full potential, she argues. “This doesn’t mean exclusively going full-time. It’s about utilizing women’s skills and talents and making sure they are not stuck in roles where they work less than they are capable of. That way we can avoid a part-time promotion cliff — hurdles to accessing leadership roles for those on reduced hours — that females are more likely to face. Only 7% of managers are employed part-time, according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, crimping women’s earning capacity and contributing to the pay gap.” What are men doing while women are working their (three-letter-word-I-cannot-say-in-this-newsletter)-es off? Well, I can tell you what they’re not doing: ordering their usual double chicken burrito bowl for lunch. According to Conor Sen, the Chipotle Boys are officially laying off the slop. For those unfamiliar, a “slop bowl” is exactly what it sounds like: a bowl — almost always made out of cardboard — full of some combination of food — beans, lettuce, sweet potatoes, steak, quinoa, beets — smothered in some sort of dressing or sauce. There is no other appropriate word to describe what happens when one mixes it all up, other than slop. For a while there, people were willing to pay nearly $20 for such a bowl, but the jig appears to be up. “A string of disappointing earnings results has sparked large declines in the stock prices of multiple fast casual food companies,” Conor writes. “This has raised questions about the state of consumption as the US economy absorbs tariffs and job growth slows. So although the overall data on spending suggests there’s nothing to panic about just yet, the geographic footprint of some of those chains provides some answers.” The long and the short of it is that all these restaurants are located in urban areas (mostly New York, DC and LA) that are reliant on immigrants, tourists and local patrons who are overwhelmingly liberal. With less foot traffic from visitors, it’s up to the locals to show up. Under a Republican administration, that’s not happening: Democrats have soured on the economy and are reining in their spending and making lunch and dinner at home as a result. Conor’s big takeaway from all of this? Unlike a big ol’ bowl of slop, “the US economy isn’t a monolith, particularly when it comes to the consumer.” | 
