More bigots in Arlington, VA

So I was at this Rally Against Rape (rallyagainstrape.org) at 7pm in the Arlington Gateway Park in Rosslyn.  On my way out, I picked up my candle and put it on the nearby table.  A young woman behind me yelled  "OMG, did she swipe something?".   So young, yet so racist, in Arlington near the Courthouse.


APRIL IS SEXUAL ASSAULT AWARENESS MONTHng

Another male imbecile

when I was in Shoppers, may even be 2.

"I was born to love her","she's my soul mate"

etc., I am sure lots of women would be flattered by this.  Too bad I am not some little girl desperate for attention or love.  I would have married at least half a dozen times if I married every man said this about me.

I would have married over a dozen times if I married every man who wanted me to marry him.

As the resulted, some had deliberately done harm to me.

Those who wanted to buy me, my price was one Billion dollar$ back when Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were the only billionaires.

I am an asexual, most likely due to my fibroid.

And yes, most Asians, particularly those from Asia, knew I am usually well-received by none-Asians as many had asked Asians for my information, as if we all know each other.

With over 2 billions of Asians on earth; it is akin to assuming all Caucasians on earth knew each other.  Their defamation of "no one wanted her; no one liked her; etc" had helped me eliminate unwanted attention, be it pernicious rumors; which they also defamed me with anyone who asked for my information, and some malicious individuals then help spread such pernicious rumors.

Not safe to go to the Employment Center anymore

now that the defamation of "no one wanted her; no one liked her; etc" is being promulgated around the Employment Center, it is not safe for me to go there anymore.

Many who had gone to the Employment Center had express abusive behavior by the women employees toward the unemployeds seeking help.

A childhood friend had also targeted by Asian version of the KKK/Nazi

KKK/Nazi/Extremists while she worked for the IBM in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1980s to early 1990s.  She had to leave the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1990s as the resulted.

People just need an excuse to do harm to others

it doesn't have to be true.  All they need is an excuse so their dark side can be free to hurt other people.

And that's what the defamation against me had done, an excuse.

Korean parents of ship wrecked couldn't eat

had to be hooked up to an I-V.

I know how that feels, I was so sick to my stomach in 2001 due to the massive attacks for years, by most of the people from Asia in the Silicon Valley at that time, most were fresh off the boat, as soon as I arrived in the Silicon Valley; that I couldn't eat or sleep for months.

When I went to the Central Park in Fremont to Rollerblade to help get over this PTSD.  One day the whole park sudden inundated with people from Asia as if it was Chinese New Year in Chinatown, and an ex-worker came to want to do physical harms to me, but I out ran him as I was on a Rollerblade.  One pervert Chinese old male even unzipped his pant in front of me.  From then on, there were continuous stream of people from Asia going to the Central Park where I went rollerblade, where prior to that day, I rarely seen an Asian.  This could only happen if a concerted effort in a well organized and well-planned way.  Well, I guess they are now in control of the Silicon Valley-the High Tech capital of the world, and will be in control of the DC metro too, of the US capital.

This was around 911, 2001

Laughing uncontrollably by USPTO employees

As I pass-by Crystal City today, an Asian male in his 30s keep staring at me for as long as I was in his sight, then said something to his male and female friends, they all laughed uncontrollably, and loud enough to be heard from a block away.

I was running some errand in the USPTO campus in 2012, where a Middle Eastern guy in his 20s came out of one of the building and laugh uncontrollably, couldn't stand up and said  "I can't believe those idiots really fired her".

I am an Asian and a woman who had an airtight first case, which may be the first woman to have an airtight first case, how could they allow an inferior race to have such achievement?  They would put me on a pedestal if I am a white woman.

All these Asian version of the KKK/Nazi/Anti-West managed to use Americans' bigotries and our anti-discrmination to their advantage, and played the Amerians like a bunch of retards, while took our trade secrets like taking candies from a baby despite people like me warned them since 2004, that resulted in all sorts of attacks from name calling and other threats.

warns against procedure to remove uterine fibroids

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• FDA warns against procedure to remove uterine fibroids; says it could spread hidden cancer

FDA warns against procedure to remove uterine fibroids; says it could spread hidden cancer

By Brady Dennis, Published: April 17

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday took the rare step of urging doctors to stop performing a surgical procedure used on tens of thousands of women each year to remove uterine growths, saying the practice risks spreading hidden cancers within a woman’s body.

The procedure, known as power morcellation, has long been used in laparoscopic operations to remove fibroid tumors from the uterus, or to remove the uterus itself. It involves inserting an electric device into the abdomen and slicing tissue in order to remove it through a small incision. The surgery is far less invasive than traditional abdominal operations.

But the FDA on Thursday agreed with a growing chorus of researchers and clinicians who oppose the procedure, saying that it can recklessly spread undetected cancers throughout the body and make the disease more lethal in the process. The agency is not seeking to ban the practice or the roughly two dozen FDA-approved devices used to perform it, but hospitals and gynecologists are likely to abandon the procedure because of potential liabilities.

The FDA said its analysis determined that an estimated 1 in 350 women who undergo morcellation have an unsuspected form of uterine cancer called uterine sarcoma.

“The existence of the risk is not new,” said William Maisel, chief scientist at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “What is new is that the magnitude of the risk appears to be higher than was appreciated by the clinical community.”

Maisel acknowledged that the agency was spurred to action — or at least moved more quickly — because of a high-profile campaign waged in recent months by a Massachusetts couple, both doctors, for a moratorium on the practice.

Anesthesiologist Amy Reed, a mother of six who last spring treated Boston Marathon bombing victims as well as one of the suspected bombers, underwent what was supposed to be a routine procedure last fall to end bleeding from fibroids. The procedure spread undetected, cancerous tumor fragments throughout her abdomen. Now she is battling stage-four leiomyosarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer.
Her husband, Hooman Noorchashm, a Harvard-affiliated cardiothoracic surgeon, responded by launching a campaign to ban the widely used procedure. He has e-mailed numerous regulators, doctors and lawmakers, written to medical journals and lobbied hospitals. The couple started a Change.org petition to end the practice.

Noorchashm said Thursday that he appreciated the FDA’s relative speed in addressing the problem. “You don’t even have to be a doctor to recognize that if tissue or a tumor has malignant potential, you should not mince it up inside someone’s body,” he said. “That’s just bad medicine.”

Many women develop uterine fibroids — benign growths that originate in the muscle tissue in the wall of the uterus. Although many fibroids do not cause problems, others can result in frequent urination, prolonged menstrual bleeding and pelvic pain.

Of the more than 500,000 hysterectomies performed in the United States each year, about 11 percent, or more than 50,000, involve morcellation, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Some doctors advocate performing a morcellation only when using an “isolation bag” in an effort to minimize the spread of tissues, but that method is not foolproof, as the bags can break.

“When you consider what the benefit is, which is a shorter hospital stay and less pain, then consider what the risk is — this could kill you — most women would not choose that risk if they really understood what is at stake,” said Diana Zuckerman, president of the Cancer Prevention and Treatment Fund.

Even before Thursday’s announcement by the FDA, the push to limit uterine morcellations had gained traction.

In February, Temple University Hospital issued guidelines instructing surgeons not to perform the procedure on fibroids over a certain size. Doctors may use the procedure for smaller fibroids only after informing patients about the risks and, in most cases, using isolation bags. Even before that, prompted by Noorchashm’s campaign, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston took similar measures.

On Thursday, the heads of obstetrics and gynecology at both Boston hospitals promptly notified their staffs to suspend use of power morcellation until further notice.

Margaret Jacobson, the medical director of Whatcom Hospice in Bellingham, Wash., cried upon hearing of FDA’s action on Thursday.

In March 2012, her sister, Elizabeth Jacobson, had a hysterectomy by morcellation. Elizabeth Jacobson did not want to miss much work, and the promise of a minimally invasive procedure appealed to her.

But inside the large fibroid that a doctor shredded lurked malignant cells that spread throughout her abdomen, her sister said. Soon, Elizabeth Jacobson was diagnosed with aggressive uterine cancer. She then had a second surgery, rounds of chemotherapy and long stretches of misery. She died Jan. 8, 2013.
“She suffered terribly,” Margaret Jacobson said. “It devastated our family.”

Thursday’s news brought a measure of relief, she said, that other women might avoid the same fate, especially given that safer surgical alternatives already exist.

“It’s a victory ,” Jacobson said. “It’s not okay to tolerate these deaths. . . . My sister’s life was extraordinary; she was beautiful and loving. She does not deserve to be an easily dismissed statistic.”

© The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fda-warns-against-procedure-to-remove-uterine-fibroids-says-it-could-spread-hidden-cancer/2014/04/17/f9fe53cc-c64a-11e3-bf7a-be01a9b69cf1_story.html?wpisrc=nl%5Feve

tctctc2

4/17/2014 10:54 PM EDT

Uterine fibroid embolization. Not every hospital does it and many obstetricians don't even tell you about it, but it worked for me. It cuts off the blood flow to fibroids. I had almost instantaneous relief - others have more gradual relief. I highly recommend that women look into it.

smurfsmom

5:24 PM EDT

Last April I was scheduled to have a partial laparoscopic hysterectomy using the method described in this article, to relieve me of side effects of multiple uterine fibroids. My insurance company would not approve the procedure until I had a biopsy done on my uterine lining. My GYN performed the procedure, which was quite uncomfortable, but in fact saved my life! I was diagnosed with uterine papillary serous carcinoma - at age 42 - my GYN said she had NEVER seen it in a woman younger than 60! This is a rare and aggressive form of cancer.

Had a full hysterectomy via da Vinci - still removed everything, but intact, without cutting it up, and without cutting into me. Post-op pathology showed that the cancer cells were entirely contained in the uterus - no spread, and I was declared cancer-free one year ago next Thursday.

My GYN has now changed her procedures in recommending biopsies, and I would encourage EVERY woman considering this procedure to ASK for a biopsy beforehand. Or ask for the entire, intact removal. My heart hurts for every woman who went thru this procedure and the subsequent treatment. Let's hope these new changes and new laws will better protect and prevent this kind of horrible chain of events from happening again....more

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Favorite Economists

PAUL KRUGMAN

             http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/


Joseph E. Stiglitz 

http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/

Biggest Predictor of How Long You’ll Be Unemployed

BAD LUCK 6:00 AM APR 17, 2014

The Biggest Predictor of How Long You’ll Be Unemployed Is When You Lose Your Job

By BEN CASSELMAN

One characteristic distinguishes the long-term unemployed from the rest of America’s jobless. It isn’t how many hours they worked at their old job, or what industry they came from, or even their level of education.

It’s bad timing.

A FiveThirtyEight analysis shows that by far the single biggest predictor of whether someone will be out of work for a year or more is the state of the economy when he or she loses his or her job.¹ Over the past 15 years, a period spanning two recessions, a one-point increase in the unemployment rate increased an individual’s odds of remaining unemployed for at least a year by about 35 percent. No other characteristic — age, sex, race, marital status, education or occupation, among others — had even close to that big an effect.

Americans who had the misfortune of losing their jobs during the height of the most recent recession in 2009 were more than four times as likely to end up out of work for a year or longer than those who lost their jobs during the comparatively good economy of 2007. Extended unemployment benefits, which are often cited as a driver of the persistently high levels of long-term joblessness, don’t appear to be a major cause of the pattern.

More than 2.5 million Americans have been out of work for a year or more. That’s down from more than 4.5 million in 2010 but nonetheless represents a crisis of long-term unemployment that’s unprecedented in the U.S. since World War II. The plight of the long-term jobless has gotten renewed attention in recent weeks in part due to mounting evidence that they are being left out of the economic recovery.

What’s gotten less attention is how the long-term unemployed ended up in that grim situation to begin with. This is an important question for policymakers, both for helping today’s jobless and for trying to avoid a similar epidemic in the future. If we could identify the qualities that make people more likely to end up in long-term unemployment, we could, at least in theory, tailor policies toward them, perhaps by training them in skills that are in demand or by teaching them how to search for jobs more effectively.

Yet most of the evidence suggests there is little that distinguishes the long-term unemployed apart from bad luck. Certain characteristics do make people more likely to become unemployed in the first place: The unemployed tend to be younger and less educated than the overall workforce; they are significantly less likely to be married and are more likely to be racial or ethnic minorities; they are more likely to have worked part-time at their prior job and to come from high-turnover sectors such as hospitality, or, particularly since the housing bust, construction.

But while there are significant differences between the employed and the unemployed, there is very little difference between those who have been out of work for more than a year and those who have been jobless for shorter periods. The table below shows how the long- and short-term unemployed compare to each other and to the labor force as a whole. Apart from the long-term unemployed being a little older, the two groups look nearly identical.²

The similarity of the profiles suggests that once someone loses a job, it’s hard to predict whether that person will find another one quickly or whether he or she will get stuck in the trap of long-term joblessness. We can test this theory by calculating the probability that someone with certain characteristics will become long-term unemployed.

This calculation is possible because of the design of the Current Population Survey, the government’s main source of labor-force statistics such as the unemployment rate, which allows us to track individual households from month to month.³ We can identify who’s been laid off, for example, by looking at people who are employed one month and then unemployed the next.⁴ We can then look back in on those same people a year later to see whether they have a job.⁵

I looked at all the Current Population Survey records since 1998, a sample of about 34,000 individual unemployed workers.⁶ Over the entire period, a bit less than 4 percent of unemployed workers ended up out of work for a full year.

The table below shows the share of laid-off workers in various categories who ended up long-term unemployed, and also the share that ended up with jobs. As the earlier table suggested, most characteristics have remarkably little predictive value. With only a couple of exceptions, such as manufacturing, workers’ choice of industry or occupation has little effect on their odds of becoming long-term unemployed. People who worked more hours when they were employed aren’t meaningfully less likely to become long-term unemployed. Nor are those with less education — in fact, more educated workers were slightly more likely to be out of work a long time, though the correlation isn’t particularly strong.

A few factors do make a difference. Men are a bit more likely to become long-term unemployed than women; blacks are more likely than whites; and, most significantly, older workers are more likely than younger ones. That’s consistent with both anecdotal evidence and quantitative research suggesting that older workers have more trouble finding jobs, due partly to implicit (and occasionally explicit) age discrimination.

The factor that has the biggest impact, however, has nothing to do with the workers themselves. It’s the state of the economy — as measured by the unemployment rate — at the time they lose their jobs. Someone who loses a job when the unemployment rate is 8 percent or higher is, on average, three and a half times more likely to end up long-term unemployed than someone who gets laid off when the unemployment rate is under 6 percent. A simple regression model allows us to quantify the relationship: A one-point increase in the unemployment rate raises an individual’s odds of becoming long-term unemployed by 35 percent.⁷

That’s by far the strongest relationship of any characteristic I examined. Even characteristics that might seem likely to play a major role in predicting long-term unemployment, such as single parenthood, don’t have as big an effect.⁸

Of course it’s impossible to measure all the factors that could make it hard for people to get jobs. We don’t know from the Current Population Survey data whether the long-term unemployed were reliable employees back when they had jobs, or whether they would make good ones now. We don’t know how hard they’re looking for work, or whether they’re doing so effectively. Beyond broad educational categories, we can’t assess their skills.

Still, there’s no reason to think that the people who lost their jobs during the worst of the recession were somehow less desirable employees than those who lost jobs during better times. If anything, we’d expect the opposite. One of the hallmarks of recessions, particularly severe recessions, is that they hit even well-established employees who would be unlikely to lose their jobs during better economic times. Yet despite their comparatively strong employment histories, workers who lose their jobs amid a weak economy are far more likely to end up trapped in long-term unemployment.

Up to this point, I have assumed that the reason people who lose their jobs in a weak economy end up long-term unemployed is that they can’t find jobs. But there is another possible explanation: emergency unemployment benefits, which extended benefits to as long as 99 weeks in some states during the worst of the jobs crisis. Some economists have argued that by offering more generous benefits during the recession and recovery, the government has actually contributed to the unprecedented level of long-term unemployment in recent years. (The government offered extended benefits in past recessions, though never for as long as 99 weeks.)

According to that argument, unemployment benefits reduce the incentive for workers to accept new jobs, since they have an alternative source of financial support. Numerous studies have reached a wide range of conclusions about the impact of extended benefits on the jobless rate, but nearly all find that longer benefits do lead to both higher and longer-lasting unemployment.

It’s possible, then, that people who lose jobs in a bad economy are accepting the more generous benefits offered to them, and ending up in long-term unemployment as a result. But that doesn’t appear to be what’s going on.

Because the government routinely extends unemployment benefits during periods of high joblessness, it’s hard to tell which of these two factors is driving higher long-term unemployment. We can begin to untangle cause and effect, however, by splitting the unemployed population into two camps: those who likely received benefits and those who did not.

The Current Population Survey doesn’t track whether people are receiving benefits. But it does ask them why they’re unemployed — whether they lost a job, for example, or whether they quit. That’s a pretty good proxy for whether someone receives benefits, because in most cases people only qualify if they’ve lost their job.

If benefits are to blame for an individual’s increased likelihood of becoming long-term unemployed, we would expect to see the effect most strongly among those receiving benefits. Instead, the opposite is true: For those who likely received benefits, a one-point increase in the unemployment rate corresponded to 33 percent higher odds of becoming long-term unemployed. For those who didn’t receive benefits, the odds of becoming long-term unemployed were even higher at 40 percent.⁹

If extended benefits aren’t to blame, that brings us back to luck. The long-term unemployed are mostly people who lost jobs at a time when companies weren’t hiring. Once they had been out of work for more than a few months, their chances of getting hired fell off dramatically: Multiple experiments have found that employers are reluctant to consider candidates who have been out of work for more than six months, even when those candidates are more qualified. Worse, recent research from former Obama administration economics adviser Alan Krueger and others suggests that most of the long-term unemployed are unlikely to find stable employment even if the economy improves.

Taken together, these are discouraging findings. A weak economy can cause long-term unemployment, but a stronger economy can’t fix it. That suggests policymakers’ top priority needs to be preventing the kind of long, slow recovery that leads to high levels of long-term unemployment in the first place. A stronger economic rebound in recent years would likely have put many of the recession’s victims back to work before they became long-term unemployed. That lesson won’t do much to help today’s jobless, but it might help prevent a similar crisis in the future.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-biggest-predictor-of-how-long-youll-be-unemployed-is-when-you-lose-your-job/

FOOTNOTES

BEN CASSELMAN  @bencasselman 

Ben Casselman is FiveThirtyEight’s chief economics writer.

I wonder if my fibroid is the resulted of

working in the lab as a hardware engineer.

Fibroid may be why I am an Asexual.

Women died from disease from working in Samsung

A movie funded by donations and crowding-funding investments from nearly 7,000 people has highlighted the battle of a Samsung factory worker's family to win compensation for her death from leukemia in the face of media indifference and corporate obstruction.

"Another Family," which premiered during the 18th Busan International Film Festival ending on Saturday, is a fictional account based on the story of Hwang Yu-mi, who died aged 23 from leukemia in 2007, four years after joining Samsung's memory chip factory in Yongin, South Korea. The title resonates widely in South Korea because it is a well-known Samsung advertising slogan.

Of three dozen Samsung employees who last year sought compensation for diseases allegedly caused by Samsung, only two won compensation, according to Lee Jong-ran, an attorney who helps tech industry workers who contracted leukemia and other cancers. About a dozen people have filed lawsuits seeking to overturn the welfare agency's refusal to recognize a link between their diseases and working conditions at Samsung, she said.

In the fictionalized account of "Another Family," a sickened young woman and her father are ignored by most reporters and former colleagues as they try to show a link between chemicals used at the factory where she worked and her cancer.

The company, named Jinsung to avoid a possible libel suit, stymies her father's efforts to find witnesses. A company official tails her family day and night, offering increasingly larger sums of money to settle. The names of Hwang and her father are also altered for the movie, to Han.

In one poignant scene, Han's father stands outside Jinsung's factory gate seeking witnesses who could testify in court about working conditions. Suddenly he is surrounded by three buses that blast dance music. Co-producer Daniel Park said the dramatic scene was based on an incident outside a Samsung factory involving two buses.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/10/another-family-movie-samsung_n_4076874.html

also:
english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/627369.html

I would NOT be surprised if the males put chemicals in the women's food as a way to eliminate women from the workplace. This is from working with Engineers from Asia in the Science and TEchnology field.

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that's what my Junior High was like

The part about school in cnn's Chicagoland,  Mostly Puerto Ricans.

There were girls got pregnant in my elementary school.

It's a problem to understand different cultures

May 11, 1995

Samsung Copes With Culture Shock

By Steven Brull

SEOUL— For more than a year, the managing director of Samsung Electronics Co.'s European headquarters near Frankfurt has been distracted by a testy labor dispute over the formation of a workers council.

Rather than devote all his energies to running an expanding European business, K.S. Kim has been fending off court actions and denying union charges that he tried to obstruct worker efforts to form the council. Such councils, which give workers rights to be consulted over hiring and firing decisions, are commonplace in German companies.

This Friday, the employees of Samsung Electronics GmbH will finally get to elect their council representatives. Mr. Kim, who can recite by heart the dates and details of every suit and countersuit over the issue, said he was looking forward to the result.

"Our employees are getting sick and tired of this debate," Mr. Kim said. "Our workers would like to form a workers council to make the outside world quiet."

Samsung's dispute in Germany is a minor problem in a growing list of strikes, fights and other labor problems that South Korean companies are facing as they expand internationally at a frenetic pace.

Driven offshore by rising domestic costs and the need to grow by expanding their overseas market shares, South Korean companies are opening factories around the globe, from Uzbekistan to England to Vietnam. They are also taking on a growing number of white-collar workers in the United States, Europe and Japan.

The pace of expansion is so fast, that conflicts, sometimes violent, seem almost inevitable. Samsung Electronics, perhaps the most international South Korean company, plans to do more than half of its manufacturing abroad by the year 2000, up from just 15 percent now.

Yet compared with Western companies, some of which set up international operations centuries ago, or Japanese companies that gained experience in colonial outposts earlier this century, South Korean conglomerates are still in the teething phase.

"Foreign workers are a challenge for us," conceded Noh Geun Sik, general manager of Samsung Electric's global-operations division. "As we expand more and more, the first problem we face is a lack of globalized managers on our side. It's a problem to understand different cultures."

Without doubt, the expressive, open character typical of Koreans helps develop loyalty and good relations with workers.

But there are deep-seated problems in the traditional top- down, authoritarian style of Korean management. There is also the legacy of grueling military training that virtually all South Korean men undergo.

The worst problems have occurred in southeast Asia, where there have been reports of South Korean managers becoming embroiled in beatings and brawls with low-wage workers. There also are problems such as those in Germany that reflect the difficulties of managing an educated, white- collar work force.

"In the Orient, we more or less operate on the same principles of Confucianism, so it's not a matter of cultural differences," said Lee Kyu Uck, president of the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade. "The problems are unqualified managers and a fly-by-night mentality. They don't respect laborers - whether they're Korean or not."

In many ways, the problems faced abroad by South Korean companies are an extension of the fractious labor disputes that have often brought factories to a standstill for weeks. These disputes reached a climax in the late 1980s, as workers demanded that wages rise to match gains in productivity; the protests also were related to the Democracy movement.

Korean companies acknowledge their mistakes and have programs - many designed by Western or Japanese consultancies - to improve the language and cultural skills of managers sent overseas. They are also trying to recruit local employees for senior positions and give foreign employees a chance to work in South Korea.

For the past five years, for example, Samsung has sent 300 employees abroad for a year of what is called regional research. They have no responsibility except to study the language and culture of the country they visit. Most are sent to India, China, Vietnam and other developing countries, which Samsung and other South Korean companies see as holding key business opportunities.

Mr. Noh, who went to the United States for cultural training two years ago, was given two months to do as he wished. But he was restricted to one domestic airline flight, a constraint that forced him to rent a car and drive around theEast Coast.

"I visited Williamsburg and all the Ivy League universities," he recalled. "I realized there is so much variety and creativity in the United States."

Brandon Mitchener contributed to this article from Frankfurt.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/11/business/worldbusiness/11iht-seoul_0.html

86 percent of all Asian mothers were born in another country

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More moms stay at home, new research says

By Carol Morello, Published: April 8

More mothers have been staying home with their children since the recession ended, but a growing number of them say that’s primarily because they can’t find a job, according to a new study.
Almost three in 10 mothers with children under 18 living with them are stay-at-home moms, an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Pew Research Center showed. That is a 3 percentage point jump from the depth of the recession in 2008.
The Pew study released Tuesday examined the demographic and economic factors driving the rise in stay-at-home moms, a phenomenon that sociologists are still attempting to understand.
After decades of decline, the share of mothers with children in the house began growing around 2000. Around the same time, the percentage of married mothers who hold jobs began to decline.
The shift is most noticeable among women who are immigrants and who do not have college educations.
Though both American-born and foreign-born mothers exhibited increases, 40 percent of immigrant mothers stay home to raise their children, compared with 26 percent of mothers who were born in the United States.
Similarly, though all racial and ethnic groups saw increases, Hispanic and Asian mothers were more likely to stay home with their children — more than one out of three, compared with barely one out of four white and black mothers. Pew’s analysis showed that 86 percent of all Asian mothers were born in another country, as were 60 percent of Hispanic mothers. In contrast, only 13 percent of black mothers and 6 percent of white mothers were foreign-born.
The rise in the share of stay-at-home mothers, however, stalled in the middle of the last decade, continuing through the Great Recession. Since 2010, though, it has picked up again, Pew said.
That suggests that economics and wage stagnation are playing more of a role now.
“When women were asked why they stayed home rather than work, most said it was to take care of their children,” said D’Vera Cohn, the Pew report’s author. “But we saw an uptick in mothers saying it was for economic reasons.”
In 2000, 1 percent of stay-at-home mothers said they were home because they couldn’t find a job. In 2012, that share had leaped to 6 percent.
That suggests that the latest rise may be temporary, and eventually will reverse when wages rise for lower-income workers. That changes the calculation of when it makes sense to pay for child care while a mother works, Cohn noted.
But it will take time to fully understand why the patterns of whether mothers choose to work have switched course.
“There surely is a slowdown in the meteoric growth of women working outside the home,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies family issues. “From 1948 to 2000, the number of married women working skyrocketed. Now it’s plateaued, and it’s very hard to know exactly what’s causing it.”
Despite the recent shift, 20 percent of all married mothers with children under 18 stay home — half what it was in 1970, according to Pew. One in five children in the United States today lives with a stay-at-home mother married to a working husband. In 1970, 41 percent of children did.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/more-moms-stay-at-home/2014/04/07/feb1f8bc-be91-11e3-b195-dd0c1174052c_story.html?wpisrc=nl_wonk

© The Washington Post Company

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Why Asian American kids excel. It’s not ‘Tiger Moms.’

By Fred Barbash Updated: April 8 at 2:20 am

Why do Asian American students outpace everyone else academically?
The most publicized attempt to answer that question — a few years ago, by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua — set off a controversy that rages to this day.
Chua’s answer, originally set out in a 2011 Wall Street Journal opinion article “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” was that “tiger mothers” were prepared to coerce kids into doing homework and practicing the piano, in part by calling them names. Chua (who’s latest book is “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America) held herself and her academically successful children out as examples.
But a new study published in the journal “Race and Social Problems” by two California scholars takes on Chua, suggesting that with all the economic resources at her disposal — she and her husband are Yale professors with highly-educated parents — her children’s success is just as likely the result of socioeconomic and cultural advantages, generally cited by scholars as the main reason some children do better than others.
The authors of “The Success Frame and Achievement Paradox: The Costs and Consequences for Asian Americans” are Min Zhou, professor of sociology and Asian American Studies at the Univ. of California at Los Angeles, currently on leave at Nanyang Technological University, and Jennifer Lee, professor of sociology at the Univ. of California at Irvine.

Scholar Min Zhou, the co-author with Jennifer Lee of a study about Asian American success. (Courtesy UCLA)

A better way to understand Asian American academic success, they write, is to look at families who don’t have resources and succeed nonetheless.
That is exactly what they’ve done. And their findings are pretty straightforward: Young Asian Americans have all kinds of good role models to emulate. Their communities and families make sure they get extra help when they need it. Their families, even on limited resources, manage to seek out and move to neighborhoods with good schools. And they aspire to success with specific goals in mind: medicine, law, engineering and pharmacy. And they aim for the best schools.

It’s not about coercion or some mysterious ethnic gift, they write. It’s about the way they view their horizons, with extraordinarily high expectations — so high that kids who don’t rise to the occasion feel like “black sheep” and “outliers.”
Zhou and Lee studied Chinese American and Vietnamese American communities in Los Angeles without a lot of financial resources or parental higher education — factors that tend to skew other academic studies of success. They focused on two groups: the so-called “1.5 generation” — foreign-born immigrants who came to the United States prior to age 13 — and second-generation families. They conducted 82 face-to-face interviews to get a picture of why these communities are doing so well in advancing their children through high school and college.
Here’s what they found: Although their means are limited, Asian families in the study choose neighborhoods carefully to make sure schools offer honors and advanced-placement courses. To do this, parents use the “Chinese Yellow Pages,” which the researchers describe as “a two-inch thick, 1,500-page long telephone directory that is published annually and lists ethnic businesses in Southern California, as well as the rankings of the region’s public high schools and the nation’s best universities.” They also make sure their kids get plenty of supplementary help such as tutoring.
These families have incredibly high standards, according to the study. If kids come home with a 3.5 grade-point average, parents are disappointed that it’s not 4.0 — and they show it.
If a child gets into, say, Cal State, the question is why they didn’t make it into Stanford.
If a son or daughter comes home and settles for a bachelor’s degree, they’re made to feel less accomplished because they don’t have a PhD.
Both groups in the study, Zhou and Lee reported, adopt a similar “frame for what ‘doing well in school’ means: getting straight A’s, graduating as valedictorian or salutatorian, getting into one of the top UC (University of California) schools or an Ivy, and pursuing some type of graduate education in order [to] work in one of the ‘four professions’: doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, or engineer. So exacting is the frame for ‘doing well in school’ that our Asian respondents described the value of grades on an Asian scale as ‘A is for average, and B is an Asian fail.’’’
Such high standards have positive and negative impacts, the researchers found.
If expectations are that high, many young people will try to meet them. They will get into Stanford and they will get that PhD.
The downside is that those who fall short — the ‘A-minus’ student’ — wind up feeling alienated from their ethnicity. In short, they feel less Asian and more, well, American.
They describe a young man named Paul who chose to be an artist instead of following the path prescribed by his parents. He called himself “the whitest Chinese guy you’ll ever meet.”
They tell of one young woman they interviewed, Sarah, who when asked whether she feels successful compared to her friends who are not Chinese, pauses “as if she had never considered that comparison before and finally replied, ‘If I were to look at my white friends of that same age range, yes I’m more successful. If I were to look at all of my friends, yes, I would say so.’”
They write:

Sarah is not unique in this regard; none of the 1.5- and second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese respondents considered measuring their success against native-born whites (or native-born blacks for that matter). Rather, they turn to high-achieving coethnics as their reference group — a finding that highlights that native-born whites are not the standard by which today’s 1.5- and second-generation Asians measure their success and achievements.
…So strong is the perception that the success frame is the norm among Asian Americans that the 1.5- and second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese who cannot attain it or choose to buck it find themselves at odds with their immigrant parents and with their ethnic identities.

While acknowledging the benefits of this “success frame,” Zhou and Lee are not entirely happy with it. They say they would prefer that academic prowess no longer be “coded as an ‘Asian thing.’”
Then, they write, “Asian American students may be more willing to measure their success against a more reasonable barometer, which may result in a boost in self-esteem and self-efficacy.”

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