Both of my grandmothers worked outside their homes.

My father’s mother was a farm wife until my grandfather’s alcoholism and abuse drove her to divorce him. I remember being told she worked as a cleaning woman to support her youngest son, my uncle, while my father was sent to live with another farm family.

My mother’s mother, who died at a very young age, ran a restaurant with my grandfather, who preceded her in death.

My own mother worked in the early years of her marriage, and returned to the workplace when I was a teen-ager out of economic necessity.

Work always figured into my ideas about the future. Before I graduated from high school, I had worked as a babysitter, a waitress and a caterer’s assistant. During my first marriage, I was often either the sole or primary breadwinner, and since my divorce and remarriage, I have been unemployed only once. For about a week.

I work. And it’s not just what I do. It’s part of my heritage. It’s a large part of who I am.

According to A Woman’s Nation, an extensive report on the status of American women, I was among the minority of mothers who worked outside the home in the 1980s. Today, those numbers have evened out. Children no longer keep women out of the workplace, and because of that enormous economic shift, much of the 450+ page report addresses the impact of work on women and their families.

The workplace gender shift is truly startling. Just 40 years ago, women held about 35 percent of American jobs. Today, women are fully half the work force. We are over-represented in certain fields: nursing, retail sales, home health aides, clerical, and elementary education. And we are under-represented at the top in the corporate world.

But our numbers are growing, and according to the report, co-presented by California’s First Lady Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, they’ll only increase. Job growth projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics through 2016 shows the vast majority of new jobs will be created in fields that are typically dominated by women.

What’s more, an astounding 70 percent of all the jobs lost since 2007 were held by men.

Over and over again, statistics and research reported in A Woman’s Nation took me back to one conclusion: While we still have many choices, work has become an integral part of most women’s lives. Our failing economy should be stripping the veneer of sexism off the workplace. But it took an act of Congress for Lily Ledbetter to finally get fair treatment from her employer.

Too many parents are still penalized in large and small ways when they put family before work. Too many employers still haven’t gotten the message that a family caregiver who has time to address critical needs at home will be more productive and less absent.

Women still earn, on average, 77 cents to every dollar a man earns. Still. In this economy. Even college-educated women, who start losing ground the minute they graduate.

A Woman’s Nation combines a dizzying array of workplace studies that, time and again, expose clear, gender-based gaps and inequities that affect both men and women. Jobs are still largely sex-segregated, which is as unfair to men as it is to women, and maybe even moreso in our emerging service-driven economy.

As the report concludes, we can no longer look at the workplace through the lens of gender. That means approaching every aspect of employment and public policy based on the assumption that men and women have equal responsibility for work and home life. It means recognizing, as have other industrialized nations, that parents need to work and spend time at home to fully support their children. Policies recommended by Ann O’Leary and Karen Kornbluh in “Family Friendly for All Families” include reforming paid family leave and social security retirement benefits, retooling wage and hour laws, and increasing support to families for child care, early education and elder care.

A Woman’s Nation shows the impact of workplace sexism and gender separation spreads far beyond just the lives of women. Its clear policy recommendations would accomplish something we always talk about in this country, something our churches and schools and governmental leaders always say they want, but never seem to accomplish: putting family, in all its glorious and varied compositions, first.

Read A Woman’s Nation.

If ever there was a “Year of the Woman,” it is this year, with the release of two comprehensive studies on the status of American women.

My plan is to finish reading these two and a Michigan leadership study over the long holiday weekend, but I can tell you this so far: “A Woman’s Nation,” produced by the Center for American Progress and Maria Shriver; “2009 Women’s Leadership Index,” produced by Michigan based Inforum, and “Benchmarking Women’s Leadership,” released last week by The White House Project, must provide the basis for some serious and significant policy discussions.

The Shriver Report, at 400+ pages, picked up the most media coverage, including a week-long NBC series with Shriver, a media celebrity in her own right and wife of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as guest editor. Of course, as Lauren Zalaznick, the president of NBC Universal Women and Lifestyle Entertainment networks, announced the news project, she said…

that NBC would also release results of a complementary study, conducted by GFK Roper, into consumer behavior of women, which she said would include “eye-opening information” about women’s buying power and its impact on “advertising and the marketplace.” — “NBC plans a week of coverage on women.” New York Times, September 29, 2009.

Much less discussed has been The White House Project’s “Benchmarking Women’s Leadership,” an extraordinarily comprehensive look at women in leadership positions – or the lack thereof – across diverse sectors. Simply put, both of these studies show an abysmal percentage of women represented in leadership positions across the board: politics, business, journalism, academia, entertainment, law, military – you name it.

Among the sectors included in The White House Project study, the highest percentage of women in leadership positions appeared in academia. Care to guess the percentage of women who are full professors or presidents of colleges? I would have thought around 50 percent. It’s not even half that.

Women in academia have actually lost ground when it comes to wage parity, from 83 percent of male faculty salaries in 1972 to 82 percent today.

Overall, American women hold an average of  just 18 percent of leadership positions. Although limited to the business world, Michigan numbers measured by Inforum’s 2009 Women in Leadership Index are even smaller. The White House Project report found 15 percent of corporate board members are women; in Michigan, that number drops to 9.5 percent.

Michigan has lagged behind other states when it comes to women in need as well. A 2004 report, “The Status of Women in Michigan,” gave the state average and less than average grades in employment and earnings, political participation, economic autonomy and a failing grade in reproductive rights. Even the number of women serving in the Michigan legislature is dropping. Of 110 state lawmakers, only 20 are women. In 1998, 31 women were elected to the House (The Test of Time: Coping with Legislative Term Limits, edited by Rick Farmer, John David Rausch, Jr. and John C. Green. 2003 Lexington Books).

If we change these inequities, I believe we can change Michigan. And if we can change America’s Recession Poster Child, we can change everything.

Read A Woman’s Nation.
Read Benchmarking Women’s Leadership.
Read 2009 Women’s Leadership Index.

During lunch with friends this afternoon, someone mentioned getting a real deal on rechargeable batteries at the local Kmart. “Everything’s seventy percent off,” he said. “It’s the last day.”

Those of us in Michigan know all too well the saga of Kmart’s bankruptcy, merger and downsizing. The company’s world headquarters in Troy has stood empty since the retailer moved to Illinois. Now, in my city, we’ll have another sprawling expanse of concrete and asphalt standing empty. But not before shoppers get one, last deal.

We went with the intention of buying a birthday card for my father-in-law. We picked through three racks of stationery, checked out the fixtures for sale in the back, and as we headed toward the cash register to check out, a booming voice announced everything in the store was now 90 percent off.

All of a sudden, I became more interested in the meagre leavings that remained after months of “going out of business” discounts. We scouted the clothing racks, where my DH found a pair of jeans and I picked up a few t-shirts for my grandchildren. I strolled slowly through each aisle, examined items more closely, debated whether discounts made up for damage and wear, picked up a few odds and ends.

Seventy percent wasn’t enough for me to make an effort. Ninety percent changed my mind. I still didn’t find much of anything I wanted to take home with me. But at least I looked.

Made me wonder what else I miss because I don’t feel “incentivized” enough to check it out.