>> thank you all very much. [applause] booktv is on twitter and facebook. we want to hear from you. tweet us, twitter.com/booktv or post a comment on our facebook page, and facebook.com/booktv. booktv continues now with caroline fredrickson the author of "under the bus" who discusses the impact of labor and employment laws on working women and their families. on our "after words" program.

>> host: hi carolyn fredrickson. thank you for being here today. i'm so excited to talk about your look set to how working women are being run over. there's a pretty bold and provocative title. so i think we will just jump right into it and i will give you a minute to tell us what you mean by that. just go i want to say what a pleasure it is to be here with you on c-span. so the book, came out of i guess my disappointment really with some of the dialogue that occurred after sheryl sandberg published her book "lean in" which i think that some important things. there are a lot of things that weren't said. they really are what effect the vast majority of women. so "lean in" isn't really an available option. there are challenges are much more exponential so what i wanted to do was expose some of

the broader questions that are affecting women in the workforce and think about what are the possible solutions that we as a nation could be moving towards. >> host: i was going to say it seems like part of your frustration is simply about the conversation around working women and which working women we are talking about. this book focuses on women with less education or lower down on the socioeconomic ladder. you have a legal possible -- policy background anywhere familiar with the family medical leave act but the premise seems we never go far enough and we need more government to help women especially those who are lower on the economic scale. you want to share more about that? >> guest: sabrina there are two things. one is that we simply don't have responses to some very broad questions and broad questions in these aren't just for low-wage women although they are particularly important for them. for example we don't actually have a childcare system in this

country. we have some mandates. we have some subsidized programs that are very underresourced. only 18% of the local children children -- eligible children were able to get into the government subsidize programs but the middle class families very deeply with the cost of childcare and you hear the childcare, the actual trial pair can cost as much as tuition at the university. so we have that out of whack but then what was interesting and troubling for me coming out of the background of policy and law was that as i started looking into some of the laws that i found them believed to be very important and still do is they have some real gaps in there and as i looked into them and looked into the history i realize and that is sort of where the title comes from that and the dealmaking process there were categories of workers and a lot of them were women in women of color that got thrown under the bus so they work explicitly left

out of our wage and don't have a right to organize in a union or who may not be covered by the family medical leave act. i think we don't look enough at the gaps and think about what the impact is. so i started thinking about as i got deeper into this issue and started thinking about the domestic workers who basically have no legal protections and i started wondering for a nanny who doesn't get paid or may not get guaranteed a minimum wage or overtime to protect against discrimination certainly can't join a union what happens when the man he has a sick kid? what goes on in that situation? so was questions like that but i wanted to explore. what is the childcare situation for someone in that category? as i look look more into it and as i said i got into these other

issues of family leave and childcare and discovered even more to my tuesday that the department of labor those surveys of the kind of care that children are in they actually have a category that is quite large called self-care and those are the kids who are just left by themselves. and that for me even if you don't, no matter what your perspective is on working women or whether or not we need a strong government a role in providing a fair workplace the fact that we have a large group of children who are growing up without supervision i think is an economic issue for all of us. the consequences of that are lasting. >> host: one of the things you have read in the book jacket is that a lot of these women and we will get into the specific policies in a minute but they are really systematically left out. do you think that policymakers are overtly eliminating them or

what they are saying we don't need to worry about those women? are they really that bad? >> guest: you know honestly not anymore. it doesn't play out that way. now it's more inadvertent or questions of the cost and at its origins it was actually quite explicit. when i was digging into some of the history around the new deal when congress adopted the flagship pieces of legislation the fair labor standards act and the national labor relations act they were very explicit conversations on the record. coming from what we would call the dixiecrat who reflected a very strong point of view about the southern economy being dependent on the kind of agricultural farming the farm

economy that was dominant in the south and they wanted to protect what they thought of as their way of life and begin its very explicit in talking about how important it is for us to keep our traditions and the black man man, she can't be paid the same as the white man because that's not what we do. so you have these conversations on the record and then you have actual implementation were categories of workers who it was well-known for african-american and many many of them were women women. they were the domestic workers and the farmworkers and a lot of the farm labor movement as well and they were cut out in a concession to the dixiecrat who wanted to preserve their economy as well as the dominant of the white majority. >> host: right, and certainly we both agreed 80 plus years later things have evolved in

many ways, and many good ways but at the same time you point specifically the book to the idea that women are still only paid or white women are still only paid 77 cents on a dollar. we have had this conversation all the time. we just had equal pay day here in washington. lots of women's groups noted having to wake -- make up for those wages. more and more we are seeing outlets questioning this. okay there is a wage gap but it's not quite as large. you think it's fair to keep using this number or should we be using a different number or? are we able to convince people that we need a smaller number? is that the problem? >> guest: well you know i do think it's a fair number but i would agree with those that are

critical that say it's not all sexual discrimination. economists say they are somewhere around the 20% pay gap gap. that 49 or 50% of that is attributable to occupational segregation and we could have an argument about whether that is a choice or whether there are cultural constraints or if it's difficult for women to break into different professions. >> host: some people refer to it as occupational segregation. just go what's interesting is women are in five job categories they were talking secretary, childcare, teachers and so forth and those kinds of jobs are dominated by women and so there's definitely -- to their lower paid them a lot categories of jobs dominated by men.

now there's a question and this is where there may be some disagreement between women's groups and other groups but many women's groups would assert and i would agree with them that because these jobs are dominated by women doesn't mean they should be painless -- paid less. when you look at jobs of equivalent skill and experience it doesn't make sense the jobs that are dominated by men should pay more. even if you say part of the pay gap is due to segregation. that is women go into certain career paths that are lower paid i think that's a question about why they are lower paid and i think it's a reflection of their broader set of constraints and expectations of their ability to earn money. whether or not the caregiving role should be as valued as a role where a man is driving a truck. and i think perhaps somewhat of

an expectation that because women are enabling caregivers that they are doing it as a job discount because it's kind of what they are and whether nature is. >> host: i think some people would say many women are different and we choose different preferences and we have different aptitudes attitudes and women may go into certain jobs that are comfortable and come naturally to them and of course i would think there were also some benefits to the segregation in some ways. we know that men die more frequently on the job. is that somehow reverse discrimination? are we allowing men to do jobs that are more dangerous than women? is that a problem? >> guest: i would be more happy -- more than happy if they wanted to be schoolteachers, it's a good thing for society to have more diversity in terms of whether men or women fill certain roles. i think it's hard for women to move into professions that are

dominated by men for a lot of reasons. going back to sheryl sandberg which may be from the broader culture but we don't want to be be -- we want to be lady lake and a lot of women do. i think there are plenty of samples of the hostility that women can face in those kinds of jobs. i fully agree. i think people should have the liberty to be in the kind of profession they want and that's all i'm interested in looking at at. how do we dismantle the barriers that women want to be schoolteachers. i think that's terrific but i think they should pay teachers adequately and they should pay at the level that is commensurate with the skills that they have. >> host: it's interesting because you do mention that women are still met with hostility and disapproval when they enter male-dominated fields and i was thinking about this.

there's no discrimination or sexism here. i also wonder are they still sort of backwards? is it more pronouncing than say law or medicine or veterinary care. do you think it's worse on the socio- naca -- economic ladder? gets going to really have the data on that type that certainly were some of the most egregious examples come from. i think it may be the segregation in terms of gender is most extreme and those are the jobs that tend to be the most associated with kind of machismo masculinity. i don't want to make too broad of a conclusion that there are

difficulties for women in those professions. i really think it's wonderful that there is some organization that break down those barriers with training. also those are good-paying jobs. being a welder may be something that would be great for women because it pays a decent wage. the door shouldn't be closed for them because their colleagues really don't want america. >> host: of were some women are looking for more flexibility and certainly the restaurant or service industry and the area were a lot of women are able to create their own hours. i remember its legal department trickling down into other areas.

and does it work for more educated women are higher skilled jobs? it makes me think of one that facts facts and it's not that surprising in retrospect. how much more accessible flexible schedules are and the higher earning workers and men in particular are the ones that access family sick leave and vacation days. and you point out that they also have more flexible as schedules generally. if you are salaried employee you don't punch a clock if you have to run out for a dentist appointment in the middle of the day. we don't account for that hour and a half by working an hour and a half another time although people understand that but that kind of ability to deal with daily circumstances and i was

thinking about that on the way here about all of the snow days that we had in the d.c. area and for people who work, and i know this is not just a mother's issue but also a father's issue. the mothers and fathers who were struggling to try to figure out who would feel the stay home and who would go to work and a lot of white-collar folks were able to telecommute or come in late. if you are an hourly worker and if you work at mcdonald's, there are options for you. i've seen data that shows the flexible work hours increase productivity and that ultimately with the economy you have a lower job turnover so that you have greater experience than the workers to stay and you don't have the costs associated with recruiting and training somebody nailed. so i think it's definitely something we should try to push down because i think those of us

who have been lucky enough to benefit from the education and socioeconomic class that has allowed us to be lawyers and doctors have by and large been able to take advantage of those circumstances when we have a family crisis where there is a snow day or whatever reason we night -- might need flexibility her job. >> host: it seemed to. >> host: it seemed to retype while flexibility and flexible hours are some of the white-collar jobs that share jobs is an area where i think we could see a lot of real progress for service industry. you don't need the same person to do the job all week long and especially women who maybe want to take up extra hours here and there and benefit from those kinds of workplace policies. >> guest: absolutely and i think they're interesting examples in other countries. prime minister cameron was a big proponent of flexible work hours in england and one of the things that they did was to guarantee

that men and women who wanted to propose they be it be a short workweek of four or 10 hour days or different configurations come in late, leave late or some other option or a job sharing could make a proposal and the employer had to accept it unless there was some business reason why they couldn't or some economic impact but it was just a matter of rearranging responsibilities that didn't have a major impact i think that's a wonderful approach. the other thing to consider on the flip side is we have situation and retail and restaurant industries are people to another schedules schedules until the day out for the day before so that colin and they are told the star you don't have a shift today or yesterday were working a double shift. and all of a sudden after find

childcare or they don't have work that day meaning they earn less money which means they may not have childcare and that kind of complete lack of control over the schedules hard enough for most people. anyone who has worked in a law firm if they are there in a friday afternoon when they dump a task on your desk and say this is for monday morning understands loss of control of your schedule. and ever day rollercoaster of not knowing whether they are working or not working and how to deal with childcare and other responsibilities. >> host: certainly and maybe we should shift into what some of the solutions are. i gather from what you were saying a moment ago that you do favor and you certainly talked about in the book one-size-fits-all. policies that would link to the larger group of people. poor people have been left out.

you have worked on the issue of the paycheck fairness act and exposing the remaining wage gap whatever it may be. do you worry, certainly some critics would say that a law like that makes women a liability and in fact makes it more expensive to hire in to hire an employee or see women as a potential lawsuit and if there is a man who is equally qualified but maybe that's a safe route. do you worry about that? >> guest: i don't actually. i don't think they have resulted in an impact where women have been -- to employers have been less willing to hire women religious minorities minorities, the disabled and so forth. they have seen the necessary response because those groups who are not being hired or promoted or paid the paycheck fairness act is really designed

to close the gaps and strengthen the enforcement mechanisms. the able payouts doesn't have damages so it's sort of a limp noodle of the statute and the idea of the act was to strengthen enforcement provide a stronger leverage for the eeoc, four enforcement organizations to get employers to pay a fair wage. to move towards transparency. i think a lot of people don't know that there are numbers of employees who are told by their employers that they are allowed either by contract or by the order that they are not allowed to share their seller information with their colleagues. that i can understand.

on the other hand it makes it very difficult for minorities to ever understand where they stand in terms of salaries with respect to their colleagues. the case of lilly ledbetter which is quite famous and she brought the kids to the supreme court is telling. she worked for her employer for several decades and it was only issue is getting close to retirement that she was slipped a note by somebody. she didn't know where it came from. it said you have been paid 40% less than the guys for your entire career and it was shocking to her. she had made it at goodyear is one of the few women at her level and in toward a very unpleasant workplace. her last boss told her that she really did want women in the workplace and then to find out

at the end of the day that she was being discriminated against so significantly. she went to the supreme court and she lost their because of what i think was an inappropriate reading of the statute of limitations. the conservative majority basically said she should have complained when she was first discriminated against witch when she was hired and got her first paycheck they the fact of the matter decades later she didn't know that she was being discriminated against. congress ended up reinforcing what it originally meant which was discrimination was discrimination and she should have been able to make it a claim but by then she had lost because he didn't get change until after her case went to the supreme court. she was up not only all of the wages but she was out of the retirement which was significantly underpaid -- the she was in of the land are paid in terms of her retirement because it was based on her salary. >> host: certainly discrimination exists and it was

found that 74% of women think discrimination is at least somewhat of a problem. so everyone has a story that is widespread and everyone knows it exists. and of course in then we have this issue of privacy and wanted to balance that with transparency. i'm wondering couple of things come to mind. one is is the best thing for women not more laws perhaps but a growing economy and more jobs that could lead to wage competition. employers would have to be more transparent than they would have to compete with other businesses out there because employees would become more valuable to them. do you think that is even perhaps a stronger solution? >> guest: i definitely think a stronger economy helps workers. there's no question and we have seen some movement in wages in the last couple of years as the

economy has recovered however i think that doesn't really address the wage gap and it doesn't address some of the structural issues that we have. to go back to the domestic workers, this is the category of workers particularly the home health aides that is one of our most rapidly growing sectors. this is huge demand for home health aides but they are still carved out of the fair labor standards act. this is a category of workers who are not entitled to minimum wage or overtime and are often expected to work just inhumane hours. they may be going from patient to patient and they have very difficult jobs because they are often dealing with the elderly or disabled, people who need to be moved and lifted cleaned assisted in all sorts of ways. and yet we haven't seen that there is this great demand and there is certainly a huge need

-- we just are moving up so i think i come from the wing of those in the economy that the government actually does play a role and i think coming out of the new deal we saw some of the real significant changes that were brought about because of the workplace laws that were enacted by president roosevelt. so actually i think to great a great extent the economy growing has helped everybody i think in order to counteract the structural problems that we have with the certain types of job categories i think there needs to be a stronger government hand in those particular places. >> host: one area in particular is the minimum wage. you go as far as to say we need a living wage which would in effect be higher than any kind of modest raise.

do you want to elaborate a little bit on that what a living wage really means and the impact too? guess that there are a number of states and municipalities that have enacted that. my state of maryland contractors with the state are paid a living wage and there are a lot of people lobbying to have changes like that push through the federal government. that is if you are getting a big contract from the u.s. government you should have to pay your workers a decent wage. so we have seen there have been a lot of moves across the country to raise the minimum wage. a lot of states have done away with the bifurcated minimum wage which gives employees a much lower wage and a state like washington state which is $15 an hour or seattle $15 an hour. they are not seeing job losses and they are not seeing them

play or flight. it's actually been good for the economy and good for workers and i think it's definitely something that we need to examine very strongly. the minimum wage has not kept pace with overall cost of living and it is not kept pace with the local economy. you see where we are now. we are well behind where we should be that the minimum wage had been actually paid to the economy. >> host: i certainly think there are those businesses that are able to increase their employees wages more aggressively and should be applauded but i'm also noticing this trend especially with jobs that are less skilled the automation. you go into a convenience store now and there's anybody checking you out. you check yourself out in maths seems to be an increasing consideration. i suppose it's worth a conversation and we should talk about in our efforts to micromanage wages are we in fact

going to see more women -- disc is certainly a criticism that is then raised the efforts to make sure people get paid a decent wage i still think the data don't carry that out and there are a lot of job categories that are -- there's nothing you can do. nobody wants to hire a robot to watch their children. not raised on what we have right now as well as home health aides and the person who does your hair or your nails or any number of categories of workers that are just not something you can really do buy a machine. so i think around the margins there is some truth to that but i think by and large they're such a benefit to low-wage workers that is worth moving forward.

>> host: this raises another question which as we think about and maybe even talk about a little bit but the structure of the workplace. we see many many more women in managerial positions in h.r. positions i went very those women are overseeing other women and i wonder when we talk about discrimination do we think that people are too quick to dismiss their employees and not only someone that comes from a family with a business but i also run an organization. guess who i'm absolutely with you on that. >> host: are we too one-dimensional about how employees behave? >> guest: i think it's a very good point. i feel entirely the same. when you have a wonderful employee and you lose them for whatever reason you bend over backwards to make sure we can

structure a workplace that allows them to have a life outside without making too many sacrifices. i think it's very important and i think maybe it's a cultural shift that we need to go to her and maybe it's a cultural shift that we will go through. the fact is that we have well over three-quarters of women in the workforce. we have over three-quarters of women and children between six and 18 who are working and we have two-thirds of women with children under 62 are working and for single moms at a much higher number. we are in a world that we have to learn have to learn to live -- live with. whether or not whatever perception you have about whether people should work or the principles whether they stay home we have to address the fact that we have that women are working and it's unlikely they're going to back to go situation which they don't work

under such high numbers. that's the truth and we care about the next generation the future of our country. we are going to need to invest in work and family make sure that their children have the best care possible. >> host: before we move into childcare subsidies which is one that is important to you as well well, the issue of the family medical leave act since 1993 now and another one of those laws that sounds like covers a lot of people but is simply not enough. maybe you can share more about that. just go unfortunately the family medical leave act is well-intentioned but it covers many fewer people than is understood. for example only existing employees are covered at all and only employees who work over 1250 hours in the previous year.

so estimate show 40% of workers are covered at all. given that king said it's very hard for certain workers to take a day so that the end of the day you see large categories of women acting out -- opting out because they can't support to the consequences of that and that red numbers of studies that analyzed women who have come back to work after cesareans that they didn't heal from very well and were hemorrhaging in different kinds of sicknesses and difficulty with nursing. the impact on mothers to have to go back soon was demonstrable and the impact on children is very significant. unfortunately the family medical leave act hasn't dealt with that very much and i think the authors of the legislation hoped that it would spur more but it

hasn't. so in origin lay the calculation is still only 10% of american workers have paid leave. so that's very low and i think that's a really significant problem and one that i think if we look at other developed countries we are really an outlier in this category. >> host: i thought the numbers were a bit higher but i don't want to tease that out here. i do want to get your opinion on the cost of paid leave not only for employers but other employees the young woman or man who doesn't have a family and has to pick up the slack. i have three young children and i understand the tremendous need for paid time off. at the same time i realized when i'm out of the workplace someone else has to do the work i'm doing and make many of these jobs are very physical jobs. do we have to consider more of those women and those men as

well would be affected? >> guest: well the medical leave act and other policies cover only childbirth a big cover early childcare which can be done by a dad and they also cover other types of families like caring for a living relative. i think everybody has that situation and i can understand in certain circumstances it can be difficult and maybe people feel they are bearing a bigger share the workload but it more or less comes out in the wash because we all want to have that security that if we are suffering from some kind of a family emergency parent is very ill that needs us to be there to be at your parent's bedside in the hospital you wouldn't be

able to do that and not risk your job. it was a very important step forward but either covered by the family medical leave act and there was a few who don't have paid leave. >> host: you mentioned one woman in the book and this might shock some viewers. you talk about her story in which she asked for a day off and she gets fired. i wonder is that the outlier? of course there are people that are just unfeeling but asked of us who oversee staff want our employees to be happy so that they are productive. is that the outlier or does that happen much more? guess goes up rina what are the reason wanted to bring those things out is people who work in large organizations or people who work in professional organizations they are not that unusual examples for these women

who work in that kind of more manual labor, whether they are into plastic doing domestic work that i think that is particularly a difficult situation where they are either working for caring for patients elderly patients were disabled patients or they are caring for children and they are in someone's household. i think that's where many of the most poignant stories occur and they are some outliers and that they are individual examples of one employers of family and one is a woman caring for their children so sometimes they may be become more emotional than they would in a more professionalized atmosphere that we work in. but what i wanted to point out to the reader was these examples are things that are legal. these are things that are legal and women who work in those circumstances don't have protections if they are sick. the pregnancy discrimination act

will cover them if they are pregnant and i think that's great. >> host: in what ways would you tweak some of these laws or implement new laws to actually cover these women that fall through the cracks? >> guest: one of the things that is in play right now is to provide domestic workers in that category of home health aides and mayonnaise is supposed to babysitters so to provide them with overtime protection. there are some interesting historical issues because originally these workers were cut out of the law as we were talking about because of racism and interest in preserving the jim crow economy in the south. it became increasingly clear

that there was injustice done and in the 70s that congress finally passed legislation to amend the fair labor standards act to incorporate those into law. what happened then was that labor department under president nixon issued a rule. so this has been 40 years since then trying to fix that regulation. president obama has issued a rule that would once again try and cover these workers so i'm sure it's implemented it will be the subject of much litigation but i think it's a very important move forward. one of the things that again that surprised me thinking i knew a lot about our employment laws in the categories of workers that have been cut out. as we were talking before there was a moment in time there was

explicit misogyny and racism and then what happened was this was the status quo. in terms of the status quo i worked on the hill and when he draft legislation you're usually looking at models. we were looking at the equal pay act so you sort of update. you don't generally change the whole framework so the existing omissions were just continued on on. i don't have a solution of easily and i think that's far more brilliant people than me but what i wanted to do was say we need to go back to square one and think about what are the protections we want. if that is our frame what is that we want to provide and thinking here is what the fair labor standards act does.

>> host: they're sort of that assessment and one thing that comes to mind for me is that you think about how big the country is. everybody has something. then they want higher ridges and some people want more benefits and more flexibility and i imagine that goes up and down the economic ladder. so is it possible that as we are seeing things like the fm -- fmla and a family medical leave act and others that we are limiting people's choices or another way of putting this is i have somebody who helps me and it seemed appropriate. if she had gone much higher i would have been able to do it. if we have more of these regulations will we find that we can't negotiate pricing? >> guest: you are appealing to the lawyer in me. there's a whole line of the very statute we are talking about

time and this was the big debate to kenya constrained the right to contract? and i think that there was a big debate in the supreme court at the time which struck down president roosevelt statute multiple times trying to limit the amount of child labor but i think where i all if they think there are differences in bargaining power between different groups of people and one of the things that the statute attempted to do is people who are the more vulnerable workers giving them the ability to have leverage on their side and that would be putting a constraint on the employer. so yes it does constrain the ability to negotiate but in a positive way i think particularly when you're talking about individual workers and i think a lot of cases people are

independent contractors working as house cleaners and they may be immigrants and they may not speak english all that well think we are looking at a situation where the employer negotiates a wage that is simply not a fair wage. >> host: when we started the conversation to talk a little bit about sheryl sandberg and the advice he gave to professional women. do you think for working women lower skilled working women there are things they can do outside of government to advance themselves and make it easier for themselves? guess goes up brain that's a very good question and it does make me want to say that sheryl sandberg was right in this area. women are actually doing a lot

to remedy the situation and we have seen the rise of the business representatives. a lot of them are run by women. the national domestic workers association organizing women that are not protected by the nape -- national labor union act. they share installation. they provide skills for each other and connections and i've actually had the immense honor are being invited to a meeting of a group of domestic workers in maryland. it was just an incredibly interesting conversation because they come together on weekends to share these kinds of stories. what is your experience in the workplace? there are at least two, and experiences of domestic workers being subject to sexual

harassment. so they share stories. we try to help each other get into these situations if they are working for a bad employer. but they also these women have gone to annapolis to lobby for minimum wage increase. even when they were protected by the minimum wage there were some engaging so it's interesting to me they can't be like a union so they do things totally different. they talk about working conditions. they talk about wages but they also are moral support for each other. they organized weekend activities and soccer matches in all kinds of things that they have language training and they have helped with legal matters. so i do think there is a lot going on that made me very hopeful but it is a completely new phenomenon. we will have to see how it can be scaled and whether it's going to have a broad impact.

>> host: we will also have to do with the larger conversation because we want to make sure that the more people recognize the person claiming your home or helping your elderly parent is a person with the family and we want to treat them with a sense of respect and hope that more people will speak in those terms. i'm happy to hear you say something positive because one thing it's "under the bus" how working women are being run over a little bit of a downer and also does it feed into this perception that life in america's hostile towards women and the workplace discriminates against women. as a perpetuate the negative image of america or do you think it's something more positive than they are for readers? >> guest: i do want to say it's been progress and as they

say in the book certainly when you look at the sets of laws that were passed in the new deal and beyond where talking about the fair labor act and the social security act and medicare in the family medical leave act and the equal pay act. we are actually looking at significant significant steps forward that are reflected and women have seen some wage changes. i think we can do better. my positive as i think this is a great country but i think it can be better. there is more for all of us to talk about. >> host: one thing that we think about jumping from working women to professional women that when you talk about that technology, do you think that there is a place for technology in terms of making things easier

for them? >> guest: one of the interesting things that has happened is there's very kitted technology around scheduling. unfortunately it has not been used so much to help workers as to be very much on the employer side which is understandable. they developed the software and they are trying to maximize profits. what i think can be seen as a win-win is employees can be given more notice about how will play out. you can still have a fair amount of give and take in the ebb and flow of customer demand and their ability to be responsive to the economy at any given time but also giving the employee more notice. i think certainly the technology is how do we benefit workers? i do believe things like telecommuting for certain kinds of workers action doesn't work for everyone.

if you are a surgeon you have to be in the operating room. but i think it's certainly something i think about. how is it that we can optimize the advances we have made in technology to make it so low-skilled workers get more skills that they have access to more jobs. if something can we figure out how to connect workers with jobs and a better way? that has always been a problem with the labor market which leads to disagreement among economists but i think one labor economist recognizes the system is very broken and that employees don't necessarily know even if there is this job in florida and they are in wyoming how do you match that up? i think technology is a real opportunity to help with those problems. >> host: that's fantastic and how things will change in the future. we have a few minutes left so i would love if you don't mind to sort of put this in the context of the political landscape

today. we have an election coming up. still a few years away. [laughter] where do you see "under the bus" fitting in with women and women candidates in 2016? >> guest: well you know i've been very pleased to see how much a lot of the topics that i write about are part of the national conversation from the minimum wage to childcare to paid leave to sick leave. these are issues that are now being debated in the public arena. president obama has been speaking rightly about the need to move forward on these policies. so i think it's actually a time where some of the ideas that you said were rather provocative they are not so provocative. i think the policy proposals

that i make are very much in the mainstream. i think they are being debated more and more. there are more and more members of congress that are interested in our already supporting legislation that addresses the issues that i raised. so i'm hopeful that we have made more strides. >> host: do you think that we need to have a woman candidate to talk about these issues? of course i think more of these policies come from democrats and republicans. they may have a different approach to dealing with these but at the same time do you think you need a hillary attend or how many of the democrats are onboard? >> guest: the family medical leave act was signed by president clinton and chris dodd was one of the lead proponent. it doesn't have to be a woman although i'm happy to have a woman. i think it would be wonderful to see a woman president whoever she may be whether it's carly fiorina or hillary clinton i

think it would be tremendous for our country to have that forward movement. but i think men are part of families and if they don't have a wife they have a mother or sister. they know they have a mother. i think daughters are sometimes the most forceful proponents for the symbol of why we need to move forward. actually i am hopeful and i think there have been plenty of advances that have helped women that have been pushed by man and as we mentioned earlier in my book i advocate for more universal solutions and a lot of proposals are as helpful for men as they are for women. we don't live anymore in a society. the new deal legislation structure to work place around men working all week in a well-paying job maybe in a

factory, maybe somewhere else are able to afford not having a second income. the wife was able to stay home and raise the kids. that's just not the world we live in anymore so i think many more men are feeling time pressured and constrained and want time with their kids and they are working too many hours and not making enough money. if there weich is -- wife is working they are juggling picking up the kids i think there are a lot of issues that are deeply resonant for men in our society so i think a man just as well as a woman can be a leader. also recently one of the things that i found it me some hope with some of the activism around the recent supreme court case which was dealing with the pregnancy discrimination act. you have women's groups and some of the christian right-wing groups coming together around

needing to protect women in the workplace. women who are pregnant should not be discriminated against, for whatever reason because they have every right to work and whether you use don't want to encourage them not to get pregnant whatever their reason that i think people can come together across the spectrum and realized when need to address these issues because pregnant women are going to be working and they will be going through their pregnancy or terminate their pregnancy and if we want them to be able to continue if we want these be able to ask women to continue with their pregnancy we want to make sure they are not discriminated against. >> host: i love the final chapter called winning together and you put out a book called lean together. [laughter] i like the title of the chapter and i was thinking you were talking more about coming together to create good policies but there's also the issue of how do we work together.

unfortunately it's a rather partisan environment these days. you think that partisanship can be overcome because it sounds like there are ways. are there other ways we can make compromise on some of this? are there going to be conservatives that say there's too much government but we want to help those people. get to childcare is a good example and i personally think government programs can be effective and not only effective but also cost-effective. if there are private solutions i think that is fine. what we need is quality and affordability and accessibility so we need parents to bail to get their kids into those programs and we need to make sure they are not in some unsafe facility with an unskilled caregiver. and we need to make sure they

are affordable. i think there are many ways we can go at that and i think we recognize it's a very important value and the children who are left in self-care which i could not get over that term, it's just not good for the children. >> host: i do think america is a country that is extremely charitable. hopefully we can come to some agreement on how best to help especially working women. any final thoughts on the book that you would like to read -- leave viewers with the one they pick up a copy of "under the bus" they might be thinking about it before? >> host: jaczko one of the things i discovered is in my own family history, and i think my great-grandmother came from sweden and she was very bored. she left her father who sent her

away because he couldn't afford to have her anymore. she has been taking care of her younger siblings because her mother had died. they all died, oliver siblings thought that point her father basically put her on a boat and she came to the united states and she was able to make it. but she worked as a domestic worker. she was a school array made and didn't really think about upstairs, downstairs in her life. ..

>> i think that the largest number of women workers are now in managerial positions do we see a positive future for women in america? >> guest them i do think that we see this as well. and i think as a society we are grappling with it and i think so. >> and i still feel very optimistic about the united states of america and