History > 2006 > USA > Men

Gender Pay Gap, Once Narrowing,

Is Stuck in Place

December 24, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, women of all economic levels — poor, middle class and rich — were steadily gaining ground on their male counterparts in the work force. By the mid-’90s, women earned more than 75 cents for every dollar in hourly pay that men did, up from 65 cents just 15 years earlier.

Largely without notice, however, one big group of women has stopped making progress: those with a four-year college degree. The gap between their pay and the pay of male college graduates has actually widened slightly since the mid-’90s.

For women without a college education, the pay gap with men has narrowed only slightly over the same span.

These trends suggest that all the recent high-profile achievements — the first female secretary of state, the first female lead anchor of a nightly newscast, the first female president of Princeton, and, next month, the first female speaker of the House — do not reflect what is happening to most women, researchers say.

A decade ago, it was possible to imagine that men and women with similar qualifications might one day soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today, that is far harder to envision.

“Nothing happened to the pay gap from the mid-1950s to the late ’70s,” said Francine D. Blau, an economist at Cornell and a leading researcher of gender and pay. “Then the ’80s stood out as a period of sharp increases in women’s pay. And it’s much less impressive after that.”

Last year, college-educated women between 36 and 45 years old, for example, earned 74.7 cents in hourly pay for every dollar that men in the same group did, according to Labor Department data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. A decade earlier, the women earned 75.7 cents.

The reasons for the stagnation are complicated and appear to include both discrimination and women’s own choices. The number of women staying home with young children has risen recently, according to the Labor Department; the increase has been sharpest among highly educated mothers, who might otherwise be earning high salaries. The pace at which women are flowing into highly paid fields also appears to have slowed.

Like so much about gender and the workplace, there are at least two ways to view these trends. One is that women, faced with most of the burden for taking care of families, are forced to choose jobs that pay less — or, in the case of stay-at-home mothers, nothing at all.

If the government offered day-care programs similar to those in other countries or men spent more time caring for family members, women would have greater opportunity to pursue whatever job they wanted, according to this view.

The other view is that women consider money a top priority less often than men do. Many may relish the chance to care for children or parents and prefer jobs, like those in the nonprofit sector, that offer more opportunity to influence other people’s lives.

Both views, economists note, could have some truth to them.

“Is equality of income what we really want?” asked Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who has written about the revolution in women’s work over the last generation. “Do we want everyone to have an equal chance to work 80 hours in their prime reproductive years? Yes, but we don’t expect them to take that chance equally often.”

Whatever role their own preferences may play in the pay gap, many women say they continue to battle subtle forms of lingering prejudice. Indeed, the pay gap between men and women who have similar qualifications and work in the same occupation — which economists say is one of the purest measures of gender equality — has barely budged since 1990.

Today, the discrimination often comes from bosses who believe they treat everyone equally, women say, but it can still create a glass ceiling that keeps them from reaching the best jobs at a company.

“I don’t think anyone would ever say I couldn’t do the job as well as a man,” said Christine Kwapnoski, a 42-year-old bakery manager at a Sam’s Club in Northern California who will make $63,000 this year, including overtime. Still, Ms. Kwapnoski said she was paid significantly less than men in similar jobs, and she has joined a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores, which owns Sam’s Club.

The lawsuit is part of a spurt of cases in recent years contending gender discrimination at large companies, including Boeing, Costco, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. Last month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case against Goodyear Tire and Rubber.

At Sam’s Club, Ms. Kwapnoski said that when she was a dock supervisor, she discovered that a man she supervised was making as much as she was. She was later promoted with no raise, even though men who received such a promotion did get more money, she said.

“Basically, I was told it was none of my business, that there was nothing I could do about it,” she said.

Ms. Kwapnoski does not have a bachelor’s degree, but her allegations are typical of the recent trends in another way: the pay gap is now largest among workers earning relatively good salaries.

At Wal-Mart, the percentage of women dwindles at each successive management level. They hold almost 75 percent of department-head positions, according to the company. But only about 20 percent of store managers, who can make significantly more than $100,000, are women.

This is true even though women receive better evaluations than men on average and have longer job tenure, said Brad Seligman, the lead plaintiffs’ lawyer in the lawsuit.

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Wal-Mart, said the company did not discriminate. “It’s really a leap of logic to assume that the data is a product of discrimination,” Mr. Boutrous said. “People have different interests, different priorities, different career paths” — and different levels of desire to go into management, he added.

The other companies that have been sued also say they do not discriminate.

Economists say that the recent pay trends have been overlooked because the overall pay gap, as measured by the government, continues to narrow. The average hourly pay of all female workers rose to 80.1 percent of men’s pay last year, from 77.3 percent in 2000.

But that is largely because women continue to close the qualifications gap. More women than men now graduate from college, and the number of women with decades of work experience is still growing rapidly. Within many demographic groups, though, women are no longer gaining ground.

Ms. Blau and her husband, Lawrence M. Kahn, another Cornell economist, have done some of the most detailed studies of gender and pay, comparing men and women who have the same occupation, education, experience, race and labor-union status. At the end of the late 1970s, women earned about 82 percent as much each hour as men with a similar profile. A decade later, the number had shot up to 91 percent, offering reason to wonder if women would reach parity.

But by the late ’90s, the number remained at 91 percent. Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn have not yet examined the current decade in detail, but she said other data suggested that there had been little movement.

During the 1990s boom, college-educated men received larger raises than women on average. Women have done slightly better than the men in the last few years, but not enough to make up for the late ’90s, the Economic Policy Institute analysis found.

There is no proof that discrimination is the cause of the remaining pay gap, Ms. Blau said. It is possible that the average man, brought up to view himself the main breadwinner, is more committed to his job than the average woman.

But researchers note that government efforts to reduce sex discrimination have ebbed over the period that the pay gap has stagnated. In the 1960s and ’70s, laws like Title VII and Title IX prohibited discrimination at work and in school and may have helped close the pay gap in subsequent years. There have been no similar pushes in the last couple of decades.

Women have continued to pour into high-paid professions like law, medicine and corporate management where they were once rare, but the increases seem to have slowed, noted Reeve Vanneman, a sociologist at the University of Maryland.

Medicine offers a particularly good window on these changes. Roughly 40 percent of medical school graduates are women today. Yet many of the highest paid specialties, the ones in which salaries often exceed $400,000, remain dominated by men and will be for decades to come, based on the pipeline of residents.

Only 28 percent of radiology residents in 2004-5 were women, the Association of American Medical Colleges has reported. Only 10 percent of orthopedic surgery residents were female. The specialties in which more than half of new doctors are women, like dermatology, family medicine and pediatrics, tend to pay less.

Melanie Kingsley, a 28-year-old resident at the Indiana University School of Medicine, said she had wanted to be a doctor for as long as she could recall. For a party celebrating her graduation from medical school, her mother printed up invitations with a photo of Dr. Kingsley wearing a stethoscope — when she was a toddler.

As the first doctor in her family, though, she did not have a clear idea of which specialty she would choose until she spent a summer working alongside a female dermatologist in Chicago. There, she saw that dermatologists worked with everyone from newborns to the elderly and worked on nearly every part of the body, and she was hooked.

“You get paid enough to support your family and enjoy life,” said Dr. Kingsley, a lifelong Indiana resident. “Yeah, maybe I won’t make a lot of money. But I’ll be happy with my day-to-day job, and that’s the reason I went into medicine — to help other people.” She added: “I have seen people do it for the money, and they’re not very happy.”

The gender differences among medical specialties point to another aspect of the current pay gap. In earlier decades, the size of the gap was similar among middle-class and affluent workers. At times, it was actually smaller at the top.

But the gap is now widest among highly paid workers. A woman making more than 95 percent of all other women earned the equivalent of $36 an hour last year, or about $90,000 a year for working 50 hours a week. A man making more than 95 percent of all other men, putting in the same hours, would have earned $115,000 — a difference of 28 percent.

At the very top of the income ladder, the gap is probably even larger. The official statistics do not capture the nation’s highest earners, and in many fields where pay has soared — Wall Street, hedge funds, technology — the top jobs are overwhelmingly held by men.

    Gender Pay Gap, Once Narrowing, Is Stuck in Place, NYT, 24.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/business/24gap.html

The New Gender Divide

Facing Middle Age With No Degree,

and No Wife

August 6, 2006
The New York Times
By EDUARDO PORTER
and MICHELLE O’DONNELL

Once, virtually all Americans had married by their mid-40’s. Now, many American men without college degrees find themselves still single as they approach middle age.

About 18 percent of men ages 40 to 44 with less than four years of college have never married, according to census estimates. That is up from about 6 percent a quarter-century ago. Among similar men ages 35 to 39, the portion jumped to 22 percent from 8 percent in that time.

At virtually every level of education, fewer Americans are marrying. But the decline is most pronounced among men with less education. Even marriage rates among female professionals over 40 have stabilized in recent years.

The decline in marriage can be traced to many factors, experts say, including the greater economic independence of women and the greater acceptance of couples living together outside of marriage.

For men without higher education, though, dwindling prospects in the labor market have made a growing percentage either unwilling to marry or unable to find someone to marry them.

Doug Thomas, 45, a computer technician with one year of college, has spent more of his adult life securing his financial footing than he has searching for a wife.

“I make enough where sure, I could get married, and sure, the girl would not have to work,” said Mr. Thomas, of Fort Collins, Colo.

But he worries what that would mean for the relationship and whether he and his wife would have time together. “Well, now you’re locked into working all those hours,” he said.

Jeff Enos, 40, a high school graduate and a construction foreman in Kenosha, Wis., said he dated several women at a time when he was younger, but having lived through his parents’ divorce, he wants to avoid a similar fate. That is one reason he has cautioned his girlfriend, with whom he lives, not to pressure him about marriage.

Perhaps most significant, many men without college degrees are not marrying because the pool of women in their social circles — those without college degrees — has shrunk. And the dwindling pool of women in this category often look for a mate with more education and hence better financial prospects.

“Men don’t marry because women like myself don’t need to rely on them,” said Shenia Rudolph, 42, a divorced mother from the Bronx.

In 1980, only 6 percent of men in their early 40’s at all levels of education and 5 percent of women in their early 40’s had never married. By 2004, this portion had increased to 16.5 percent of men and about 12.5 percent of women.

Of the men remaining single, the greatest number are high school dropouts, especially blacks and unemployed men. But marriage is also declining among white men and men with jobs who lack college degrees.

There is no conclusive evidence that marriage helps men. Still, some social scientists worry that not marrying may further marginalize men who are already struggling.

“It is a mistake to think of this as just happening to the underclass at the bottom,” said Christopher Jencks, a professor of sociology at Harvard. “It is also happening to people with high school diplomas or even some college. That is the group that has been most affected by the decline in real wages in the last 30 years.”

The course of Mr. Thomas’s life has been determined as much by his finances as by circumstance or his own character. He is a tall, athletic man with cropped, George Clooney-style hair who projects a kind and upbeat persona — surely a catch to some women in Fort Collins. Yet Mr. Thomas, who was laid off from Lockheed Martin as the electronics industry shifted jobs overseas, has experienced so much job insecurity that for most of his adult life, a stable economic foundation has eluded him.

It is only now, working for Hewlett-Packard, that he has been able to pay off debts and build a nest egg. The job, however, which pays about $56,000 a year, could end next year, leaving Mr. Thomas, who would like to begin a lower-paying career as a graphic designer, feeling a greater urgency to save.

One way he has cut costs is by giving up his expensive one-bedroom apartment. Two years ago, he rented a room in a town house from Anna Mahoney, a single woman four years his junior. They pool household purchases and buy in bulk. Their platonic friendship serves as a stand-in for their families, who live out of state.

Yet their domesticity has also bred a level of intimacy that can alienate romantic partners. Ms. Mahoney frequently refers to herself and Mr. Thomas as “we.” Mr. Thomas dutifully churns the oil in the jars of almond butter and takes out the garbage.

“She always says: ‘You’re going to be my roommate forever. Then when I get married, you’re going to live in my basement,’ ” Mr. Thomas said. “I’m like, ‘Pleeease. When you start dating, I’m going to be so out of there.’ ”

When Mr. Thomas fell in love last year and began bringing his girlfriend to the town house, Ms. Mahoney complained that his girlfriend, a 33-year-old dialysis technician, was sloppy. Meanwhile, his girlfriend objected to the time that he spent with Ms. Mahoney, Mr. Thomas said.

“It was a constant form of stress,” he said. The two had discussed moving in together, but the bickering made them wonder if it was a good idea. In February, after one year together, they broke up.

“I miss her horribly,” Mr. Thomas said quietly one recent Saturday after stopping at a health store to buy vitamins on Ms. Mahoney’s shopping list.

Pool of Potential Mates Shrinks

A quarter-century ago, when fewer women went to college, there was a plentiful supply of potential mates for men who had only a high school diploma. Even men who dropped out of high school could get blue-collar jobs paying decent wages and could expect to find, and support, a wife.

As women started climbing the educational ladder, first equaling and then surpassing men in college attendance and graduation rates, the pool of potential partners shrank.

At the same time, broad changes in the roles of men and women upended the traditional marriage contract in which the husband provided a paycheck in return for the wife’s housework and child care.

First, as more women joined the work force, they became less dependent on men’s earnings. More than 70 percent of women ages 25 to 54 are working today, up from about half of such women 30 years ago.

While women were gaining economic independence, wages were slumping in the blue-collar jobs that in the past allowed less-educated men to support a family. Women, largely employed in service industries more resilient than manufacturing, fared better.

Between 1979 and 2003, the earnings of men with a few years of college but no degree barely kept up with inflation, while those for women rose by 20 percent in real terms. For high school graduates with no college experience, men’s earnings declined 8 percent over the period, while women’s advanced 12 percent.

“In the past guys could drop out of school after finishing high school, or even without finishing, and go into a factory and get a steady job with benefits,” said Valerie K. Oppenheimer, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But there has been a deterioration in young men’s economic position, and women are hesitant to marry a man who is likely to be an economic dependent.”

Not all men have adjusted to the new dynamics of marriage and work, as women have gained greater clout and become more vocal about what they want from their mates. By 2001, wives earned more than husbands in almost one of four marriages in which both partners worked, compared with 16 percent in 1980.

“Changing women’s expectations about what married life should be like has put more tension into these relationships,” Mr. Jencks said. “Men who have graduated from college have been more responsive and ready to accommodate those changes than those who haven’t.”

Though many unmarried men and women do end up living together, cohabitation is a less stable arrangement. There is a 43 percent chance that a couple living together will split up within three years, compared with a 12 percent chance for a breakup of a first marriage in that time. “It’s more like a stopgap,” said Andrew J. Cherlin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

In 2005 there were nearly 5 million households of unmarried partners of the opposite sex, according to census estimates, up from 1.6 million in 1980. In 2004, 36 percent of babies were born to unmarried women.

As a response to some of these trends, many women with limited education have turned theirs sights on “marrying up,” choosing men who may be older, more established and more educated.

“Why would you want to be in a stable relationship with somebody who is unstable?” asked Ketny Jean-Francois, a never-married 30-something from the Bronx who has supported her 3-year-old son on her unemployment check and food stamps since leaving her job as a security guard a year ago. “It’s a myth that all women want to marry.”

Ms. Rudolph has sworn off blue-collar men. For a man to be marriage material, “you have to have a job; you have to be educated; you have your own apartment and a car,” she said. “Both have to contribute something.”

She speaks from experience. She married her high school boyfriend right after graduation, a 2-week-old baby in arms. But her husband, who never graduated, was unemployed for most of their marriage, and the couple broke up after six years.

Determined to find a man who had better prospects, Ms. Rudolph entered a relationship with a basketball player and had three children with him. It ended when she learned he was married to someone else, a revelation that left her badly shaken. “I don’t trust men to marry them,” she said.

Tax policy does not encourage poor couples to marry. At the lower end of the income scale, couples with two incomes face higher marginal tax rates if they marry. Couples can also lose federal dollars when marriage increases their household earnings above the threshold for welfare payments.

According to C. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, a single mother of two children who earns $15,000 a year gets an earned income tax credit of $4,100. If she marries a man making $10,000 a year, the benefit drops to $2,100.

David Popenoe, a sociologist at Rutgers and a co-director of its National Marriage Project, argues that it is the men who are choosing to remain single. He says men do not marry because they do not want to. As unwilling to commit as ever, men have been let off the hook by more permissive social mores that have made it acceptable to live together and raise children out of wedlock.

Joe Callender, 47, a retired New York City corrections officer and a father of four, has had long-term relationships with two women but has never married. One obstacle, he admits, has been his own infidelity.

“Marriage, that’s sacred to me; I’m committed to you for the rest of my life, my last breath,” Mr. Callender said, describing his vision of the institution. “I’m not cheating, looking. Work, home, that’s it. It’s you and me against the world.”

Fears of Divorce

Relaxed mores have also encouraged more gay men to live openly homosexual lives. “I think this could be a minor factor but not a major one” in the decline of marriage, Professor Cherlin said. But it would not explain the gap between the educated and the less so. The percentage of college-educated men who marry has been relatively stable the last few years, while the marriage rate among college-educated women has actually ticked up.

For some men, living with a girlfriend is an attractive alternative given the possibility of a messy divorce. Many men fear that a former wife will take all their money. For blue-collar men, the divorce rate is twice that of men with college degrees.

“From the view of the male, there are pretty big reasons you would not marry,” Professor Popenoe said.

It was his parents’ divorce that showed Mr. Enos, the Wisconsin construction foreman, just how bitter a dissolution could be. Mr. Enos, a compact man with a shock of blond hair and a streak of independence who supported himself in high school by working on a pig farm, rarely saw his father after his parents’ split.

After high school, Mr. Enos joined the Marines. Once his service was complete, he moved back to Kenosha, only to witness another family dispute over his grandfather’s estate. Mr. Enos, who earns about $50,000 a year, lives in a small house bought with some money inherited from his grandfather, and keeps his distance from family.

He has vowed not to mix personal and legal affairs. He has worked too hard, he said, to lose his house and his savings if a marriage were to fail. “I told my girlfriend a long time ago: ‘Don’t pressure me. I don’t want to get married and then divorced,’ ” Mr. Enos said.

The same fear has lurked in Tom Ryan’s mind. Mr. Ryan, 54, an electronics specialist who lives outside Denver, bought his ranch house with a girlfriend over a decade ago. He had to buy out his girlfriend quickly when the relationship suddenly ended — or else lose his home.

His girlfriend, who had been with him for six years, had wanted to marry and have a child. But Mr. Ryan, who attended music college for a year and spent his 20’s singing in a local rock band, did not feel ready.

He loved her, he recalled one afternoon this summer, but was reluctant to settle down. After a decade of playing concerts (including a tour in Japan, a highlight), he had learned relatively late in life how to budget and save enough to pay a mortgage, a contributing factor.

Comfortable Being Alone

Mr. Ryan, who grew up without a father, learned how to be alone. A new girlfriend came along, but he was unwilling to let her move in as much as a toothbrush. They broke up. He went to a community college and got an associate’s degree in electronics. He renovated the basement. He built a soundproof recording room. He learned to enjoy the silence and the ability to be as fastidious at home as he pleased.

When he walks in the front door after a weekend trip or a run or a bike ride, he often puts a commemorative baseball cap on his coat rack, and now, about three dozen hats cover the rack, with no apparent space for a purse or a diaper bag.

“Later in life, will I miss the fact that I don’t have a little son or daughter around?” Mr. Ryan asked. “I probably will. But it’s not totally out of the question.”

For every man who fits into one of the categories of unmarried men put forth by social scientists — men who cannot commit, men who are afraid of divorce, men who have been forced to the edges of the economy — there is a man like Chris Cunningham of Staten Island.

Mr. Cunningham, 41, a sanitation worker, seems to defy any theory about why he is single. He has, he said, simply not met the right woman.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, and now assigned to an office job in Manhattan with the Department of Sanitation, Mr. Cunningham said he was undeterred by his parents’ divorce and was ready for marriage, having just ended a decade-long relationship going nowhere.

He makes a comfortable living at about $80,000 a year. He appears self-deprecating and sweet, and is clean-shaven (his head, too). Eager to have children of his own, he bought Christmas presents last year for several children in Milltown, N.J., where he often spends weekends with his best friend and neighboring couples.

With most of his friends paired off, and few single women in the Milltown clique, his dating life has stalled. “It’s funny,” he said one Saturday as adults mingled and children scampered with water toys at a block party. “You feel kind of like they met someone and got their lives started, and you’re still waiting for it to happen to you.”

Some social scientists have found that married men are healthier and earn slightly more than unmarried men. But it is unclear whether marriage produces higher incomes and better health, or whether people who are richer and healthier in the first place more often choose to marry.

Beyond the questions of finances and health, there is the issue of how content these men are. All the men interviewed for this article looked younger than their age. All said they were happy with their lives, even Mr. Cunningham, with his clear longing for a family of his own, and Mr. Thomas, of Fort Collins, who said he might move to Denver to meet more women.

Mr. Ryan, too, said he enjoyed being single. He stood talking in his kitchen on a Saturday when he had no plans other than a solo bike ride. It was a slow weekend day — his birthday, in fact — and though the phone never rang, he was free for dinner.

    Facing Middle Age With No Degree, and No Wife, NYT, 6.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/us/06marry.html

Caught in Post-Adoption Trap,

Unwed Fathers Fight for Rights

March 19, 2006
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

Jeremiah Clayton Jones discovered that his former fiancée was pregnant just three weeks before she was ready to give birth, when an adoption-agency lawyer called and asked if he would consent to have his baby adopted.

"I said absolutely not," said Mr. Jones, a 23-year-old Arizona man who met his ex-fiancée at Pensacola Christian College in Florida. "It was an awkward moment, hearing for the first time that I would be a father, and then right away being told, 'We want to take your kid away.' But I knew that, if I was having a baby, I wanted that baby."

Mr. Jones has never seen his son, now 18 months old. Instead, he lost his parental rights because of his failure to file with a state registry for unwed fathers — something he learned of only after it was too late.

Under Florida law, and that of many other states, an unmarried father has no right to withhold consent for adoption unless he has registered with the state putative father registry before an adoption petition is filed. And Mr. Jones missed the deadline.

At a time when one in three American babies is born to unwed parents, birth fathers' rights remain an unsettled area, a delicate balancing act between the importance of biological ties and the quick and undisrupted placement of babies whose mothers place them for adoption.

While women have the right to get an abortion, or have and raise a child, without informing the father, courts have increasingly found that when birth mothers choose adoption, fathers who have shown a desire for involvement have rights, too.

But to claim those rights most states require a father to put his name on a registry. While about 30 states now have registries, they vary widely. In some, the father must actually claim paternity; in others, just the possibility of paternity. The deadlines may be 5 days after birth or 30, or any time before an adoption petition is filed.

And registries are a double-edged sword. Indeed, it remains an open question whether they serve more to protect fathers' rights or to protect adoptive parents, and the babies who have bonded with them, from custody battles with biological fathers.

"My specialty is contested adoptions, and the most common contest is where the mom wants to place the baby and the dad objects," said Martin Bauer, president of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, which is working for creation of a national registry. "Registries can protect men against birth mothers who won't disclose the father's name, or actively lie about his identity."

Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit research and education group, sees it differently.

"It's all smoke and mirrors," Mr. Pertman said. "How can registries work if no one's heard of them? And it's just not reasonable to expect that men will register every time they have sex."

In the early 1990's, the two-year fight over Baby Jessica and the four-year battle over Baby Richard highlighted the wrenching dramas of birth parents winning back custody of babies placed with adoptive parents shortly after birth. The widely publicized spectacle of those two young children, Jessica in Michigan and Richard in Illinois, being taken from the arms of the only parents they had known raised a public outcry about the need for speedy, permanent placement.

While a few states have long had putative father registries — New York's registry was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1983 — most were started in the last decade, to head off late parental claims.

In many states, fewer than 100 men register each year — not surprising, adoption experts say, because most young men have never heard of registries, never seen public service advertisements warning them to register if they may have fathered a child. One exception is Indiana, where men are notified of the registry as soon as a birth mother names them as the father, and 50 men a week register.

Adoption lawyers say some birth mothers refuse to identify the father, to forestall interference.

There are no statistics on the proportion of unmarried fathers interested in raising a baby the birth mother has relinquished. Putative father registries are not public, but for use only in adoption proceedings. And because the baby is being adopted, child support from the father is generally not an issue.

Mary Beck, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, said the burden of registering should be the father's. "There are men who complain, 'What, I have to file for every woman I've had sex with?' " Professor Beck said. "But men are on notice of possible pregnancy by virtue of having had sex, and the alternative is leaving it up to the women to chase them down."

Even for registered men, the system is far from perfect. Because the registries are state by state, the father's claim will not show up if he or the mother has moved — or the baby was surrendered for adoption in a different state specifically to avoid a challenge.

In one widely publicized case, Frank Osborne of North Carolina challenged his 5-month-old son's adoption in Utah. The Utah Supreme Court rejected Mr. Osborne's claim, but a dissenting judge found it unfair that Mr. Osborne could not prevent the removal of a child he had lived with, and supported, until the mother "unilaterally and clandestinely" brought the boy to Utah.

Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, will address that problem in the Proud Father Act, legislation to be introduced in Congress later this year, creating a national registry.

"In a perfect world, everything would be linked so that everyone could find out if a man had registered or filed for paternity anywhere in the country," said Jim Outman, a lawyer in Atlanta who has consulted on the Landrieu legislation. "But in the real world, the left hand doesn't always know what the right hand is doing. If there's nothing in the records in their county, their state, how is an adoption agency supposed to know there's a father who's going to come forward in two years? There has to be some security for the adoptive parents and the child."

One self-made expert on the registries is Erik L. Smith, an Ohio paralegal who fathered a child in Texas. The child was placed with an adoptive family immediately after birth and lived with them for several months before Mr. Smith tried to assert his rights. In an unusual resolution, Mr. Smith left his son, who is now 13, with the adoptive family but won the right to be a noncustodial father with visiting rights.

Mr. Smith was naturally intrigued when he heard of the Ohio registry in a class where the professor explained that babies born to unwed parents can be adopted without the father's consent if he did not register within 30 days after the birth.

"I asked if that meant that, to protect his rights, a man should register every time he has sex with a new partner, and he said yes," Mr. Smith said.

So he tried. "I called information and asked how I could contact the Ohio putative father registry, but there was no listing," Mr. Smith said. "I searched the Internet, but couldn't find any address. I finally found a hot line number, after calling information again, and then I called the registry office, which turned out to be just a few blocks away. The guard there said they didn't have anything like that. Ohio's improved in some ways since then, but as long as registries aren't publicized, I think they just work as a way to get rid of fathers like me."

Glenn Spraggs, a 22-year-old Cincinnati man, was recently caught short by ignorance of the Ohio registry. His girlfriend, Sharicka Watson, had a baby boy, Thomas, on Dec. 2, and Mr. Spraggs, who also has a daughter with Ms. Watson, was with her when he was born. Ms. Watson has told reporters that she had talked about a possible adoption with Mr. Spraggs, but he said he had no warning that less than two weeks after the birth, Ms. Watson would surrender Thomas for adoption.

"No one told me anything," said Mr. Spraggs. "When I found out he was gone, I called the police to see if they could help get him back, or file kidnapping charges or something, but they said there was nothing they could do because it was an adoption. By the time I heard about the registry, it was too late."

Although the Ohio registry allows men 30 days to file, a judge had terminated Mr. Spraggs's parental rights when Thomas was 19 days old. After Mr. Spraggs hired a lawyer, the adoption agency returned Thomas to Ms. Watson, who now wants to raise him. A hearing on the case is scheduled for tomorrow.

Carol Sanger, a family-law professor at Columbia Law School, said registries reflected society's deep skepticism about unmarried fathers and the belief that most are irresponsible. "If we want registries to mean anything," Professor Sanger said, "we'd have to teach them in every sex education curriculum in every school, and publicize them everywhere."

In Florida, legislators made a gesture in that direction. The 2003 law creating its registry requires the State Department of Health "within existing resources" to distribute pamphlets on the registry at every office of the Health Department, the Department of Children and Families and the Bureau of Vital Statistics.

But when Barbara Busharis, a family law professor at Florida State University, sent students to find the brochures, they had no luck. "They couldn't find anyone who knew anything about the putative father registry," Professor Busharis said.

Mr. Jones's case illustrates the dangers of ignorance. The identity of his former fiancée is confidential, but the court papers detail Mr. Jones's struggle to prevent the adoption. He tried repeatedly to contact his ex-fiancée, who disappeared from his life when her parents took her from school and to another county. He called her friends, her brother, her pastor. He hired a Florida lawyer and filed a paternity petition the day before the baby was born, in the county where she previously lived. But that lawyer, now deceased, apparently knew nothing of the putative father registry, and never mentioned registering.

"I believe I will get my son," said Mr. Jones, who is appealing the termination of his rights. "I don't think there's any greater right that you could trespass on than a parent's right to his child."

In her brief, Allison Perry, Mr. Jones's appellate lawyer, called the registry "a well-kept secret," with just 47 registrants for the 89,436 out-of-wedlock births in 2004. Mr. Jones, living in Arizona, had no reason to know of it. The adoption agency that alerted him to the pregnancy never mentioned it, and when the agency later sent him a letter, it enclosed information on a Florida registry for birth parents interested in a reunion when the children grew up, but nothing on the putative father registry.

Jeanne Tate, a lawyer representing the adoption agency, said that because it represents the birth mother's interests, it could not advise Mr. Jones of his rights. Even the call to Mr. Jones went beyond the agency's legal obligations, she said. Ms. Tate, who is working to get public service advertisements publicizing the registry, believes that, over all, the registry works well.

"It's a lot better than what it replaced, which was the 'scarlet letter' law that made single women placing their babies for adoption publish their sexual histories in the newspaper," she said. "What's good about the law is that it provides clear guidance on whether a baby is or isn't free for adoption, so you don't get into those heart-wrenching situations where a baby who's been placed has to be removed."

In most court cases, fathers who miss registry deadlines have lost their cases. But Ms. Perry argues that the Florida law, applied as mechanically as in the Jones case, is an unconstitutional intrusion on men's fundamental rights.

"Jeremiah Jones did everything he could reasonably do to establish a relationship with his child," she said. "It's just inconceivable that the government can take away his child because he missed a filing deadline."

Caught in Post-Adoption Trap, Unwed Fathers Fight for Rights, NYT, 19.3.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/national/19fathers.html