Midgley, Jane

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Midgley, Jane

PERSONAL:

Education: Carleton College, B.A.; certified professional coach.

ADDRESSES:

CAREER:

Women's International League for Peace & Freedom (U.S. section), legislative and executive director; Women's Budget Process, Somerville, MA, director; Strategies for Success (executive coaching company), director. Member of board of directors, Jane Addams Peace Association.

MEMBER:

International Coach Federation.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow, Bunting Institute.

WRITINGS:

Women and the U.S. Budget: Where the Money Goes and What You Can Do about It, New Society Publishers (Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Public policy analyst Jane Midgley is an expert on the U.S. federal budget and is a frequent writer and speaker on budgetary topics. As the director of Strategies for Success, Midgley works with nonprofit organizations and provides planning and organizational development assistance, as well as leadership coaching for managers and executive directors.

In Women and the U.S. Budget: Where the Money Goes and What You Can Do about It, Midgley expands on the concepts she has taught women about the U.S. budget; she condenses the sometimes bewildering complexity of U.S. budgetary activity into a more comprehensible message. Since women are often primary caregivers for their children, they frequently exit the workforce and become beneficiaries of government spending on related benefits. Women, Midgley notes, also invariably pay a higher percentage of their incomes in taxes. She encourages her readers to serve as "public investigators," watching for areas in which governmental priorities and women's issues are at odds, and in which women's needs are overruled by governmental powers. In addition to her explication of the budgetary process, Midgley offers insights into how the federal budget can be reworked to be more supportive of women's economic equality, as well as how readers can become involved in this process.

"Midgley is not an academic, and she does not write for academics," noted Randy Albelda in the Women's Review of Books. "Those looking for empirical evidence and a stream of carefully documented sources for her claims about corporate concentration and power or the ways in which women's needs are ignored will not find them. Instead, the book is a polemic geared toward a popular audience. Midgley wants to educate women and rile them up about the gendered implications of the US budget." Reviewers Mary Zepernick and Carol Reilly Urner, writing in Peace and Freedom, called the book "a crash course in ‘budget literacy’ that uncovers the secrets hidden in the national budget." "This book, which brings together taxes, spending, and political decision-making and connects them to the larger economic system as well as to national and international feminist efforts, in a readable and friendly form, is an important contribution," concluded Albelda.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Peace and Freedom, winter, 2005, Mary Zepernick and Carol Reilly Urner, "New Books by and about WILPF Members," review of Women and the U.S. Budget: Where the Money Goes and What You Can Do about It, p. 22; spring, 2006, Leslie Reindl, "Recommended Books," review of Women and the U.S. Budget, p. 30.

Women's Review of Books, May-June, 2006, Randy Albelda, review of Women and the U.S. Budget, p. 18.