by Ada Calhoun
No one found it funny.
Fair enough. If anyone who’s not in that world makes a joke about PTA moms, I defend those women to the death. Because the truth is that this is how things get done, especially at public schools—how the funds get raised, how the volunteers are wrangled, how the teachers receive their gift certificates and their oversized greeting cards signed by the cast of the school musical.
To people ignorant of these threads, the labor is invisible. It is also, as anyone who even comes close to it can tell you, exhausting. Many hours and dollars a year go into reading these emails and then acting on their directives—sending the kid in with a bagged lunch for the museum trip, buying something for the class basket, wrapping the Secret Santa present, venmoing Angela for the principal’s gift. This is an inconspicuous “mental load” that women commiserate about: the holiday gifts and grocery lists and travel plans and all the other “little things” that can eat your brain.¹⁹
Time-use surveys show that while Gen X men do more at home than their fathers did, it’s still not enough to spare women the bulk of the work. Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 book, The Second Shift—which showed that working women came home from the office and did a second shift as homemakers—remains timely.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2016, fathers reported spending eight hours a week on child care. That’s more than three times what fathers spent with their children in 1965. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, working women with children under the age of six still spend an average of 1.1 hours of each workday physically taking care of them. Men? Twenty-six minutes.²⁰ According to Pew, men today do ten hours a week of housework, up from four. Not enough to close the gap.²¹
Recent Pew research on two-income families showed that fathers said they shared household work and child care equally.²² Mothers disagreed, and their “perceptions are supported by plentiful research,” according to the New York Times.²³ According to another report, after a baby was born, women’s total time working—including paid work, child care, and housework—went up twenty-one hours a week; men’s climbed twelve and a half.
There is still a presumption that men are the heads of household, even when they earn less and do less. In fact, according to a 2018 report from the US Census Bureau, both men and women in a heterosexual couple tend to misrepresent—even to census takers—their incomes if the woman earns more. Women understated their income by 1.5 percent and men exaggerated theirs by 2.9 percent. The researchers who noticed this called it “manning up and womaning down.”²⁴
Part of the problem may be that women have moved into formerly “male” work without the reverse being true. “the jobs that many men used to do are gone or going fast,” Isabel Sawhill and Richard V. Reeves, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, wrote in the New York Times.²⁵ “And families need two engaged parents to share the task of raising children. As painful as it may be, men need to adapt to what a modern economy and family life demand.”
Instead, changing gender roles are causing a backlash. “Women who earn more than their husbands,” Sawhill told me, “actually do more housework in an effort to compensate for their higher earnings and the psychological drama involved.”
And even though women tend to say that they want men who help with the kids or do more at home, when they find such a man they may despair in the way that “Breadwinner” did in a letter to the advice podcast Dear Sugars: “I hate that I want a more traditional lifestyle with a husband who can provide for me. I am so ashamed of my feelings.”²⁶
Fantasies of an equal partnership, in which both partners do equal amounts of work, make equal amounts of money, and each cook dinner three and a half times a week, typically run up against the reality of just how grueling it is to take care of children when both parents work. Often, both parties wind up feeling underappreciated.
At the other end of the caregiving rack are Generation X’s aging parents. While men are doing more these days to take care of the elderly as well as children, the main burden still falls on middle-aged women (average age: forty-nine) more than on any other group.²⁷
Many of us deal with aging parents who are divorced, which often adds tension while doubling the number of homes that need cleaning and fridges that must be stocked with food.²⁸ Moreover, because we were born during a baby bust and are apt to have few siblings, we can count on less backup. In 2010, the ratio of possible caregivers for a person over the age of eighty was 7–1. By 2030, it’s predicted to be 4–1; by 2050, just 3–1.²⁹
The cost is significant, especially for women. According to a 2011 MetLife study, when a woman leaves the labor force early to care for a parent, the potential toll of lost wages and lost Social Security benefits averages $324,000 over her lifetime.³⁰ Six in ten caregivers become obliged to make changes at work, like taking paid or unpaid time off.³¹ Family caregivers spend about $7,000 per year on out-of-pocket costs relating to caregiving; for women, that’s an average of 21 percent of their income.³²
AARP’s family and caregiving expert, Amy Goyer, told me that she has lived these stats herself. For about a decade, she took care of both her ailing parents and an ill sister, while working full-time. She said she believes that, ideally, women come into their own in their forties and fifties, finding their true callings in life, but that often today: “women are too busy to even think about it.”³³
The caregiving rack is likely to stretch Millennials and Gen Z even more than Gen X. As cancer treatments progress and people live longer with chronic illness or dementia, the absence of family leave and of affordable health insurance could prove yet more debilitating for those cohorts in midlife.
There is one positive trend, for younger women: the gender gap in caregiving is narrowing, though the pattern of having children later and parents living longer persists. It didn’t happen in time for Gen Xers to benefit that much, but younger men appear to be taking on more as fathers, husbands, and sons. According to a recent AARP report, Millennial men in the United States actually do 47 percent of caregiving.³⁴
At the first-night party of a professional conference I attended in Miami, I fell into conversation with three women. The first woman I’d encountered as we waited for a shuttle bus to the party. She had just ended a phone call and looked perturbed.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Well, no,” she said. Her husband had encouraged her to come to the conference. She deserved a night off away from their little kids, he’d said. Mere hours later, he had palmed the kids off on her in-laws. She wanted them home, with him watching them. Should she change her flight and go back early? She opened an airline app on her phone.
The next woman onto the bus was also frowning. Her five-year-old daughter had just bawled at her on FaceTime, telling her she should come home, and—apologies to the young lady—the exact wording was: “Why aren’t you heeeerrrreeee???”
The third woman, when about to take the conference stage for a presentation, had received a text with confusing news of a playground accident involving her child. She made it through the hour, then called home to learn it wasn’t a big emergency after all.
We stood at the party in our cocktail attire and high heels. Up walked a chiseled male author. We asked what book he was promoting at the conference. He told us that he had built a raft out of plastic bottles and sailed it across the Pacific.
I felt a combination of awe and envy, attraction and resentment. This guy didn’t seem like someone who had babies wailing at him on FaceTime. He did not appear to be thinking about rebooking a flight to reclaim children from in-laws. He was just enjoying the warm Miami night. Did he have a family? Many of the female authors at the festival mentioned their spouses and children in their author bios; the male ones rarely did.
A waitress came over with a tray of drinks. The male author casually reached to take one. We women knocked ours back like marathoners drinking Gatorade.
America gives middle-aged women little support in
their caregiving roles. While the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) has been in place since 1993—the federal law allows eligible employees of public agencies or private companies with fifty or more employees to take off up to twelve weeks for health, pregnancy, newborn, or other family caregiving needs, unpaid, without being fired—US workplaces mostly ignore the needs of working parents, 40 percent of whom aren’t covered at all under FMLA.³⁵
In nearly every other developed country, women have help from the government. The UK famously offers six weeks of parental leave at 90 percent pay, followed by a flat rate for another 34 weeks, but even Turkey, China, South Korea, Mexico, Indonesia, India, and Saudi Arabia permit at least seventy days at half pay.³⁶
According to the American Psychological Association, health insurance anxiety pervades the United States. Some 66 percent of American adults, at all income levels, report being stressed by the expense of health insurance.³⁷
“It is by this point a commonplace that inequality is as bad as it has been in a century,” writes Emily Cooke in a review of Alissa Quart’s Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,³⁸ “that every sector of the population save the richest is treading water at best.” She ends her review with a note that she and her partner, both having lost jobs recently, can’t see themselves having more than one child.
One of my son’s best playground friends when he was a toddler was a little girl named Ella. Her Swedish mother and I spent many days together with them, negotiating the naps and snacks and activities and the odd work email popping up at the exact moment the kids were colliding on the slide.
Johanna had lived in the United States for several years, but there came a point when she and her husband, who is from Florida, hit a wall. They were working too hard with too little to show for it. So they moved to Sweden. My husband and I bought a bike and a dresser at their garage sale to remember them by.
After many years away, Johanna and Ella recently came to visit. I asked how the move had worked out. Johanna described the first month back in Europe as a revelation. It’s not entirely fair to compare the complicated, vast United States with a relatively tiny, largely homogeneous country, but I think there’s a lesson here.
“When we got back to Sweden,” she said, “it took two weeks before Ella got into kindergarten. It was really close to where we stayed and in these pretty little red houses. It was free. And they got lunches—good lunches that she still talks about, actually.”
I asked Johanna what having her child in a free, high-quality school eating free, high-quality food every day did for her as a mother.
“I could start thinking again,” said Johanna. “It was amazing. I realized: here we can actually get a balance in our lives again.”
Religious communities once played a significant part in American life—offering fellowship, advice, and material help, from child care to casseroles, not to mention a unifying concept of universal order and purpose. Generation X has largely rejected organized religion. As a nation, we are still in name religious (71 percent Christian), but the number of people checking “none” on religious-affiliation surveys keeps rising.³⁹ Americans in their twenties and thirties are less likely to regularly attend services now than at any time in recent US history.⁴⁰ Middle-aged women may opt instead for individualized practice of yoga or Buddhism.⁴¹ Astrology is booming.⁴²
In a pinch, the occult provides a narrative. Maybe it’s: “You drowned in a past life, and that’s why you’re scared of water now.” Or maybe it’s: “The reason this is a hard time is that you’re in a Saturn return, and that’s throwing everything out of whack.” What a gift to hear that your miserable week is not your fault, just a planet that will soon cycle away.
Mira Ptacin, author of The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna, told me she likes having mediums on call. “I can text them anytime, day or night, and be like ‘riddle me this,’” she says. “And they will provide me with some answer. The last time, one of the mediums gave me an accurate date of when my parents would sell their home. I just texted again because I’ve been having a weird, nagging sensation about my dad’s health.”⁴³
Astrology and psychics offer breaks from wondering. Wondering can be so painful. Making decisions, seeing patterns, and imagining the future can be so hard. How soothing to be told that magic is real, providing ready reasons for loss or failure.
Also: crystals don’t require preauthorization. Across the country, there is an alarming shortage of mental health professionals, particularly those who take insurance.⁴⁴ A psychotherapy session might help more than a gong bath, but which is cheaper?
In 2018, I was invited to teach a memoir seminar at a creative writing conference. Teaching fiction down the hall was the novelist Min Jin Lee, who had recently won fame with her book Pachinko. The teachers had to give little lunchtime talks and I went to see hers. She described how she had worked on her writing for many years with very little support. Almost no one believed in her, she said. She made no money from it. The world seemed to want her to quit, to focus on her house and family, to stop trying to become a published author.
At one point, she’d gone to a writers’ colony, paying $2,000 she couldn’t really afford in order to do the residency, and she cried at night from missing her young son. One day, she heard a fellow writer say how embarrassing it was that there were housewives who had paid to be there rather than attending on fellowships.⁴⁵
“I realized,” Lee said, “it was me she was talking about.”
Today, Lee encourages others to keep doing whatever they feel called to do that isn’t taking care of other people.
“I bet when your friend is sick, you bring over food,” said Lee. “When your mother needs to go to the doctor, you take her, even when she doesn’t ask nicely. When the school nurse calls, you rush to pick up your child even when you have a lot of work to do. You know how to do this already: love when it’s difficult. It’s a superpower. You just need to use it for yourself, too.”
During the Q&A, a middle-aged woman in the audience raised her hand. “But I feel guilty taking time away from my family to write,” she said. “I think about all the things they need.”
Lee looked the woman in the eye and said, “But what about you?”
The question hung in the air.
4
Job Instability
“I should be in the prime of my career. Not only do I feel like I don’t have a career, I don’t even have a job.”
“I don’t know that I have a formal career, not one I carefully chose and then built,” said Lori, forty-one, who grew up in Pittsburgh and is now a contracts analyst in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I just sort of wandered around until I finally landed in my current job. And it’s fine. It’s corporate, it’s safe. Predictable. But sometimes, I have these moments of clarity—usually during lengthy conference calls. This voice in my head suddenly starts shouting: What are you doing? This is pointless and boring! Why aren’t you out there doing something you love? Name one thing you love! Cheese? Okay, great. Let’s get some goats and start making cheese, and we can sell it from a truck. We’ll call it something clever. And then, I spend the rest of the conference call thinking up names for my imaginary cheese truck: Hmm, some pun on a wheel? Fromage on a Wheel?”¹
So why not go ahead and become the Fromage on a Wheel lady?
“I have friends who have told me over the years, ‘Just quit your job and be a baker or be a cheese maker,’” she said. “I’ve never had that option. Especially now. We have a child. You want to provide security and safety and health insurance. Those things overrule your own personal preferences. What if something really bad happens? Or if we lose a job?”
She shuddered.
The overall wage gap has closed somewhat—to eighty-two cents on the male dollar in 2017.² But the gap increases when you look at women in middle age.³ Claudia Goldin, former president of the American Economic Association and a widely acknowledged forc
e in the field, has pointed out that by the time college-educated women are forty years old, they earn just seventy-three cents to a man’s dollar. After graduating with an MBA, women earn ninety-two cents. A decade later: fifty-seven cents.⁴
A 2018 study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) reported even more dire news: Looking back over a fifteen-year span, the IWPR observed that when you take into account women’s breaks from full-time work, the wage gap widens to forty-nine cents to the typical men’s dollar, significantly less than the eighty cents usually calculated using a single year of census data.⁵ The report found that women who take just one year off make 39 percent less than women who stayed in the workforce for the full fifteen years.
Despite the prevalent gap, almost a quarter of women now manage to outearn their husbands.⁶ But women are still underrepresented when it comes to top-paying jobs.⁷ A 2018 report by PayScale, a compensation-research firm, found that “by midcareer, men are 70 percent more likely to be in executive roles than women.” In late career, the rate soars to 142 percent.⁸ That’s now, when many Gen X women are in mid or late career.⁹
Only 3 percent of venture capital goes to women-run companies.¹⁰ As of 2019, women hold just 4.8 percent of CEO positions at S&P 500 companies.¹¹ In fact, as you may have heard, fewer women run large companies than men named John.¹²
Gen Xers now hold roughly 37 percent of management positions in the United States and 51 percent globally.¹³ But, just as Generation X ages into managerial positions, those positions are vanishing. In the past two decades, US corporate hierarchies have become flatter, with a reduction, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, in the ranks of middle managers.¹⁴ It seems that every day there’s another report of a company’s bold new plan to cut costs and increase annual savings by “streamlining”—read: having fewer people do more work.¹⁵