He concluded his message by speaking to the parents: “If a child grows up with parents who have work, and have some education, and can be role models, and can teach integrity and responsibility, and discipline and delayed gratification,” then you have given “a child the kind of foundation that allows them to say, ‘My future, I can make it what I want.’”
WORKING-CLASS MEN MARGINALIZED
In the post–World War II decades of the 1950s and 1960s, a man completing high school was assured a low- or middle-skill job with decent security and could marry and expect to play the breadwinner role in the family. Now, working-class men can expect to make dramatically less compared to the wages of the nonworking class, and they are pulling back from both the labor force and marriage. While 90 percent of male college graduates are in the labor force, just three-quarters of high school graduates and two-thirds without a high school degree are. In 1960, only 10 percent of male high school graduates never got married, but that has surged to 25 percent today.28
While men are growing marginalized, women are on the move, adapting to the new economy and the evolution of gender roles and marriage, taking risks, and getting more education, even as they struggle to find jobs that pay enough to live on and support their families.
Women are surging into higher-education institutions of all types. Remarkably, the number of women who enter higher-education programs is greater than the number of men who apply. Women earned more bachelor’s degrees than men by 1982, more master’s degrees by 1987, and more doctoral degrees by 2006. In 2010, women were receiving 57 percent of the BA’s, 63 percent of the master’s degrees, and 53 percent of the doctorates. This gender gap is evident for every race. The student body of traditionally black colleges such as Fisk and Howard universities are about two-thirds female, and Clark University has reached 75 percent. Among the Hispanic graduates of Boston public schools, 64 percent are female.29
And falling behind in the knowledge economy has consequences. Look how it has impacted wage gains over the past thirty years.
Compared to three decades ago, women with a postgraduate degree saw a remarkable 33-percentage-point increase in income, and college graduates saw an impressive 23-point gain. Women with some post–high school education saw a very modest 8-point advance, while the incomes of those women with high school diplomas just stood still between 1979 and 2010.
But the incomes of men are on a very different trajectory. Male high school graduates got creamed, their income falling 20 percentage points, and those with some college education lost ground as well. Men had to get at least a four-year degree to pick up any income gains over this thirty-year period. The incomes of college-educated men grew 12 percentage points—though that is 10 points less growth in income than for women with a comparable degree. If you focus on the longer period from 1970, when working-class wages faltered, the median earnings of male high school graduates fell a shocking 41 percent.30
The proportion of people in middle-skill jobs in the country has declined as opportunities for such employment have fallen over the past thirty-five years, and while almost the entire decline in women’s employment in middle-skill jobs was due to their increased representation in high-skill jobs, for men, half of the middle-skill workers moved to less-skilled ones.31
As David Brooks noted powerfully, “The financial rewards to education have increased over the past few decades, but men failed to get the memo.” No wonder more than two-thirds of women say they have “more opportunity to get ahead in society” than their mothers, while less than half of men say that when comparing themselves to their fathers.32
These differing responses are playing out in the context of broader trends in American society, where many more prime-age workers say they are looking for more leisure time and shorter hours and many fewer people are saying “work is important and gives a feeling of accomplishment.” This important cultural shock could plausibly explain why the male working class may seem less industrious—but it does not. That is the key finding of Andrew Cherlin’s important study Labor’s Love Lost. From 2006 to 2012 many more working-class men were looking for more leisure time in a job compared to two decades earlier (1985 to 1994), though the problem is that college-educated men—and women, too—were shifting priorities to the same degree. Cherlin speculates that college-educated men who are in high demand do not act on their new priorities, while male non-college-graduates who are not in high demand are able to act by withdrawing from the labor force. Women who see themselves as catching up in a changing labor market also respond differently.33
“Diverging Fortunes for Men and Women,” New York Times, March 20, 2013. For workers ages 25–39.
While men “have proven remarkably unable to adapt,” Hanna Rosin notes that “this generation of women has adapted to the fundamental restructuring of the economy.” Whereas women today “are more fluid,” the men “are more likely to be rigid” and seem “like immigrants who have physically moved to a new country but who have kept their minds in the old one,” speaking their native language and following the old mores.34
The delay in marriage age and the change in work opportunities have delayed formative transition points in the lives of working-class men that will have consequences. While most of the focus has been on women as gender and economic roles change, the changes for men are life-changing, too.
“Marriage, work, and fatherhood remain a package deal in most men’s minds (if not in their lives),” the Institute for Family Studies writes. As Kay Hymowitz explains in The Wall Street Journal, “Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children.” She might have added that in earlier eras, many had fought for their country, too. But “Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance.” And it has “become obvious to legions of frustrated young women,” Hymowitz observed in The Wall Street Journal, that this “doesn’t bring out the best in men.”35
With the median marriage age pushing toward thirty for men and more not marrying, Stephanie Coontz writes, “marriage no longer organizes the transition into regular sexual activity” and men are less intent on building up “human capital whose returns will later be used to support the marriage.”36
Now, men “who are not committed to families,” Michael Jindra writes, “enjoy all the options that a consumer culture gives them, have more independence and freedom, and thus are found in a wider array of subcultural activities that take men away from consistent work and commitment to families.”
Interestingly, it is the younger men that are leading the secession from the labor force and working fewer hours, Tyler Cowen writes, because they “cannot find satisfying work at a wage they are happy with.” These are reinforcing trends that take them on a different path than the women and delay their adapting to these tremendous challenges.37
The state of working-class men has real economic and cultural content, though they are also increasingly pushed to the margins by other trends and other groups whose issues are seen to be more “legitimate.” Nonetheless, the problems of the marginalized working class are very real.
WORKING WOMEN ON THEIR OWN
These revolutionary social transformations put women fully into the workforce while they continue to take primary responsibility for raising children and caring for the household, and yet there has been barely any reform of work and family policies to help them manage it. That growing gap will put work and family issues at the forefront of the public agenda. That is one of the core contradictions that America will have to face if it is to realize the benefits of its economic and cultural changes.
Working mothers are the sole or primary income provider in four in ten households with children, and as a result of the social transformations, half of working women are unmarried. Three in ten mothers are single mothers, two-thirds of the unmarried do not have a coll
ege degree, and more than 60 percent of unmarried mothers earned less than $30,000 in 2012. They are on edge financially, but with only the barest help from a father or government.38
What responsibilities wives and husbands take on has changed dramatically since the 1960s, but the incompleteness of the changes has only raised the pressures on the women who are fully in the labor force. In 1965, mothers were putting in eight times more hours on housework and four times as many hours as the father dealing with child care. Now it has changed. But women are still putting in twice as many hours as the men on both. That is a revolution in family responsibilities, though with more women spending more hours on paid work and many women unmarried, it is a growing, not a lessening, nightmare.39
Kim Parker and Wendy Wang, “Modern Parenthood,” Pew Research Center, March 14, 2013.
The incomplete revolution in gender roles and changes in marriage are shaping how women participate in the labor market, often diminishing their career prospects and long-term income. Working mothers are choosing to reduce hours at work, work part-time, interrupt their careers, and even quit their jobs to deal with young children at rates much higher than for working men.
Women with children just cannot put in as many hours of paid work as men do. These women are working twenty-one hours a week, compared to thirty-seven hours for fathers. A quarter of working mothers are working part-time, which is twice the proportion for men and four times that for working fathers.40
The choice to work part-time might well be necessary for mothers struggling with the time commitment of parenting or the costs of child care, but that choice is profoundly impacted by your economic resources, whether you have the security of a college degree, and whether you have a husband or partner helping you out. Half of unmarried mothers want to work full-time, twice the figure for married mothers. A majority of married moms say the ideal is working part-time. Among working women earning less than $50,000, 63 percent say “I’d prefer to be home with my children, but I need the income so I need to work.”41
Working women and working men are making different choices in the face of these pressures. Fully 42 percent of mothers reduced their working hours at some point in their working life to deal with the needs of children or another family member, compared to just 28 percent of fathers. A very striking 27 percent of working mothers have quit a job and 13 percent turned down a promotion to deal with family needs. Only 10 percent of working fathers report doing either.42
And these choices have real and perceived consequences. A majority of working mothers (51 percent) say that being a working parent has made it harder to advance in their job or career, but just 16 percent of working fathers believe that for themselves. That may be because men and women experience very different reactions in the workplace to their changed status as a parent. According to New York Times writer Claire Cain Miller, “One of the worst career moves a woman can make is to have children” because “mothers are less likely to be hired for jobs, to be perceived as competent at work or to be paid as much as their male colleagues with the same qualifications.” On the other hand, men are rewarded for having a child and “are more likely to be hired than childless men, and tend to be paid more after they have children.”43
Working women and working men are struggling with these issues because the United States provides almost no help, despite these revolutionary changes. After President George H. W. Bush vetoed a similar measure, the Democrats rushed to enact the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993, and it was the first bill signed by President Bill Clinton two weeks after assuming office. The new law provided up to twelve weeks of unpaid family leave to care for a new child or sick relative for full-time employees of large and medium-size businesses. President Clinton wrote on the twentieth anniversary of the law, “To this day, I received more thanks from citizens for the FMLA than any other single piece of legislation I signed into law.”44
In any case, that historic law allowed for only unpaid leave, and no new major legislation expanding protections for working parents has been enacted in the following twenty-two years. Even though social and economic changes have proceeded at an accelerating pace in the subsequent years, the amount of leave time afforded has not been extended and it is still unpaid. This fact symbolizes both how much working parents are on their own and how isolated the United States is in the developed world when it comes to supporting families, despite the progress of a gender revolution in the labor market and in marriage.
Gretchen Livingston, “Among 38 Nations, U.S. Is the Outlier When It Comes to Paid Parental Leave,” Pew Research Center, December 12, 2013.
The United States ranks at the very bottom of all OECD countries when it comes to government-supported time off for new parents because it does not provide a penny of paid leave when a child is born. Estonia tops the list with 108 weeks of paid leave, followed by Hungary, with just under 100. Nearly all the other former members of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe offer at least 50 weeks, and the core of the Eurozone—Germany and France—gives new parents just under 50 weeks. Asian competitors such as Japan and South Korea give just under and over 25 weeks, respectively. Canada provides our neighbors to the north with roughly 25 weeks of paid leave, and to the south, Mexico matches America’s commitment to 12 weeks of protected leave, but it is paid.45
It is paradoxical that America would stand alone with no paid leave because it is both the richest and one of the most religiously observant countries, yet it has not addressed social policy in this area so central to parenting, a child’s life, and marriage. For working parents it is not just a paradox, it is also an everyday struggle.
With such paltry leave protections for new parents, more working parents must rely on child care in early years. In the OECD countries, the average cost of full-time child care for a two-year-old for a two-earner family is about 27 percent of their annual income. In the United States by contrast, it is over 40 percent. And that is assuming two incomes! And women hardly exaggerate when they look for comparisons: child care costs exceed college tuition in thirty-one states. No wonder this has emerged as a point of exasperation in what seems like an endemic cost-of-living crisis.46
The last time the United States attempted to create universally available child care for working parents was in the early 1970s. Congress passed with the support of the Nixon administration and support from both parties the Comprehensive Child Development Bill to provide universal day care. Though after conservatives mobilized against it, President Nixon vetoed it. Social conservatives asserted the law would undermine the traditional male breadwinner and female homemaker family, and with fears about communism looming at the height of the Cold War, the law would commit “the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”47
Since that veto, the federal government has neglected to address the issue with the exception of providing some tax credits for child and dependent care and block grants to the states to help the very poorest with child care. And in this age of austerity, spending has been cut and reduced further by inflation, meaning fewer children are covered and the states are busily reducing eligibility, increasing copays, and decreasing reimbursement rates.48
So working women understand that they are on their own, and they have personal strategies to overcome the lack of support and take advantage of what opportunities are out there.
That is why I was so taken with Hanna Rosin’s account of “Bethenny” at the outset of her book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. Bethenny was single, “twenty-nine and ran a day care out of her house (hence, the Cheerios). She was also studying to get a nursing degree and raising her daughter, who was ten.” “Bethenny seemed to be struggling in the obvious ways,” as you would expect given her financial and family challenges. Rosin tells us, “Later I saw her at checkout, haggling over coupons. But she did not exactly read as the pitiable single mother type.” She was proactive.49
Bet
henny was like so many working-class and unmarried women I have observed in focus groups sharing stories about pursuing more schooling, taking on extra work, and finding ways to avoid expenses by sharing with neighbors and making creative living arrangements.
Women are adapting to the times and making progress. According to David Brooks, women are doing better than men after divorces—their incomes rise by 25 percent—and woman-owned small businesses are more likely to outperform male-owned businesses and survive the recession.50
The women are getting on with their lives and finding solutions, but a traditional marriage is not the primary one. When asked whether she wanted to be married, Bethenny replied, “Kind of.” There was Calvin, the father of her daughter, though he was basically invisible now. As Bethenny tossed her daughter a granola bar she added wryly, “But Calvin would just mean one less granola bar for the two of us.” Rosin observed, “There was genuine pleasure in that laugh, a hint of happy collusion in hoarding those granola bars for herself and her daughter.”51
Instead of becoming economically dependent, women are playing the leading role in transforming marriage and parenting with the sense that they must move to adapt to new realities or get stuck in the wrong marriage.
Despite all these changes, virtually all young adults want “to create a lasting marriage or marriage-like relationship,” and ideally, a marriage where the goal is for both the man and the woman to be working and pursuing a career as well as sharing responsibilities for parenting and home care, according to Kathleen Gerson’s research for her book The Unfinished Revolution. Other studies show that 69 percent of unmarried Millennials would like to get married. But Gerson’s critical finding is that both young women and young men are doubtful that they will find a partner who can meet that goal and thus pursue “second-best fallback strategies as insurance against worst-case fears.” Even though their hopes align, “There is a gender divide lurking below the surface.” For both young women and young men, making sure you have a good job and career is the most important goal, and that leads to divergent fallback strategies.52
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