So if more mothers are working outside the home, are more men picking up the workload at home? Compared to the 1980s, more American men believe in sharing the second shift and fewer men hold to traditional roles. In the 1970s, 70 percent of men born before the baby boom agreed: “It’s better for everyone if the man works and the woman cares for home and family.” But by the 1990s, half of those same men agreed and among post—baby boom men, a quarter did.5 Fewer men also disapproved of high-earning wives.
Still, many couples also feel that however much a dad helped at home, his job came before his wife’s. Then came the Great Recession of 2008. The higher-paying jobs of welders, machinists, auto assembly-line workers—all jobs usually filled by men—proved more vulnerable to cost-cutting automation and offshoring than the lower-paid but steadier jobs women held as health aides, administrators, or day-care workers. So while over the past twenty-five years more men have come to believe in sharing the second shift, economic trends caused them to keep an anxious eye on their potentially runaway jobs.
So do the husbands of working moms actually share the second shift more than the men of the 1980s I describe in this book? Since the publication of The Second Shift in 1989, a startling two hundred studies published in the decade between 1989 and 1999 provide some answers.6 The most recent, careful, and detailed study by Melissa Milkie, Sara Raley, and Suzanne Bianchi—based on two nationwide surveys—reported the present-day story of married two-job parents of preschool children, just like those in this book.7 In one survey conducted in 2003-5, 3,500 mothers and 3,000 fathers agreed to receive periodic telephone calls during a twenty-four-hour day. During each call parents were asked what they were doing, how long it took, where they were, and who they were with. A second survey, conducted in 2000, simply asked parents how they used their time, including such activities as taking naps.
Compared to working dads, researchers found, full-time working moms with preschool kids put in an extra five hours a week (in the first study) and seven hours a week at home (in the second). This created a weekly leisure gap of five to seven hours, or an extra two weeks a year of twenty-four-hour days.8 In my 1980s study, I’d found that compared to their husbands, working moms put in an extra four weeks a year. So twenty-five years didn’t rid women of an extra shift. But it did cut the length of it in half.
In 1989, I had found that working moms felt more rushed than working dads. And that’s what the new research found to be still true: half of moms (52 percent) and a third of dads (34 percent) “always felt rushed.” I had also found that women did two or three things at once more often. Women still feel that way more than men but don’t actually do it more than men. I had found that women slept fewer hours than their husbands and did fewer things for “pure fun” with the kids. Their counterparts today sleep as long as their husbands and do fun things with their kids as often too. But husbands watch 2.7 more hours of television a week and get 7.5 more hours a week of adults-only leisure.
So are couples happier as a result of these changes? This matters, of course, for if couples aren’t enjoying life at home, we haven’t really unstalled this stalled revolution. The Milkie et al. findings on this issue are unsettling. The researchers compared mothers with full-time jobs (thirty-five hours or more) with those who worked part time or stayed home. Moms with full-time jobs reported laughing with their children less often than anyone else in the study—part-time moms, unemployed moms, and all of the fathers. Surprisingly, fathers married to full-time workers— fathers whose help was most needed—read to, laughed with, and praised their children less often than fathers married to part-time or stay-at-home moms. And mothers in full-time jobs (25 percent) were less likely to say they were “completely satisfied with how well their children are doing in life” than were part-time (35 percent) or nonworking (58 percent) moms. About a third of dads were “satisfied,” a proportion that did not vary with the hours their wives worked. Overall, most parents—59 percent of mothers, 66 percent of fathers—were not “completely satisfied with how their children were doing.”
So why would that be? Could such worried parents be responding to a more widespread reality of American life? One clue lies in a 2007 UNESCO report comparing American children with those in twenty other advanced nations. The report focuses on the health, schooling, social relationships, and self-reported happiness of children ages eleven to fifteen, and it offers sobering news:9 out of twenty-one countries, the United States ranked twentieth. It was at or near the bottom, researchers found, in rankings on children’s health, poverty, family and peer relations, chances of risky behavior (drinking alcohol, drugs, fighting, for example), and personal relationships.10
Children were also given a picture and told, “Here is a picture of a ladder. The top of the ladder, 10, is the best possible life for you and the bottom is the worse possible life for you. In general where on the ladder do you feel you stand at the moment? Tick the box next to the number that best describes where you stand.” In terms of the proportion of children marking a box above the middle rung, the United States—the world’s richest country— ranked eighteen out of twenty-one countries.11
So why, in the welfare of its children, does the United States rank so far lower than most other advanced nations? Could it be that so many American mothers work? It is, after all, common for guilty American parents to worry that a mother’s job itself makes for unhappy children. But if so, we couldn’t understand Norway, which boasts both the world’s highest rates of maternal employment and one of the world’s highest rates of child well-being. Seventy-five percent of all working-age Norwegian women work for pay while Norway also ranks seventh out of twenty-one nations in the overall welfare of its children. In short, Norway has undergone a gender revolution, but avoided a stalled revolution. Norwegian parents of new or newly adopted babies enjoy an eleven-month paid leave, and new fathers are offered a month’s paid leave, exclusive to them, to be forfeited if they decline.12 Parents receive cash benefits for children ages one to three who lack a full-time place at a public daycare center. Should an elderly parent fall ill, a person with a job can sign up at the local municipality for a “care salary,” and take leave from work to care for the parent. And to top it off, a full-time workweek in Norway is thirty-five hours.
Americans shake their heads in disbelief at Norway’s wonderland of limited hours and family-friendly benefits. The country is so small, detractors point out. And its economy is thriving, blessed as it is with the well-spent revenue from North Sea oil. But larger surrounding countries—Sweden, Denmark, and Finland—have no such oil, yet enjoy both thriving economies and family-friendly state policies. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and other European nations are not far behind. In short, women can both work and raise thriving children in societies determined to remove the “stall” from a stalled revolution.
For the United States to catch up with its more successful neighbors, we’d need to reconsider some of our beliefs about community and government. Many Americans resist the idea of government help in the abstract: they want to fix the stalled revolution privately. But when you get down to specifics, a light appears in their eyes. Paid family and medical leave for new parents or those coping with family illness? Good idea. Affordable subsidized child care? Good idea. A neighborhood toy exchange, or a skill bank that allows neighbors to exchange unpaid services—computer help for mowing a lawn, math tutoring for fresh lasagna? Good idea. Government incentives for companies offering flexible hours and job shares? Sure. But no one of us can accomplish all these reforms alone.
In celebration of National Telework Week, Joan Blades, the founder of the Internet-driven organization MomsRising, recently renewed the call for flexi-place—work from home or neighborhood workstations.13 Compared to office-based workers, research shows, home-based workers get more done and save companies money. Working from home, we also unclog freeways, save gas, and green our nation while saving precious time for giggling children at home.
Bu
t at the very root of a successful gender revolution is, I believe, a deep value on care—making loving meals, doing projects with kids, emotionally engaging family and friends. Most women in America are no longer homemakers. But the choice arises—do we devalue that role, or do we value its emotional core and share that now with men? And here we must address a strange imbalance between two values associated with the early women’s movement. As that movement rolled forward—during the days I first jotted notes envisioning this book—it put forward two big ideas. One was female empowerment—the idea that women should express their talents, be all they can be, and stand equal to men. The second big idea was valuing—and sharing—the duties of caring for others.
Without our noticing, American capitalism over time embraced empowerment and sidetracked care. So in the absence of a countermovement, care has often become a hand-me-down job. Men hand it to women. High-income women hand it to low-income women. Migrant workers who care for American children and elderly, hand the care of their own children and elderly to paid caregivers as well as grandmothers and aunts back in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mexico, and other countries of the global South. And those Filipina, Sri Lankan, or Mexican paid caregivers at the end of this care chain pass child-care duties to oldest daughters. The big challenge in the years ahead—and the challenge at the heart of this book—is to value and share the duties of caring for loved ones. Facing it, we could—and why not in our lifetimes?—finally celebrate a world beyond this unstalled revolution.
Appendix
Research on Who Does the Housework and Child Care
When I read Gwendolyn Salisbury Hughes’s description of women factory workers in Philadelphia after World War I doing laundry and washing their front steps on Saturday mornings, I was reminded of the stories I was hearing from women over sixty years later. But in 1918, when Gwendolyn Hughes was collecting her information, no one would have thought to do a survey comparing men’s work at home with women’s. Outside of a small social circle, in 1918 this comparison was hard to imagine.
In contrast, through the mid-1960s, 1970s, and 1980s there has been an explosion of research that compares working women to men in their relative contributions to the home. One of the largest time-use studies was conducted by John Robinson at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center. In his 1965 survey, published in 1977, Robinson gave the 1,244 men and women the so-called yesterday interview in which respondents were asked to remember on one day what they did the previous day. The study overrepresented urban, educated people. The same interview was conducted by Alexander Szalai in 1965-66 in twelve other countries in Western and Eastern Europe, including West Germany, Belgium, France, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the former USSR.
A second major study, by Kathryn Walker and Margaret Woods, sampled 1,296 men and women (all married couples) living in Syracuse, New York, in 1967 (the report was published in 1976). Their methods differed from those of Robinson, but both found a large leisure gap between working men and women. Both found that husbands of working wives do little more at home than husbands of housewives. Both found that husbands of working wives actually put in altogether fewer hours of work (paid work combined with work at home) than did husbands of housewives— because husbands of working wives could now afford to cut back on their paid work. These husbands did proportionally more than husbands of housewives (25 percent versus 15 percent of home work) but that’s because both spouses did less at home when the wife went out to work.
Are men doing more now? Studies done in the late 1970s and 1980s come up with mixed findings. Some studies find no increase. The 1977 nationwide “Quality of Employment” survey done by the University of Michigan combined the hours of paid and unpaid work men and women each do and found a daily leisure gap of 2.2 hours, about the same gap researchers found in the 1960s. Another study—this one in 1985-by Bradley Googins of Boston University’s School of Social Work, took as its subjects the 651 employees of a Boston-based corporation. Of these employees, the married mother averaged 85 hours a week on job, homemaking, and child care. The married father averaged 66 hours—a nineteen-hour-per-week leisure gap. In 1983, Grace Baruch and Rosalind Barnett’s study of 160 middle-class Boston families found no difference in the help around the house between men whose wives worked and men whose wives didn’t. In her 1983 study of 1,500 white working couples, Shelley Coverman found that women did a total of 87 hours of paid and unpaid work while men did 76-leaving a leisure gap of 11 hours a week. In her 1981 study of professional women with children, Sara Yogev found a leisure gap of 30 hours.
In her 1977 study, Harriet Presser asked how much husbands increased their work at home after their wives took outside jobs. She found 44 percent of the husbands did more work at home, 45 percent did the same amount, and 11 percent actually did less. One study by Greg Duncan and James Morgan (1978) presents some stark statistics on the extra hours of work marriage costs women and saves men. They reported hours of housework per year as follows: 1,473 for married women, and 886 for single women, 301 for married men, and 468 for single men. All of this evidence points to “no change.”
But other recent studies find a decrease in the leisure gap. One study—a replication of the earlier University of Michigan study by Robinson—found that women worked only a tiny bit longer than men each day. Between 1965 and 1975 Robinson and his coworkers found the leisure gap between men and women had virtually disappeared. Men weren’t doing more housework and childcare. Women were doing less, and putting in four to five hours less on the job as well. Rather than renegotiating roles with their husbands, these wives pursued a strategy of cutting back at home and at work.
If this study is representative of women and men in the general population, then “cutting back”—not male sharing—is the new response to the strains of being a supermom. But I don’t believe this study is representative of the general population, and the researchers themselves were puzzled. During 1965 through 1975, when this study was done, hours of women’s paid labor did not shrink and the proportion of women part-timers did not increase in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Table 677), the proportion of women working part time was 19 percent in 1965, 22 percent in 1970, 21 percent in 1975, 21 percent in 1980, and 20 percent in 1982. In short, most women continued to work full time. The proportion who worked part time didn’t change between 1965 to 1982.
But the hours at work of women in this study did decline, and the decline was probably an artifact of the researchers’ method. In hopes of improving the accuracy of their study, the researchers periodically reinter-viewed the same respondents at different times of day. So detailed and repeated were the questions in this study that about a quarter of the people dropped out of it—among them, presumably, the busiest. Ironically, the women most burdened by the very crunch the researchers were investigating probably didn’t have time to fill out such a lengthy questionnaire.
Observing the findings of this study, Joseph Pleck cautiously hailed the day when the problem of the leisure gap would pass. But the fact is, for most women that day has not come. Even if all women could iron out the leisure gap by working part time, is part-time work a solution if it’s just for women ? Given the increasing danger of marginalizing family life, I believe it’s important to offer and legitimate well-paid part-time jobs (see Chapter 17), but for men as well. I think it would be a mistake to settle for part-time work “just for women.” This division of labor would lead to economic and career inequities between men and women, which would make women economically vulnerable in an age in which half of marriages don’t last. A better solution might be to share the part-time option or alternate part-time phases of each spouse’s work life.
MY STUDY: A NATURALISTIC APPROACH
Anne Machung and I interviewed 145 people altogether, two-thirds of them several times over. We interviewed 100 husbands and wives (50 two-job couples) and 45 other people, including baby-sitters, day-care workers,
schoolteachers, traditional couples with small children, and divorcées who had been in two-job couples. I did the in-depth observations of 12 families, and these families were selected from among the 50 couples in our study as good examples of common patterns we found. We supplemented the in-depth study with a quantitative analysis of all 50 families.
Characteristics of the Couples
Of the men we interviewed, the mean age was thirty-three, of the women, thirty-one. Forty-seven percent had one child, 38 percent had two, and 15 percent had three; no couple had more than three. As a whole, those we interviewed were disproportionately middle class. Twelve percent were blue-collar workers (craft workers, operatives, service workers), 17 percent clerical and sales, 25 percent managers and administrators, 46 percent professional and technical workers. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the United States as a whole in 1982, 44 percent were blue-collar workers, 25 percent were clerical or sales, 12 percent were managers and administrators, 17 percent were professional and technical workers, and 3 percent farmers. These add up to 101 percent due to rounding error.)
As for education, 6 percent of the people we interviewed had a high school education or less, 31 percent had some college, 19 percent had a B.A. or B.S., 12 percent had some graduate education, and 32 percent had graduate degrees. As for home ownership, only 2 percent already owned a home, 55 percent were in the process of buying one, and the rest rented. In this study, 8 percent of families had regular outside help, 13 percent had occasional help, and 79 percent had no help at all. (Nationwide, 85 percent of all the families have no form of outside help.)
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 29