The Marriage Strengthening Research & Dissemination Center (MAST) recently released a new research brief, “Trends in Relationship Formation and Stability in the United States: Dating, Cohabitation, Marriage, and Divorce.” Co-authored by CCF expert Dr. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, the brief is the first in a series aiming to provide an overview of the current state of research on romantic relationships.
History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family Life
Men and Women Agree: During the COVID-19 Pandemic Men Are Doing More at Home
A briefing paper prepared by Daniel L. Carlson (University of Utah), Richard J. Petts (Ball State University), and Joanna R. Pepin (University of Buffalo – SUNY) for the Council on Contemporary Families.
For the past 30 years the gender revolution has proceeded at a snail’s pace. Some argue it has actually stalled. Relationship quality and stability now appear greatest when heterosexual partners are equals, and some evidence shows that couples are increasingly likely to share domestic labor. Yet the proportion of couples who achieve egalitarian arrangements remains low relative to the proportion of adults who value gender equality. And now, as the COVID-19 pandemic rages, some fear the gains of the gender revolution will be erased. Recent surveys commissioned by the New York Times and USA Today appear to confirm such fears, suggesting that during the pandemic women continue to shoulder the majority of housework and childcare, and now also do the majority of homeschooling too, despite men’s claims to the contrary.
These polls, however, omit one very important thing – how families were arranging domestic labor prior to the pandemic. A focus on homeschooling as an emergent and pressing issue is understandable, given the way this task may exacerbate inequalities at home. But how partners divide the responsibilities for educating their children during the pandemic may tell us little about the future of gender equality once the pandemic ends, since homeschooling is temporary for most parents. When we examine trends in the division of those housework and childcare tasks that have been in the process of renegotiation for decades, the patterns provide evidence of more egalitarian progress.
A glass half full or half empty? Most women still do more at home than men, but many men are doing more than before the pandemic — and very few (if any) are doing less
Our survey[i], an online non-probability sample of parents (n = 1,060) in different-sex couples, conducted in mid-April, assessed divisions of labor during the pandemic and compared them to how couples divided labor before it began. Our results[ii] suggest a more hopeful scenario than those implied by the headlines: According to both men and women, men are doing more housework and childcare during the pandemic than before it began, leading to more equal sharing of domestic labor. Moreover, given the conditions under which men are doing more, there is potential that these changes may persist after the pandemic ends.
Though homeschooling falls largely on the shoulders of women, our results indicate that for the majority of men and women (approximately 60 percent), time in domestic labor has not changed since the beginning of the pandemic, even accounting for helping children with homework. This is because time in some tasks like transporting children, attending children’s events, organizing children’s schedules/activities, and grocery shopping (for women, at least) have declined dramatically or stopped altogether.
Men and women differ in their reports of who does more domestic work; the truth is likely somewhere in the middle.
One of the most provocative findings in the NYT and USA Today surveys is the discrepancy between men’s and women’s reports of who is doing what in the household. For example, in the NYT story, 80 percent of women report doing the majority of homeschooling right now. Yet 45 percent of men also claim to be doing most of the schooling, while only three percent of women report their male partners as the primary educator. Like the Times, we find that most women (70 percent) report being primarily responsible for homeschooling during the pandemic, but we find a much smaller gender gap in men’s and women’s assessments of men’s responsibilities for schooling: 20 percent of men say they are doing the online educating while three percent of women say their male partners are largely responsible. Discrepancies between the estimates in the two studies may be the result of sampling variation or differences in question wording – the NYT asked about homeschooling children or helping with distance learning – that may influence responses.
Men and women also differ in their reports of how much housework and childcare each is doing, although the differences are not as large as over the homeschooling question. The NYT story suggests that men’s estimates are more accurate than women’s. But it is not at all clear that men exaggerate their time use more than women in surveys or fail to notice their partners’ time use more than women do (Bianchi et al. 2000; Kamo 2000; Lee and Waite 2005; Yavorksy, Kamp-Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan 2015). In an appendix to this report, we discuss why we use both men’s and women’s reports to construct estimates of the division of domestic labor during the COVID-19 pandemic – an approach we argue is ultimately conservative. Nonetheless, even if we rely only on women’s reports, the story from our data on how the pandemic has changed domestic labor is the same: Men are doing more housework and childcare since the pandemic began, and this has led to an increase in egalitarian domestic arrangements.
When we focus on the housework and childcare tasks that couples were dividing before the pandemic, we find that among couples where the division of tasks has changed, it has changed in an egalitarian direction. Indeed, in no situation — and in no type of family, whether dual-earner where both are working full-time, dual-earner where someone is working part-time, single earner, or both unemployed — did we find that the division of tasks became less likely to be shared.
Considering both men’s and women’s reports, we see that prior to the start of the pandemic, 26 percent of parents reported sharing routine housework[iii] relatively equally[iv] with their partner, 41 percent reported sharing care for young children[v] relatively equally – although physical childcare and the mental load of organizing children’s lives were by and large mother’s responsibilities — and 45 percent reported sharing care of older children[vi]. A little more than a month after the start of the pandemic, 41 percent of parents reported sharing housework with their partners – a significant 58 percent increase — while the percentage of partnered parents reporting equal sharing care of young and older children also increased significantly, to 52 percent and 56 percent respectively. The proportion sharing in the care of young and older children grew by 27 and 24 percent respectively, driven by increases in equal sharing of physical care, monitoring, reading, and organizing children’s activities.
We find similar evidence of change when we restrict analyses to women’s reports only. Only one-in-six women (16 percent) reported sharing housework with their partners prior to the pandemic, compared with more than one-in-four (27 percent) who reported sharing it during the pandemic. As for childcare, 28 percent of women reported sharing care of young children relatively equally prior to the pandemic while 34 percent reported sharing it equally during. For older children, women’s reports of equal sharing grew from 29 percent to 42 percent.
The increase in egalitarian arrangements is largely the product of men’s doing more. Forty-two percent of fathers reported an overall increase in housework time, 45 percent reported more time in the care of young children overall, and 43 percent reported more total care of older children. Many mothers also reported that their partners increased their total time in housework (25 percent), care of young children (34 percent), and care of older children (20 percent). Nonetheless, mothers are significantly less likely than fathers to report that fathers have increased their time in housework or childcare. Men and women who report that fathers increased their time in housework and childcare also widely report that they were sharing housework (69 percent) and childcare (76 percent) responsibilities equally with their partner during the pandemic or that the men were doing the majority.
Consistent with past research (Kamo 2000; Lee and Waite 2005), though men and women disagree on men’s time, there was no such disagreement regarding mother’s time. More than one-quarter of both fathers and mothers reported an increase in mothers’ time in housework and childcare. The women most likely to increase their time in childcare and housework were the ones who were already responsible for the majority of such work before the pandemic. Parents also agree that between 11-16 percent of mothers and 6-8 percent of fathers decreased their overall time in domestic work. This might be because some tasks are just currently obsolete.
We still don’t have an egalitarian utopia
Families are sharing domestic labor more equally since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. That is not to say, however, that the pandemic has created an egalitarian utopia in households. Indeed, although conventionally gendered divisions of housework and childcare have become less common since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many mothers continue to find themselves in these arrangements. Of the mothers who continued to be primarily responsible for domestic work during the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly one-third increased their time spent in housework and care of children during the pandemic. Moreover, 70 percent are also solely responsible for educating their children. Consequently, among families that have not moved toward more egalitarianism, domestic work for mothers has become even more time-intensive.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every aspect of Americans’ daily lives. Stay-at-home orders in nearly every state, along with the closure of schools, childcare centers, and non-essential businesses, have placed immense strain on families, suspending important care supports and demolishing barriers between work and family roles. Our findings demonstrate that the COVID-19 pandemic has both exacerbated and reduced gender inequalities in the division of domestic labor. For women who continued to shoulder domestic work during the pandemic, housework and childcare responsibilities have become much more arduous. Not only are these women spending more time in classic tasks, but homeschooling has also been added to their plates. Nonetheless, though roughly half of women are doing most of the housework and childcare right now, according to our estimates another half of women are not. Among a sizeable number of families, the burden of domestic responsibilities has become more equal as fathers have increased their contributions to housework and childcare.
Will the trend towards egalitarianism last beyond the crisis?
A central question is whether fathers will continue their domestic contributions once the pandemic passes. The signs, we think, are encouraging. Research shows that many couples fail to craft egalitarian divisions of household labor in part due to unsupportive workplace-family policies (Pedulla and Thébaud 2015). The COVID-19 pandemic has eliminated some of the structural barriers to sharing domestic work – particularly for men – since many adults are now working from home. The pandemic has demonstrated that many jobs can be done remotely. To the extent such arrangements increase, this may create greater egalitarianism, because recent evidence from before the pandemic shows that men who work from home share more equally in domestic labor (Carlson, Petts, and Pepin 2020). However, whether men and women will continue to have schedule flexibility or the ability to work from home as employers re-open is unknown.
Nonetheless, just the experience of having heightened responsibilities for housework and childcare during this time bodes well for men’s continued involvement in housework and childcare. As research on paternity leave demonstrates, men who take leave, especially extensive leave (e.g., two months), continue their involvement in housework and childcare over the long-term even after returning to work (Petts and Knoester 2018; Bünning 2015). The longer the pandemic lasts, the more hardships most of us will experience. But perhaps in the aftermath the patterns of domestic involvement men are establishing now will become a new normal.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Daniel L. Carlson / Associate Professor / Department of Family and Consumer Studies / University of Utah / daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu.
Richard J. Petts / Professor / Department of Sociology / Ball State University / rjpetts@bsu.edu.
Joanna Pepin / Assistant Professor / Department of Sociology / University at Buffalo (SUNY) / jpepin@buffalo.edu
LINKS AND ABOUT:
Report: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2020/05/20/covid-couples-division-of-labor/
Press Advisory: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2020/05/20/covid-couples-division-of-labor-advisory/
The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.
The Council helps keep journalists informed of notable work on family-related issues via the CCF Network. To join the CCF Network, or for further media assistance, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.
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REFERENCES
Bianchi, S. M., Milkie, M. A., Sayer, L. C., & Robinson, J. P. (2000). Is anyone doing the housework? Trends in the gender division of household labor. Social Forces, 79(1), 191-228.
Bünning, M. (2015). What happens after the ‘daddy months’? Fathers’ involvement in paid work, childcare, and housework after taking parental leave in Germany. European Sociological Review, 31(6), 738-748.
Carlson, D. L., Petts, R. J., & Pepin, J. (2020). Flexplace Work and Partnered Fathers’ Time in Housework and Childcare. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jm2yu/
Kamo, Y. (2000). “He said, she said”: Assessing discrepancies in husbands’ and wives’ reports on the division of household labor. Social Science Research, 29(4), 459-476.
Lee, Y.S., & Waite, L. J. (2005). Husbands’ and wives’ time spent on housework: A comparison of measures. Journal of Marriage and Family, 67(2), 328-336.
Milkie, M.A., Bianchi, S.M., Mattingly, M.J. et al. (2002). Gendered division of childrearing: Ideals, realities, and the relationship to parental well-being. Sex Roles, 47, 21–38.
Pedulla, D. S., & Thébaud, S. (2015). Can we finish the revolution? Gender, work-family ideals, and institutional constraint. American Sociological Review, 80(1), 116-139.
Petts, R. J., & Knoester, C. (2018). Paternity leave‐taking and father engagement. Journal of Marriage and Family, 80(5), 1144-1162.
Press, J. E., & Townsley, E. (1998). Wives’ and husbands’ housework reporting: Gender, class, and social desirability. Gender & Society, 12(2), 188-218.
Scarborough, W. J., Sin, R., & Risman, B. (2019). Attitudes and the stalled gender revolution: Egalitarianism, traditionalism, and ambivalence from 1977 through 2016. Gender & Society, 33(2), 173-200.
Yavorsky, J. E., Kamp Dush, C. M., & Schoppe‐Sullivan, S. J. (2015). The production of inequality: The gender division of labor across the transition to parenthood. Journal of Marriage and Family, 77(3), 662-679.
APPENDIX
Early analyses using data from the 1980s found that although men and women both overestimate their time in housework in surveys compared to time diaries, men were more likely to overestimate their time than women (Press and Townsley 1998). And new fathers in dual earning couples also appear to overestimate their housework time more than new mothers (Yavorsky, Kamp-Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan 2015). But numerous other studies comparing time diary and survey data on men’s and women’s time use indicate that men and women equally overestimate their own time in housework in surveys (Bianchi et al. 2000; Lee and Waite 2005; Yavorsky, Kamp-Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan 2015). According to Bianchi et al. (2000) and Yavorsky and colleagues (2015), men and women overestimate their own time in housework in surveys both by approximately 50 percent. This applies to men and women generally, including married men and women and childless men and women in dual-earning couples. The study by Yavorsky and colleagues is the only one that we are aware of that compares men and women’s estimates of time in childcare between time diary and survey data, and even then, it only evaluated physical childcare amongst new parents in dual-earning couples. These researchers found that new mothers appear to overestimate their time in childcare more than new fathers. Whether these patterns hold for non-physical childcare, older children, and parents in single-earning couples is unclear.
When estimating one’s partner’s time, research shows that men and women disagree over men’s time use, but generally agree on women’s time use (Kamo 2000; Lee and Waite, 2005). In US based samples, men report more time in domestic labor than women report of their male partners (Kamo 2000; Lee and Waite, 2005; Milkie et al 2002). In surveys, men overestimate their female partners’ time, while women’s estimates of men’s time are generally consistent with men’s time use gathered using time diaries (Lee and Waite, 2005).
The tendency of women to overestimate their own time, but not their partners’ time, may lead to an underestimation of men’s shares of domestic labor in surveys (Lee and Waite 2005). Though men’s reports of time use are less accurate in terms of absolute amounts, their tendency to overestimate both their own and their partners’ time use appears to result in more valid estimates of partners’ shares of domestic labor. When using survey data, accordingly, estimates of relative shares of domestic labor may give a more accurate picture of couple dynamics than estimates of each partners’ absolute time in tasks (Kamo 2000). Using both men’s and women’s reports of men’s shares of domestic tasks is therefore a conservative approach to estimating the division of domestic labor from survey data.
[i] Participants for this study completed a Qualtrics questionnaire and were recruited from Prolific (www.prolific.co). Prolific is an opt-in online survey panel similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). The sample consisted of parents who reside with a spouse/partner, with an oversample of men, black, non-college educated, and ideologically conservative respondents to approximate national demographics. The sample included an additional n = 86 same-sex partners who are not included in this analysis. [ii] Results have been weighted using estimates from the 2019 Current Population Survey to be representative of American parents who reside with a child under the age of 18 based on parent’s gender, age, and race/ethnicity. Because our sample is a non-probability sample results still may not be representative of the United States population despite weighting. [iii] Routine housework includes cooking meals, doing dishes, house cleaning, laundry, and grocery shopping [iv] Relatively equal is defined as men doing between 40 percent and 60 percent of labor. Findings regarding patterns of change are similar when a 35/65 split is used. [v] For parents of young children (less than age 6) tasks include: physical care; talking to children; looking after children; reading to children; putting children to bed; playing with children; organizing children’s lives/activities; enforcing rules. [vi] For parents of older children (age 6 to 17) tasks include; talking to children; monitoring children’s whereabouts; attending children’s events; reading with children; playing with children; organizing children’s lives/activities; enforcing rules; picking up/dropping off children up; helping children with homework.
CCF’s Stephanie Coontz for The New York Times: What Can Different-Sex Couples Learn From Same-Sex Couples?
Five years after marriage equality, CCF Director of Research and Public Education Stephanie Coontz asks: What can different-sex couples learn from same-sex couples?
Featuring research by CCF experts Joanna Pepin, Dan Carlson, Virginia Rutter, Amanda Miller, Deb Umberson, Kristi Williams, Sharon Sassler and many more, Coontz highlights the role of gender expectations in shaping marital dynamics across same-sex and different-sex couples.
Read more in the NYT’s How to Make Your Marriage Gayer
National Spouses Day Is This Sunday…. Feeling Any Pressure?
January 23, 2020
A fact sheet on prospects for marriage in contemporary America prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Daniel L. Carlson, University of Utah, and Stephanie Coontz, The Evergreen State College
January 26 is National Spouses Day, and Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. If you’re looking for a spouse — or hoping to become a better one — here are a few things you might want to know, including why you shouldn’t panic if no one is on the horizon.
Get a College Education
- As late as 1970 more than 80% of US women age 40-45 were married, with few differences by education but a slight advantage for women with a high school degree. In the last two decades, however, a different and much larger educational marriage gap has emerged. As of 2014, 75% of women aged 40-45 with a Bachelor’s degree or more were currently married, compared to only 65% of those with some college, 59% of women with a high school diploma, and just 56% of women who had not completed high school.
- In the 20th century, women with PhDs or professional degrees were the least likely women to marry. Today, women with such advanced degrees are the MOST likely to marry. More than 80% of women age 40-45 with professional degrees or PhDs were married in 2014.
- A college education is especiallyprotective against divorce. The Pew Research Center reports that as of 2015, college-educated women had an 80% chance of their marriage lasting more than 20 years. For women with a high school education or less, the chance of a marriage lasting that long is only 40%.
Take Your Time
- In 2018 the average age of marriage reached an all-time high of 30 years for men and 28 for women.
- But these averages reflect far greater variation in the chance of marriage AFTER age 30 than in the past. Sociologist Philip Cohen estimates that 85 percent of White women and 78 percent of Black women will marry in the course of their lives. Although Black women marry later than White women until their early thirties, they marry at higher rates after that age. In fact, Cohen calculates that a White woman who reaches age 45 without marrying has a 26 percent chance of marrying at some later point, while a Black woman still single at 45 has a 49 percent chance of marrying.
- And almost every year a woman postpones marriage, up to about age 49, lowers her chance of divorce.
Get by with a little help from…the internet?
- The most common way heterosexual adults met their future marital partners in the latter half of the 20th century was through friends. However, after peaking at 35% in 1990, the percent of heterosexual adults who met their partner through friends had fallen to 20% by 2017. Meanwhile, the number of adults who met their partners online had soared to nearly 40%, up from just 1% in 1995. For heterosexuals, the internet is now the most common way of meeting a marital partner. Bars and restaurants are the second most common place to meet a partner, with 27% reporting they met their partner there, up from 19% in 1990. Yet most of these initial in-person meet ups were actually precipitated by online connections, making the number of couples who owe their start to online dating even greater! Heterosexuals who meet on line tend to enter marriage more quickly than their counterparts who meet in other ways, but they do not have a higher risk of breakup.
Don’t be afraid to buck outdated rules
- As of 2016, one in ten marriages involved partners of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, a more than three-fold increase from 1980. Among newlyweds, approximately one in six is married to someone of a different race or ethnicity. Many researchers believe these trends reflect an erosion of the traditionally rigid boundaries between different faith communities and racial-ethnic groups.
- In the past, marriages where women had higher education or higher earnings than their husband had an elevated chance of divorce. But in recent decades women’s advancements in education and the work force have ceased to threaten marital stability. Couples where men and women are educational equals are the least likely to divorce and those in which women are more educated than their male partners are no more likely to divorce than those where the man is more educated than the woman. Since the 1990s, couples where women earn as much or more than their husbands no longer have a higher risk for divorce.
When making marital wishes, don’t forget the nightly dishes
- It turns out the best predictor of a happy marriage is not how good-looking, talented or rich your spouse is, but how much you share – in your conversations, your interests, and especially the daily routines of life, such as housework. Gender egalitarian and same-sex couples have some big advantages here, since they tend to share more equally. Sharing housework and childcare, especially, is associated with greater relationship quality – including more satisfying and frequent sex. But have a conversation about who is going to do what, because when it comes to sharing housework, some tasks matter more than others. If you’re a woman in a heterosexual relationship and your partner won’t share the dishwashing, this could mean your relationship is headed in the wrong direction. 41% of women who do the majority of dishes say their relationship is in trouble, compared to just 20% of those who share dishwashing equally. Meanwhile, men are three times more satisfied with their relationships when their partner trusts their judgment enough to share the shopping.
- Talk it out. For women who want their partner to share responsibilities for domestic labor, communication is key. Men who report higher quality communication with their partner are more likely to do an equal share of housework and childcare.
And always remember, single doesn’t mean second-best
- Only 16% of men and 17% of women say that having a spouse is essential to their fulfillment. What IS essential for a fulfilling life, according to57% of men and 46% of women, is having an enjoyable job or career.
- Once you have an education and a secure income, you do have a better chance of getting married. But you also have a better chance of enjoying health, happiness, and a wide range of friendship networks if you stay single. In fact, at the highest income levels, never-married individuals actually report more supportive friendship networks then their married counterparts. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X1630789X
- This is an important advantage, because having supportive and numerous friendships is a stronger predictor of mental and physical health than being married or living with a partner.
Daniel L. Carlson is Assistant Professor, Department of Family and Consumer Studies, at the University of Utah, and a Board Member of the Council on Contemporary Families
daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu; 614-286-4104.
Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA and is Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families.
coontzs@msn.com; 360 556-9223.
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The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.
Follow us! @CCF_Families and https://www.facebook.com/contemporaryfamilies
Read our blog Families as They Really Are – https://thesocietypages.org/families/
Parents Can’t Go It Alone–They Never Have: What to Do for Parents to Help Our Next Generation
CCF PRESS ADVISORY: Parents Can’t Go It Alone—They Never Have: What to Do for Parents to Help Our Next Generation
Barbara J. Risman
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Children Are Now Back at School, Time to Focus on What Their Parents Need
Barbara J. Risman
Why No One Can “Have It All” and What to Do About It
Kathleen Gerson
Work that Works for Low-Wage Workers
Maureen Perry-Jenkins
Fears of Violence: Concerns of Middle-Class Latinx Parents
Lorena Garcia
Mothering While Black
Dawn Marie Dow
Dads Count Too: Family-Friendly Policies Must Include Fathers
Stephanie Coontz
Raising a Village: Identifying Social Supports for All Kinds of Families
Caitlyn Collins
Why No One Can “Have It All” and What to Do About It
A briefing paper prepared by Kathleen Gerson, New York University, for the Council on Contemporary Families’ Symposium Parents Can’t Go It Alone—They Never Have.
If debates about women’s rights, relationships between the sexes, and worsening conflicts between paid work and family life seem endless, that’s because Americans can’t agree on what is happening, much less on what to do about it. Some blame the problems on a “gender stall,” as women continue to hit glass ceilings at work and perform the lion’s share of caregiving at home. Others focus on the decline of men’s breadwinning as their earnings erode, their labor force participation drops, and they fall behind women in educational attainment and career aspirations. Progressives lament the lingering traditionalism that leaves women mired in second-class citizenship, while conservatives worry about the rise of a self-centered individualism that elevates personal freedom over lasting commitments to others.
To gain a more nuanced picture of how today’s adults are negotiating work–family conflicts, I conducted face-to-face depth interviews with 120 (self-identified) women and men between the ages of 33 and 47 years—the years when most Americans face their peak challenges in building both their work and their family lives. I went to two different geographic areas, interviewing people living in the heart of the “new economy” in Silicon Valley (stretching from San Jose to the East Bay) and those living in or nearAmerica’s biggest city, the New York metropolitan area. This approach yielded a group with diverse racial, economic, and educational backgrounds living in a variety of family arrangements, including singles, cohabiters, and married couples.
My interviews revealed four major patterns of response to the challenges of earning a living and caring for others. At one end of the spectrum, one-fifth of my participants adopted a “hyper-traditional” pattern that emphasized overwork for fathers and intensive parenting for mothers. Concerns about job security prompted husbands to put in very long work weeks(ranging from 60 to as many as 100 hours) to assure employers of their work commitment. In a parallel way, concerns about living up to a standard of “intensive parenting” left wives with equally strong pressures to devote their utmost attention to childrearing. Although these mothers and fathers felt overworked in their separate spheres and deprived of both personal time and time together as a couple, they did not believe they could risk doing anything else.
At the other end of the spectrum, 24 percent opted to remain “unencumbered.” These adults remained single and childless or became estranged from offspring in the wake of a breakup. A comparable percentage of women and men followed this path, but they did so for different reasons. The men were typically unable (or unwilling) to find steady work and concluded they could not afford to take on the financial or emotional responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. The women found they valued work too much to dilute their career commitment by taking on commitments to care for husbands and children.
In a very real sense, the hyper-traditional couples are recreating traditional gender patterns in an especially extreme form, whereas the unencumbered are opting to preserve their independence by avoiding such traditional family commitments. Yet together these two extremes account for only 44 percent of my respondents. The remaining 56 percent comprises two additional groups.
About a quarter (26 percent) of my participants are in relationships that reflect the simultaneous decline of the male breadwinner wage and the persistence of the female caregiver norm. These families rely on the woman’s earnings as much as they do on the man’s (and sometimes more) but they also depend on her for the bulk of caregiving. In these cases, women do not “have it all” so much as they “do it all.” It is hardly surprising that carrying the load as both a primary or co-breadwinner and the main caretaker leaves most of these women feeling tired, disheartened, and unappreciated—but they are not alone in their frustration. Most of the men in these relationships also express frustration, saying they wish they could do more caregiving, but fear that taking the necessary time would endanger their job security and prospects. What’s more, these are not unrealistic fears. Research has demonstrated that a “flexibility stigma” penalizes workers—especially professional men—who choose to pull back even slightly to engage in care work at home.
The remaining 30 percent of my participants can be described as egalitarians—couples who are experimenting with building an equal partnership despite the obstacles. With no clear path to follow, they do so in varying ways and with varying degrees of success. A third of this group (about 12 percent of the entire sample) decided to avoid the difficulties of equal caretaking by forgoing parenthood altogether, with many looking to relatives, friends, and pets for other forms of caregiving ties. The rest were willing to limit their working time, risk their financial prospects, and forego sleep and personal time to try to divide work and caregiving equally. Yet the dearth of institutional supports has left many of the work–care egalitarians wondering how long and at what cost they can sustain their efforts.
Despite their differences, all these strategies are responses to a similar set of pressures and conflicts. Rising job insecurity has upped the ante for workers, forcing them to put in long hours or risk losing their employment or endangering their future security. On the home front, concerns about rising inequality and declining social mobility have upped the ante on childrearing, creating a sense that only intensive parenting can prepare children to navigate an uncertain future.
Each of the four strategies described inevitably produces some degree of dissatisfaction, but the one commonly seen as most challenging—that is, the egalitarian strategy—turns out to be most preferred by those who practice it. Figure 1 shows that 55 percent of hyper-traditional women and 38 percent of 
hyper-traditional men would prefer a different arrangement, while 84 percent of the women who “do it all” and 75 percent of men who rely on a woman to do it all would also prefer a different arrangement. Among the unencumbered, 58 percent of women and 76 percent of men report that a different situation would be preferable. In contrast, those expressing the lowest desire for a different arrangement are the egalitarians, with only 7 percent of women and 29 percent of men saying they would prefer one of the other alternatives.
What arrangement do people prefer? Figure 2 shows that in addition to the egalitarians, where 93 percent of women and 71 percent of men prefer their situation, most of the rest of my interviewees also would prefer to share breadwinning and caregiving in an egalitarian way if that were a more realistic option. Women are understandably more likely to prefer sharing, with 74 percent of those currently “doing it all,” 58 percent of the unencumbered, and 55 percent of those in hyper-traditional relationships preferring more equal sharing. Although men expressed less enthusiasm for sharing, a significant minority—including nearly a third of hyper-traditional men, almost half of men who rely on
a woman to do it all, and slightly more than half of unencumbered men—expressed a preference for an egalitarian partnership.
These findings make it clear that although every work–care strategy poses significant trade-offs and difficulties, people should not be forced to choose between hyper-traditionalism and hyper-individualism. Given the realities of the new economy, which relies on women workers but rarely longer offers job security to anyone, regardless of their gender identity or class position, it is neither humane nor just to confine the measure a man’s worth to his ability to be a successful breadwinner or a woman’s worth to her willingness to be a selfless caregiver. The solution is not to shore up and intensify an outdated system, but to address the inequalities and insecurities that permeate the current one.
How can we get to a more reasonable future? The first step is to reframe the work–care debate. It is time to jettison the tired lens of “having it all”—a lens that sees earning and caregiving as incompatible goals and the people (read women) who seek it as selfish or unrealistic. Instead, it is time to build our work and caring institutions on the principles of gender justice and work–care integration. Concretely, this means regulating time norms at the workplace so no worker must choose between excessively long work weeks and job insecurity. In our communities, it means creating caretaking resources that extend beyond the privatized household for children of all ages. And in our political institutions, it means ensuring equal economic opportunities for women of all stripes, equal caregiving rights for fathers as well as mothers, and a strengthened safety net that provides everyone with the basics that fewer and fewer jobs provide, such as a livable income, decent health care, and access to supports for weathering the ups and downs of our increasingly uncertain economic and family lives.
The rise of the new precarious economy is as challenging as the rise of the industrial system was more than a century ago. This transformation calls for structural and cultural realignments as vast as the shifts they need to address. Judging from the responses of my informants, the costs of doing nothing are far greater than the costs of helping everyone—women and men alike—forge a more balanced, equal, and secure division of work and caregiving.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Kathleen Gerson, Professor of Sociology, and Collegiate Professor of Arts and Science at New York University, Kathleen.gerson@nyu.edu.
September 19, 2019
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