Text 3 Combining Career and Family

In describing their future family life, however, both sexes tend to follow tra­ditional gender roles. When asked whose job comes first, most say the husband's does. Both sexes are unanimous in declaring that primary care of children is the wife's job. Al­though young women hope their hus­band will share household chores equally, most young men express only willingness to "help"—a word that im­plies, not taking their share of the re­sponsibility, but assisting with tasks that are really the wife's responsibility.

Although both sexes anticipate hav­ing careers, males and females hold dif­ferent attitudes toward work. Male students see their future in terms of a steady line of work and achievement. Most have clear ideas about where they want to go and how to get there. They expect to work for the rest of their lives and to be the main providers for their families, even if their wife works. By comparison, women seem tentative and vague about their ca­reer goals. They want to work, but see their career plans as depending on the needs of their husband and children. They expect their careers to be inter­rupted or even halted at various times.

In short, neither sex anticipates a symmetrical marriage in which husband and wife assume equal responsibility for supporting the family and raising the children. If compromises need to be made, both sexes assume that the wife will sacrifice her career for the family (and the husband his family life for his career). Given the fact that women usu­ally earn less than men and that the workplace is not structured to accom­modate family commitments, these ex­pectations may be realistic.

The American workplace is not designed for people who want to make equal com­mitments to their family and their job. The law does not guar­antee American women maternity leave, and very few companies offer men paternity leave though one of the first bills that President Bill Clinton signed into law required large companies to offer their workers unpaid leave for births, adoptions, and family emer­gencies. Although more than half the mothers of small children work, few em­ployers provide any form of child-care assistance (such as on-site day care or allowances for baby-sitters). The federal government's support for day care has been minimal. Because caring for chil­dren is still seen as women's work, the burden of trying to balance work and parenthood falls on women. Our culture still expects men to be part-time parents, just filling in for Mom now and then.

There are alternatives. In Sweden, where nine out of ten women ages twenty-five to thirty-four work, the government provides public day care for all children. Parents of either sex who choose to stay home with a newborn or newly adopted baby are guaranteed eighteen months' leave, receive social security payments corresponding to their current salary, and must be given their old jobs back when their leave ends. The government also requires employers to allow parents time off to care for a sick child and the option of part-time work while children are preschoolers. Either parent may take advantage of these pro­grams, or mothers and fathers may take turns. Of all the in­dustrial nations, only the United States and South Africa do not provide new parents with some form of support. But the structure of the workplace does not tell the full story; cultural forces also come into play. Even in Sweden, few men take advantage of paternity leave, and those who do often are ridiculed by their co-workers. As a result, most women today hold two full-time jobs, one at the work­place and one at home.

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild characterizes the state of gender relations in America today as a "stalled revolu­tion." The work force has changed, women have changed, but most work­places and many men have not changed in response.

The most visible sign of the stalled revolution is the phenomenon that has come to be known as women's "second shift." Growing numbers of women work an eight-hour shift at their jobs and then put in another full shift at home, cook­ing, cleaning, and caring for children. From her own research and other time-use studies, Hochschild calculates that working women do fifteen more hours of work a week than their husbands do. This adds up to an extra month of twenty-four-hour days each year. Even when husbands are willing to put in as much time on child care and housework, women feel more responsible for the functioning of the family and the home. Women are the ones who keep track of doctor appointments, arrange for chil­dren's visits with friends, and call from work to check on the baby-sitter. Women do more of the daily jobs, like cooking and cleaning up, that lock them into fixed routines. Men take care of the car, the yard, and household repairs— nonroutine chores that are less frequent and often can be done whenever time permits. Most of the time men spend working at home is devoted to the chil­dren, not the laundry. Moreover, men are more likely to do "fun" things with the children (such as trips to the zoo), while women more often perform such routine child-care tasks as feeding and bathing. Just as there is a wage gap in the workplace, so there is a "leisure gap" at home. Husbands sleep longer and have more time to watch TV or pursue hob­bies. Wives talk about sleep "the way a hungry person talks about food”

Hochschild suggests that women give in to their husbands on the "second-shift" issue because they are locked into marriage in a way that men are not. For one thing, women earn less than men and so have more of an economic need for marriage. For another, marriage is less stable than it used to be, and divorce is more economically damaging to women than to men. To make matters worse, many divorced mothers receive little emotional or other support from tradi­tionally minded friends and relatives.

Hochschild sees the "stalled revolu­tion" as the result of colliding social forces. On the one hand, new economic opportunities and needs have drawn women into the work force, which puts pressure on men to share the second shift. On the other hand, the wage gap between men and women and the high rate of divorce lead women to hold on to their marriages—and men to hold out on sharing housework. Hochschild sug­gests that many modern women feel dou­bly oppressed by men, not only on the first shift (where the boss is male, privi­leged, and better paid than they are) but also on the second shift (where husbands opt out).