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Phyllis Moen, Erin Kelly and Rachel Magennis ¹

Adulthood is a fundamentally different experience for women and men, even those with similar backgrounds growing up. Why is this the case? Research and theory pose several alternative explanations, grounded in ideas about nature and nurture. Most common historically has been a biological explanation (nature), pointing to the impacts of genetic, hormonal, and physiological differences between women and men. There are, to be sure, male and female traits rooted in biology or nature. But if this were the only reason for gender differences, we wouldn’t find variations in the distinctive experiences and expectations of women and men across cultures, social classes, geographical regions, and history.

Gendered Allocation of Roles, Resources, Relationships

Gender Systems of Stratification

Gender socialization – the ways adults as well as children learn how to be male or female – can explain part of the story, but scholars increasingly focus on processes of gender allocation, the institutionalized packaging of resources, constraints, and options by gender within families, schools, workplaces, religious, civic and other organizational structures and groupings. As Ridgeway and Correll (2004) point out, gender used to be described as an identity or role that is taught in childhood and enacted in family relations. Now the definition is moving toward thinking of gender as an institutionalized system of social practices. These practices divide people into two groups, men and women, and it works to maintain the inequality between the two based on these made up differences.

Gender socialization is about learning gender, fostering differences in women’s and men’s beliefs, values, and identities. Gender stratification is about dividing by gender, allocating positions, power, and material resources by whether one is male or female. It is the systematic way that roles, resources, and rewards are distributed that perpetuates gender inequality. This takes place in large part because organizational rules, routines, and regulations serve to structure the adult course in gendered ways (Mayer/Tuma 1990).

Why is there inequality – economic, political, social, and interpersonal – between women and men? Even more important than socialization processes are the institutional arrangements that stratify women and men by their gender. Kohn and Schooler (1983) define stratification as the hierarchical distribution of power, privilege, and prestige. Groups and organizations of all types allocate roles, resources, and relationships – along with power – based on a range of factors. The allocation of power, privilege and, prestige in society and in organizations depends on one’s social background, race, and ethnicity, educational achievement, and occupational level, of course, but also on the combination of age and gender (see Anderson 2005, Kramer 2005, Kimmel 2000, McCall 2001, Rothman 2005).

Gender stratification is fundamentally about disparities in economic power (Anderson 2005, Blumberg 1984) that is between men and women. Serguino (2007) argues that socialization forces in the form of gender ideology, norms and stereotypes reinforce material inequality between women and men thereby reinforcing the gender stratification system.

Social Policies as Gender Systems

A regime of 20^th century social policies and practices have created, reinforced, and perpetuated different life courses for men and women. First were efforts to institutionalize life into segments predicated on middle-class men’s experience. In fact, the very notion that adulthood consists of distinctive and identifiable paths is a product of primarily mid 20^th century policies and practices developing in Europe and America around the institutions of education, employment, and retirement (see Kohli 1986a, 1986b, Marshall/Heinz/Krueger/Verna 2001, Meyer 1986). In the middle of the 20^th century, educational, employment, and pension legislation and regulation forged a lock-step life course, consisting of first full-time public education as preparation for adult roles, then an adulthood of continuous, full-time employment, followed by full-time leisure during the “golden years” of retirement. This adult path of continuous, full-time, year-round employment, bracketed by schooling at one end and retirement (or death) at the other, became institutionalized as the (only) route to adult fulfillment and success – the structure of the career mystique (Moen/Roehling 2005). Government policies – Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare, disability regulations, the Fair Labor Standards Act – all took as a “given” both the lock-step path of (men’s) continuous, full-time employment and the breadwinner-homemaker gender divide. These policies, together with the regulations guiding business practices, constitute an age-graded regime giving structure to the life course: the shared understandings and taken-for-granted rules, roles, relationships, resources and risks associated with adulthood at different ages and life stages.

But note that this lock-step arrangement was predicated on men’s, not women’s, lives. Most middle-class women’s adulthood in the middle of the 20^th century gave primacy to marriage and mothering, with only intermittent ties to the workforce. The primacy of family goals and obligations continues to shape women’s lives even though most are entrenched in the workforce (Carr 1997, Garey 1999, Gerson 2001, Han/Moen 1999a, 1999b, 2002, Ridgeway/Correll 2004). Thus the social organization of the life course is gender-graded as well, typically producing diverging pathways for men and women, even though they may begin life with similar backgrounds and abilities (Compton 2001, Moen 1996a, 1996b, 2001, Moen/Roehling 2005) fostering work-family conflicts and strains for women and their families (see Kelly 2008). The life course as an institution allocating roles and resources overtime is also replete with informal norms that shape women’s and men’s cognitive assessments, their “ambitions, stock-taking, and self-image at various times during their lives” (Kruger/Baldus 1999: 356; see also Altucher/Williams 2003, Becker/Moen 1999, Blossfeld/Huinik 1991, Moen/Orange 2002, Townsend 2002).

Today, age divides are more visible (often written into policies, such as kindergarten for five- year-olds or retirement for 65-year olds) than are gender divides. It is easy to “see” the life course as a convoy of institutionalized rules and regulations when we think about the ages one can purchase alcohol, marry, vote, or retire. By contrast, there are few overt regulations about gender. Yet this was not always the case.

Consider the ways jobs were allocated by whether or not one was male or female (or pregnant), or how workers were allocated social security credits, both of which disadvantaged women. Until the late 1960s, job want ads in newspapers specified the gender of the employee, with clerical and secretarial positions specifically seeking women (Pedriana 2004). Teachers in some school districts in the 1960s and 1970s could not continue to teach if pregnant. Before 1978 one could not receive a year’s Social Security credit except by remaining in the workforce continuously throughout the year, something problematic for women, given they were likely to move in and out of paid work for caregiving or other reasons (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2005). Both of these policies were revised in tandem with both the women’s movement and the influx of married women into the workforce (Moen/Roehling 2005).

Work Organizations as Gender Systems

Employment has been a “master” adult role, the path to economic independence, self-esteem, meaning, and security. It is the fundamental public ecology and institutional convoy in which adult life plays out. But jobs remain gendered, even though they are no longer labeled “for men only” or “for women only”. Employers commonly steer women (or men) toward some jobs rather than others, contributing to the ongoing gendering of jobs (Fernandez/Sosa 2003). Ridgeway and Correll (2004) describe how small biasing effects such as these accumulate over careers and lifetimes to result in substantially different employment experiences and rewards for men and women who are otherwise similar in social background.

Characteristics of jobs, career paths, and the working environment are extremely consequential for the developing individual and tend to differ by gender. Considerable theoretical progress and empirical evidence link high demands on the job and low levels of job latitude with heightened feelings of strain (Elsass/Viega 1997) leading to poor health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease and elevated blood pressure. But men are more apt than women to typically occupy jobs with both high demands and high control (Bosma/Stansfield/Marmot 1998, Cheng et al. 2000, de Jonge/Bosma/Peter/Siegrist 2000, Dwyer/Ganster 1991, Fox 1993, Hemingway/Marmot 1998, Kristensen 1995, 1996, Landsbergis et al. 1992, Schnall/Landsbergis/Baker 1994). Moreover, Marshall, Barnett, and Sayer (1997) find evidence suggesting that the “demand-control” model may be more applicable to employees in manufacturing sector jobs (typically men) than to those in service jobs (typically women). They find that, for employees in the service sector, job control does not moderate job demands, while the intrinsic rewards associated with serving others tend to benefit service employees’ health.

Families and Work-Family Linkages as Gender Systems

Contemporary adulthood is replete with ostensibly gender-neutral paths. Even the career mystique of continuous full-time employment, often in the same occupation or organization throughout most of adulthood, is now seen as available to men and women alike. However, family obligations are neither gender-neutral nor integrated into the designs of jobs and career paths. Most women find it patently impossible to pursue the career mystique and simultaneously their own (and others’) caregiving role expectations as wives, mothers, and adult daughters (Pavalko/Artis 1997). The result? Men have typically reaped greater advantages than have women, with their lock-step work histories enhancing future career options and expectations (O’Rand/Henretta 1996).

Having all adults in a household in the workforce means that more employees are experiencing work-family conflicts and strains. “Good” jobs (those with benefits, for example) were designed for workers (men) without family responsibilities. The “man in the grey flannel suit” office worker and the unionized blue-collar worker in the 1950s could follow the career mystique of working long hours on a continuous basis throughout their adult years precisely because they had wives working as full-time homemakers. They also had jobs paying a living wage, and could expect both their wages and their job security to increase as they gained seniority by remaining with the same employer throughout a lifetime of employment (Moen/Roehling 2005).

Supposedly ungendered pathways are, in fact, not gender neutral so long as jobs are designed for people without family responsibilities, and gender schema and cultural expectations continue to assign women responsibility for society’s unpaid family care as well as for kin-keeping and community-building. Moen and Roehling (2005) conclude that most employing organizations are “work-friendly,” not family-friendly. Mennino, Rubin and Brayfield’s (2005) analysis of the 1997 “National Study of the Changing Workforce” reveals that not only is the workplace environment typically not supportive of employees with family responsibilities, but the environment is worse for women. Women report higher levels of both home to job and job to home spillover than men. Purportedly supportive workplace policies are often merely bandaids, doing little to reduce time pressures and strains. Absent are authentically supportive workplace cultures and supervisors.

Family life and occupational careers are both typically examined exclusive of other social roles and of each other. Life course scholars are beginning to look at the ways in which gender, relationships, and roles intersect across the life course, at the interdependency between work and family obligations as well as the interdependency between the lives of different family members. Some innovative research (Home 1998, Wethington 2000) examines “contagion,” that is, the spillover of stress from one family member to another (see for example, Bolger/DeLongis/Kessler/Wethington 1989).

Social Clocks as Gender Systems

Yet another framing of the adult course is to consider the ways individual lives unfold in the face of institutional clocks and the correlative taken-for-granted culture of what constitutes being “on” or “off” time in adult passages (Neugarten 1968, Hagestad/Neugarten 1985). People leave old roles and enter new ones – such as that of retiree – at particular points in their life biographies. Han and Moen (1999a, 1999b) term this biographical pacing, defined as the age at which individuals undergo key status passages – whether and when one marries, has children, takes a job, goes back to school, changes jobs, retires, goes back to work, remarries, or moves (see also Sweet/Moen 2006). Viewing adulthood from the vantage point of biographical pacing emphasizes the life-course concept of timing and the social clock aspects of gender systems, with individuals defining the passages in their lives (and the lives of others) as being either on or off time – for example, retiring earlier or later than the conventional norm (Brim/Ryff 1980, Neugarten/Hagestad 1976, Settersten/Hagestad 1996, Hagestad/Neugarten 1985, Mortimer/Simmons 1978, Mortimer/Oesterle/Kruger 2005, Mortimer/Vuolo/Staff/Wakefield/Xie 2006, Wheaton 1990). Social clocks are often different for women and men, with women having more temporal latitude around job and retirement clocks and men having more temporal latitude around marriage and parenting clocks. Institutionalized clockworks shape not only individual life pathways but the subjective side of adulthood as well, coloring women’s and men’s expectations, self-concepts, goals, identities, and affinities (Downey et al. 2005, Moen/Sweet/Swisher 2005). Thus the predictability, timing, and clustering of role occupancies or transitions change their meaning, and their implications for identity and adult development more generally.

An emerging issue in life course research is the effect of variation in the pacing and clockworks of life events. Mortimer, Staff, and Oesterle (2003), for example, find alternative paths of labor force participation on the way to adulthood among high schoolers. Similar proportions (~26 percent) of both boys and girls follow a high investment employment path of high duration, and high intensity. Similar portions (~23 percent) of both boys and girls also follow an occasional employment path towards adulthood. But young men are almost twice as likely as young women to not work at all throughout high school (9.9 to 4.6 percent). Young men are also more apt to have a sporadic work history of low duration but high intensity (28.2 to 14.3 percent), and are less likely than their female classmates to follow a steady (i.e., high duration, low intensity) employment pathway during the high school years (18.2 to 30.6 percent). Moreover, Mortimer and colleagues (2003) find that those in sporadic paths – disproportionately men – experience more stress, but also more opportunities for learning, as well as having greater potential for advancement. By contrast, those persons engaged in steady, low intensity occupational paths – disproportionately women – obtain lower earnings and have less stress, but they also have fewer opportunities for human capital development. There has been, to date, little research on biographical pacing as a predictor of behavior or beliefs, and yet it makes intuitive sense that life stage experiences and location – in terms of occupational and family pathways – should shape adult identities as well as plans and expectations for the future, and that this differ by gender.

One manifestation of the unraveling of the social clock aspect of adult development path is the fact that first women and now men as well are increasingly returning to school as adults, often after marriage and childbearing, or even as they approach or enter retirement (Bradburn/Moen/Dempster-Mc-Clain 1995, Settersten/Lovegreen 1998, Suitor 1987, Sweet/Moen 2006).

Biographical pacing is patterned by social class, race and ethnicity, and other social markers, as well as by health and ability, age and gender, and chance events. Recall that a life course theoretical lens (e.g., Elder 1985, 1998a, 1998b, Moen/Wethington 1992) also points to the importance of prior as well as coterminous events for understanding the gendered nature of adulthood. People’s lives thus reflect the interplay between their past experiences, ongoing social and institutional convoys, and large-scale technological, economic, and policy shifts. While considerable advance has been made in capturing the patterned constellations of paths shaping adolescent development (Booth/Crouter/Shanahan 1999, Moen 2003, Mortimer/Staff/Lee 2005, Mortimer/Staff/Oesterle 2003, Shanahan 2000), we know little about the dynamic interplay between work, family, gender, and human development in middle and later adulthood. This points to the need to capture, through life histories or longitudinal data, the patterned dynamics and social clocks of adult lives and identities as they are constructed and reconstructed over time.

Changes in Gender Systems

Institutional convoys – the taken-for-granted regime of age-graded (and often gender-graded) norms, rules, and regulations allocating options and risks at different ages and life stages – do change as a result of historical events, scientific and technological advances, demographic and economic shifts, policy initiatives, and other social transformations.

Most contemporary workers are single, single-parents or dual-earners – without homemakers as back up for family and other obligations. Regardless of status or tenure, both men and women in all kinds of occupations and at all ages confront global economic changes fostering greater job and economic insecurity, along with concerns about health insurance, prospects for advancement, and/or retirement pensions. New information and communication technologies are escalating work demands and speeding up the pace and pressures related to the time and timing of work. The reality is that very few contemporary adults – women or men – have the time, option, or inclination to devote themselves exclusively to their jobs. Moreover, doing so is no guarantee of an adequate income, job security, health care, and other protections.

It is only in the last four decades that employers have even attempted to help employees reconcile work and family responsibilities by adding maternity leaves and later gender-neutral family leaves (Kelly/Dobbin 1999) and creating new child care benefits (Kelly 2003). Recent research confirms that access to family-supportive policies like leaves and child care benefits has an important effect on women’s pattern of labor force attachment, including whether they leave the labor force (Estes/Glass 1996, Liebowitz/Klerman 1995), how quickly they return to full-time work (Hofferth 1996), and whether they change jobs around the time of a birth (Glass/Riley 1998). Those employment decisions, in turn, affect mothers’ wages and career advancement (see Kelly 2005a, for a review). Employers have not added these family-supportive policies out of the goodness of their hearts, or even because the evidence of their benefit to the organization was clear and convincing, but instead because public policies and the public’s expectations have changed over this period (Kelly 2005b). In other words, women’s decisions about how they will try to “balance” work and family are shaped by company policies and practices that are, in turn, shaped by public policies and by broader cultural shifts about what we expect from good employers.

The notion of “orderly” career paths (Wilinsky 1961) embedded in the career mystique dream is no longer a reality even for most middle-class men. In their follow-up study of boys in Great Britain (who were first interviewed at ages 16-18 in 1962-64 and then reinterviewed in 2001), Goodwin and O’Connor (2005) found that as this group proceeded through adulthood they did not follow single careers paths as they had expected, but moved in and out of positions, occupations and employment based on the fluctuations of the local labor market.

In sum, whether reflective of reality or not, the lock-step institutional life course represents time structures and cultural clocks and calendars that constitute both informal timetables and norms (at what age young people should, for example, become financially independent of their parents) and formal policies (such as at what age people become eligible for Medicare). The multilayered clockworks of the adult course are important because they open up or close opportunities (such as the “right” age to attend college) that can have enormous long-term impacts on life chances and life quality. They also infuse the same transition – such as parenthood – with different meanings and consequences, depending on whether the new parent is a father or mother, and whether that new father or mother is age 15, 25, or 45.

Thus far we have described the life course as an institution that is historically constructed and reconstructed, showing that the rules and regulations around age and gender change for different cohorts of people in light of historical events (such as the women’s movement), technological and economic transformations, the move to a service economy (and now a global economy), and social policy development (such as the “Family and Medical Leave Act” and Social Security). But they change slowly, often lagging behind alterations in the real-world experiences of adults.

Most Americans now endorse gender equality in every sphere, and landmark legislation has reinforced the belief in and the right to equal access and opportunity in education, jobs, and community roles. But some variant of traditional gendered divisions of housework, childcare, and paid work persists even when both spouses work full time outside the home.

We argue that gender inequality is now less a consequence of discrimination and patriarchy than a function of a series of mindful, seemingly pragmatic decisions on the part of employers, employees, and families. For example, cultural beliefs presuming that a mother will prioritize family over paid work bias employers’ and managers’ expectations about her ability, performance, and appropriateness for authority even more strongly than for a woman who is not a mother (Ridgeway/Correll 2004). There is growing evidence that women who are mothers of dependent children face special disadvantages in the labor force even compared to other women (Budig/England 2001). Women are more likely than men to work part time or to avoid overtime in order to manage child-rearing and other caregiving work (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2005) that remain principally “women’s work”. Many employers’ stereotypical expectations that women are not interested in long-term careers are thereby reinforced. Some managers then assume that all women – or at least all mothers – are less committed to their jobs. Of course, such assessments are inaccurate and arguably constitute sex discrimination (Correll/Benard 2005, Kelly 2005a, Williams/Segal 2003). Men in turn, continue to embrace the role of family breadwinner, accentuating their willingness to devote enormous amounts of their energy, focus, and time to their jobs.

Two studies of caring for aging or infirm relatives offer suggestive evidence as to the gendered processes and consequences of strategic selection, as well as the absence of institutional supports. Fredriksen (1996) captures some of these control cycle processes in a study of university employees who also have caregiving responsibilities, defined as “assist[ing] an adult family member or friend who has a health problem or disability.” Caregiving demand was defined as the number of children in house, number of hours providing informal adult care, and characteristics of care recipient (i.e., age, resides in home, functional impairment). Women are more likely than men to both be caregivers (strategic selection) and to report higher levels of caregiving strain, work interference, and role strain (consequences of strategic selection). Not surprisingly, women tend to have fewer resources and higher levels of caregiving demand. While men tend to help spouses, women tend to help everyone (see also Gerstel 2000, Sarkisian/Gerstel 2004). Women employees in this study also were more likely to anticipate job termination as a response to their caregiving responsibilities. The women caregivers also endorsed employerprovided benefits more than did their male colleagues.

Marks (1998), drawing on data from the “Wisconsin Longitudinal Study,” finds that caring for a disabled child or spouse is associated with poorer health for women, while only spousal care was associated with negative effects for men’s well-being. Marks also finds caregiving is conducive to well-being, net of work-family conflict. She concludes: “… if steps were taken to make work-family conflict less problematic for employed caregiving women, women caregivers would evidence considerably less distress than they currently do, and some additional psychological benefits of the caregiver role would emerge more clearly.” (Marks 1998: 962).

Contemporary gender strategies have less to do with gender values than with outdated government and business policies that limit options in the time and scheduling of jobs and the inflexibility of career paths (Moen/Coltrane 2005).

Conclusions: Converging Divergences?

The gendered adult course itself may seem “natural,” but it is has been constructed historically through cultural beliefs and norms about the ways women’s and men’s lives should play out, as well as through institutionalized organizational structures that constrain and open options by gender.

In this chapter we have theorized a dynamic ecology of gendered adult development. Our ecology of the life course perspective locates lives in historical time, emphasizes the unfolding of roles and relationships over time, and recognizes the importance of agency as women and men respond to and shape the gendered environments around them. Although gender differentiation is now more subtle than it was in the past, gender remains a visible source of both difference and inequality, especially related to the most gendered role of all – parenthood – and its impacts on employment experiences.

Contemporary adult development is taking place on a moving platform of multilayered social, economic, and technological transformations rendering existing gender scripts and gender systems obsolete. The mismatch between contemporary exigencies and outdated scripts and structures (geared to a very different, 1950s-style adulthood) means that women and men of all ages and stages make strategic adaptations within a climate of uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk.

The result? An increasing degree of variability both within and across gender and age in the experiences and exigencies of adult life. We call this trend converging divergences (Moen/Altobelli 2006, Moen/Chermack 2005, Moen/Spencer 2006), in that neither men’s nor women’s lives now follow taken-for-granted timelines. “Convergence” invokes processes of increasing similarity (in, for example, women’s and men’s labor force participation) over historical time. Most men and women now participate in both paid work and unpaid family carework. Adult insecurities are also converging across gender lines, in that many women and men – even those in the middle class – have neither job nor income security, regardless of their tenure in a particular job or corporation. “Divergence,” on the other hand, suggests a widening of within-gender disparities as a consequence of the deinstitutionalization of traditional gendered expectations around paid work, families, and adulthood. We hold that adult development is both converging (across gender) and diverging (within gender categories).

Basic processes of gendered development unfold in the real-world environments of home and work, as adults seek to integrate and gain a sense of control over the disparate aspects of their lives. People today come to each role transition – marriage, employment, parenthood – with no common set of experiences or expectations. Moreover, people are constrained by their own or significant others’ prior choices (buying a home, taking one job over another, marrying, having a child) and by multi-layered social transformations that call for pragmatic, rather than optimal, actions. In decisions large and small, gender continues to operate as a master status (Bem 1999, Merton 1968, Ridgeway/Walker 1994), directly and indirectly shaping identities, relationships, risks, and resources, as well as role trajectories and transitions, but there are also significant variations among women as a group and among men as a group.

Our ecology of the gendered life course theorizing of the adult course suggests a complex process of adult development as individuals strategically respond to policies or practices premised on standardization (as reflected in outdated cultural and organizational allocation and socialization of people by age and by gender) along with emerging processes of individualization. A global economy, new technologies, and values of gender equality, along with other transformations, mean that contemporary adulthood is a complicated project; often challenging institutional timetables and expectations related to education, occupational career paths, marriage, parenthood, and retirement (see also Neugarten 1968, Rossi 1980, Stewart/Healy 1989). Today, the linear path of adulthood as a lock-step movement from schooling to employment to retirement is being upended as people return to school at different ages, get laid off from (supposedly) lifetime career jobs, take up jobs in completely different fields, or are often are “encouraged” (through buy-outs and layoffs) to retire earlier than they expected. Older workers function under age stereotypes about their inability to learn new skills, and worry about their job security (Bybee/Wells 2002).

Family clockworks are in similar disarray. Young adults sometimes move back home when they can’t support themselves. As Mortimer, Staff and Lee (2005) point out, what it means to be an adult is no longer self-evident to young people in the midst of that transition. Women and men are postponing marriage, never marrying, or leaving marriage. Even, parenthood now occurs on many different time tables. Women are having their first child at 15 and 50, or not having children at all. Men in their 80s are fathering kids, often with second or third (younger) wives. Demographic changes are also reconfiguring the adult years as baby boomers move toward and through the traditional retirement years. Increasing longevity means that adult children are now more apt to share more years with their aging parents and daughters especially, but sons as well, are likely to care for infirm relatives.

We end this chapter where we began: to understand the gendered nature of contemporary adult development requires attention to time, ecological context, and dynamic processes of socialization, allocation, and strategic selection. We have shown that dynamic convoys of institutions and relationships shape how adults spend time – including the entire adult course – in gendered ways. These convoys shift across the adult course as new roles and relationships are entered, others are exited, and still others shift as a result of maturation, experience, or both (such as the changing parent-child relationship over a sixty-year period). Moreover, social and institutional convoys around work and family roles and relationships are themselves in flux, as a result of a changing workforce, a global information economy, egalitarian gender norms, and shifting family life. These large-scale social transformations are creating new risks, uncertainties, and challenges, producing considerable absence of life course “fit” in adulthood for women and men at different ages and life stages.

The mismatch between outdated rules and updated but ambiguous realities is producing a sense of ambivalence about current and future ways of living (see also Bourdieu 1990, Orrange 2007, Sewell 1992, Luescher/Pillemer 1998, Suitor/Pillemer 1994) and of “doing gender” (Bem 1994, Moen/Spencer 2006, Orrange 2007, Risman 1998, West/Zimmerman 1987). We propose the future trends of converging divergences across gender divides in adult development, as women and men pursue similarly diverse paths – in whether and when to marry, have children, divorce, move, go back to school, shift jobs, retire.

There are two ways to change the gender stratification system, from the top down and from the bottom up. Some scholars argue that you have to first change beliefs, norms and stereotypes and then concrete changes will appear (such as equitable income). Other scholars suggest that changing gender systems and structures leads to corresponding changes in gender stereotypes, beliefs, and norms (Serguino 2007). We have made the point in this chapter that contemporary gender inequalities are in large part the result of the fact that jobs remain structured for breadwinners with homemakers, even though neither men nor women are apt to have such back up. When couples have children, therefore, it is women’s wages and career progression that suffer (Correll/Benard/Paik 2007). But the temporal organization of jobs and career paths – the “typical” work day, workweek, work year, work life institutionalized in public and corporate polices and practices – limits employee control and flexibility in arranging their daily schedules, as well as their control and flexibility over arranging their career paths. Gender equality is difficult if not impossible without the development of greater career and schedule flexibilities in the clockworks of workdays, workweeks, work years, and work lives (Kelly/Moen 2007). Without such fundamental work redesign, the only way to gender equality seems to be for women and men alike to function as if they have no obligations outside of their jobs.

The absence of relevant blueprints for contemporary adulthood can be disconcerting, to be sure. But it also presents opportunity – for individuals, couples, schools, employers, communities, and governments to reimagine and reinvent alternative scripts of the adult experience. Organizations and nations can create a range of options for meaningful, productive, and integrative pathways that move beyond the gendered adult course. The challenge is to recognize the need and the value in doing so.

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