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Chapter 3

Changing Gender Roles in Family and Domestic Life

At 36, Meg had been working full-time since college. Trying to balance her career in sales for a major telecommunications company with the demands of her young family—she had two children, aged two and five—and caring for her father, who was suffering from congestive heart failure, had left her feeling burned out. “I got to a place where I thought that I was doing everything, but nothing extremely well,” she recalls. Her company offered a formal off-ramping program. Meg decided to take advantage of it.

Like Meg, many women are book-ended by the two responsibilities and find themselves bearing the burden of both. Nearly three-quarters of off-ramping women say that spending more time with their children was one of the major factors in their decision to leave the workplace, 29% more than in 2004 (see Figure 3.1). Caring for a parent or family member is also on the rise (an increase from 24% in 2004 to 30% in 2009).

For all of the trumpeted media stories about stay-at-home dads, the traditional division of labor between men and women still prevails in the majority of households. Sixty percent of full-time working women in our 2009 survey reported that they routinely performed more than half of the domestic chores (see Figure 3.2). With regard to childcare, the number is 56%.

One of the most surprising findings of our refielded survey is that women today are 28% more likely to have a nonworking spouse than they were five years ago. What’s more, nearly 40% of full-time working women outearn their spouses. Unfortunately, this isn’t so much good news for women as it is bad news for men, who have been more harshly affected by the many layoffs that have characterized the current recession. Furthermore, even as more wives and mothers step into the role of primary breadwinner, they continue to shoulder a disproportionate load of domestic responsibility: 39% of women who currently earn more than their spouses continue to take care of most of the household responsibilities and childcare duties.

Many of the women in our focus groups, regardless of their off-ramp status, report doing “double duty” at work and at home because their husbands also had demanding careers. (Women are more likely than men to have a spouse or partner who works full-time: 77% of women compared with 65% of men.) And when companies are unwilling to offer flexibility to full-time working women with childcare and/or eldercare responsibilities, the tugs and pulls of family can be so strong that many women feel that they have no choice but to leave.

Childlessness

Of course, not all women are married, and not all women have children. Over a quarter of the women in our sample were single and 38% of them were childless.

Interestingly, childlessness appears to be related to income. Women who are high earners—those who earn $75,000 or more annually—are less likely to have children than their lower earning counterparts.

Single, childless women still off-ramp in significant numbers: 14% of single, never-married women have taken a break at some point during their careers, as have 31% of women without children. Single and childless women off-ramp due to many of the same “push” factors as their married-with-children counterparts: 44% of childless off-rampers who left cited an unsatisfactory or disappointing career as a major factor in their decision to depart, while 28% said feeling stalled was a major factor.

It is also worth remembering that childlessness does not automatically equate to a lack of family responsibilities. For example, 21% of women without children off-ramp for eldercare responsibilities. Companies and managers would be wise not to take women for granted just because they don’t have a traditional family model at home. As we found in our “Bookend Generations” study, eldercare responsibilities tend to fall squarely on the unmarried sibling or one without children.9

Takeaways

The increasing importance of women as bread-winners has done little to equalize the role that women play in the home. Even when they are working full-time and earning more than their spouses or partners, a majority of women are still responsible for more than half of the household chores and childcare in their homes.

 Women today are 28% more likely to have a nonworking spouse than they were five years ago.

 Even as women become primary wage-earners, they continue to shoulder a disproportionate load of domestic responsibility: 39% of women who currently earn more than their spouses continue to handle most of the household responsibilities and childcare duties.

 Single women and those without children are also tugged off-track by family responsibilities: 21% of women without children off-ramp for eldercare reasons.

* Data for 2001 comes from Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Norma Vite-León, High-Achieving Women, 2001 (New York: Center for Work-Life Policy/National Parenting Association, 2002).