Dual-earner couples might seem to have "new-millennium" marriages, but for the great majority, strategies to manage work and family demands create, in fact, a variant of the traditional breadwinner/homemaker gender division. Except, in the new version, there are two careers, with only one on the front burner.
This "neotraditional" model helps couples in their effort to "have a life" in a world in which the organization of work and career paths presumes that workers have no family responsibilities -- and it's still the husbands' career that is given priority, says a new study out of the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute.
Working couples have few options, said Phyllis Moen, director of the institute, because of the lag in employment policies and practices that are predicated on lock-step career patterns established early in the 20th century. Caught in a vicious cycle, couples tend to reinforce this template with wives cutting back at work in the face of couples' work-family demands, she said. But this short-term strategy might have long-term negative consequences for women's job security, seniority, rewards and advancement opportunities.
"Contemporary working couples are traversing an uncharted terrain, changing both the composition of the workforce and the division of family labor," said Moen, who also is a professor of sociology and human development at Cornell. "However, with few institutional mechanisms to help dual-earner couples manage their joint work and domestic responsibilities, typical couples choose strategies that free the wives to do most of the domestic work, including child and elder care."
Contemporary couples typically have egalitarian values but find themselves playing more traditional roles. But unlike middle-class couples in the 1950s, gender roles are differentiated not by whether couples work outside the home but by how much they work. The vast majority put in long hours, although women work fewer hours. This reflects not what contemporary couples want but the absence of realistic options for building a life around shared work and family responsibilities, Moen said.
The best off are those in new-millennium marriages in which both spouses put in about the same amount of time on their jobs and neither works long hours, said Moen. "Still, only about 24 percent of workers in dual-earner couples follow this strategy. Again, this is because policies and practices at work lag behind current workplace realities; most workers are married to other workers, but career paths still presume one career per couple," she said.
Moen's study, conducted with Yan Yu, an assistant professor of anthropology/sociology at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Mich., was published in the journal Social Problems (August 2000). The researchers analyzed data from 824 men and 844 women in dual-earner households from the 1992 National Study of the Changing Workforce.
Among their findings:
The study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of the research of the Cornell Careers Institute.
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