40 percent of women now say that they are the primary breadwinners for their families. This is a huge shift in the workforce. (I'm not sure if that's because more women are divorced or unmarried or because their work pays better than their husband's work.)
Women are still paid less then men for similar work, reports MSNBC. Actually, it's married women with children who are paid less. Single women have parity with their male counterparts. This is because women with children need more flexible work hours to deal with their care-taking responsibilities. They aren't in the position to bargain for higher salaries, because they are afraid to rock the boat if their boss does allow them some flexibility. They also turn down more work with higher salaries, because the job with longer hours might interfere with family time.
MSNBC correctly points out that the workforce and the schools have been extremely slow to deal with the shift in demographics of the workforce. We need more flexible work options and better after-school care to deal with these shifts.
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The Today Show had a segment on this this morning, too.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
UPDATE: See Ezra Klein.
Apt. 11d 
I wonder if the recently released shriver report is actually the primary source for these commentaries re: work/school inflexibility? (I mean MSNBC didn’t think that up all on their own…)
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Thanks for pointing out the truths behind the wage gap. Men are more likely to take on work that’s dangerous (coal mining, construction, contract work in Iraq) and that requires lots of travel. More women will take a position with higher job satisfaction over a position with a higher salary. Compare apples to apples, and women who work the same numbers of hours in the same positions make as much as men. In some fields, women make more.
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I’m already cranky.
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It is a problem is that mother accountants are paid less than father/single guy/single woman accountants. Mothers shouldn’t be penalized for having to take care of their children or for taking off a couple of years when the kids are young. Mothers shouldn’t be given the Sophie’s Choice of their children or their careers.
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Mothers shouldn’t be given the Sophie’s Choice of their children or their careers.
That makes it sound a bit like someone will kill the kids if Moms put in long hours.
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I’m kind of resigned on this whole issue, for the moment at least. No one has any leverage in the economy; we’re all afraid to the point of franticness over the specter of losing health insurance for our kids. I have never, ever seen worse office politics than I’m seeing now … people are doing ANYTHING to keep their gig.
Keep in mind, Laura, that mother accountants only take a pay cut when they start behaving like something other than the Ideal Employee. When they ask to leave early, or call in sick repeatedly for a child’s illness, or ask to go part time for a while. Until we break down the whole Ideal Worker thing anyone with outside responsibilities of any kind will be at a disadvantage.
I wonder what this teaches our kids. Why would our daughters (or sons, for that matter), watching what we’re going thru, ever choose to have families? My own colleagues look at me and roll their eyes — you can tell they think I’m an absolute sucker for having kids.
I waver between thinking this will all lead to even more women-owned small businesses, or below-replacement birth rates, or both.
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“It is a problem is that mother accountants are paid less than father/single guy/single woman accountants.”
“I waver between thinking this will all lead to even more women-owned small businesses, or below-replacement birth rates, or both.”
I don’t have a cite for this, but I believe that accounting is actually rather attractive as a home business model for mothers. You can have a home office and decide how much you want to work (with a predictable spring tax rush). My parents use a woman with exactly that home office set-up to deal with payroll, taxes, etc for their small business ventures.
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Arthur’s mother is an accountant, right (the aardvark).
Isn’t below replacement birth rates already a fact of life in many developed nations? The mean OECD average looks like it’s 1.62. IN 2004, only the US, Turkey, Mexico, and New Zealand had rates higher than 2, and most are substantially below replacement level.
I actually don’t think this is going to be an economic issue, though (lower than replacement birthrates), ’cause I think that the world population is eventually going to shrink, that the carrying capacity of the earth for a developed human population (i.e. more food, more shelter, more energy usage, more toys) is lower, and that eventually we’ll actually see population shrinking.
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Oops, forgot Iceland and the Netherlands, also above 2.
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bj, I totally hear you, that below-replacement birth rates are a fact of life in many places and that it may be for the best in the end, in terms of the environment. It just feels unfair to me to have motherhood be so stressful that many people avoid it altogether.
And I’m with Marya – I’m already cranky. (Although I think I’d be crankier if I were living 50 years ago.)
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Oh, I wasn’t really arguing that it was a good thing in general (I was talking about the economics — i.e. will the declining birth rates mean that government intervention/change of policies will be required). I was trying to point out that cranky women have already made this decision, that having children is such a significant cost that they are “choosing” below-replacement reproduction rates. From an evolutionary standpoint, that’s pretty dramatic. I’d guess, though, that part of the explanation is how much of a “choice” it is.
We can, after all, sustain a below-replacement value for quite a while, but it is the road to extinction.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html
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Why would our daughters (or sons, for that matter), watching what we’re going thru, ever choose to have families?
Flip that question around. As they see what so many of us are going through, why on earth would they ever choose to pursue the kind of jobs/lifestyles we pursue?
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Well, our three regularly talk about when they get married and have children. They do say they don’t want a high-stress, long-hours job like mommy’s, though.
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I more often get cranky from school and kid activities not accommodating my work schedule than work not accommodating kid life. For example, my job rarely requires me to come in unexpectedly or take time out of my evenings, but school and preschool like to randomly close in the day, and most music and swimming lessons aren’t even in feasible working-parent hours. I feel like work is maybe a bit excessive, but predictable. Kid coverage is not.
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The Today Show did a hard hitting story about how tough it is for Gov. Granholm’s husband to adjust to being the primary caretaker of the children. I watched and marveled this morning – a special week long report about women – that talks about how it all affects men. yuck
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I agree that most European countries with more family-friendly policies also have lower birth-rates, so any argument along the lines of “free childcare and paid time off will boost birth rates” seems like a non-starter.
Overall, I think the main fallacy here is that when “we” (upper middle class families) think about “work” in the work/family balance, we think of potentially rewarding and productive activities that fulfill us to some degree (at least ideally).
If your job is a secretary, or a cashier, or a housekeeper, or data entry, or 90% of the jobs that “they” (lower middle class, working class and poor women) do, the idea of free daycare so that you can go to work seems ridiculous. “You want to pay someone else to care for my kid so I can go to work? Why not just pay me to watch my own darned kids and cut out the middle man?”
I’m guessing if you asked non-upper-middle-class-women, “This government program offers $8,000 per year credit to put your kid in daycare, or an $8,000 check you can keep if you stay at home and don’t work, which do you want?” an overwhelming majority would pick the latter.
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” “You want to pay someone else to care for my kid so I can go to work? Why not just pay me to watch my own darned kids and cut out the middle man?””
But a bunch of the countries have actually offered this as well — child subsidies that have nothing to do with whether you are doing something else at the same time. They don’t seem to work either.
I have some vague memory that we’ve had this discussion before, and I think at the time that people noted that whether women choose to reproduce (when they have a choice) seems to depend most directly on whether they have help with their children (in the form of spouses who help, or extended family who helps). It seems like many women are unwilling to become full-time, primary caretakers of their children without a close support network, when they can choose to do otherwise. Wasn’t one of the differences we noted, say, between Italy & the Netherlands, the involvement of fathers in child-raising?
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I think you are right. My point here (to the extent I had one) was not “How can we raise the birth rate?” — I don’t actually care if people don’t want to have children, or only want to have one.
My point was primarily that “subsidies and policies to help working mothers” is largely a subsidy to upper-middle class women (as a recent thread showed, working moms are, on average, in richer families than SAHMs). It may be what “we” want, but it’s not really very progressive compared to other policies that are targeted more toward working class moms.
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You know, Ragtime, If your job is a secretary, or a cashier, or a housekeeper, or data entry, or 90% of the jobs that “they” (lower middle class, working class and poor women) do, some of “they” actually read and comment on this blog. Even 20 years ago when my kids were in day care, I would have picked the subsidy rather than stay home with them–and it’s not like $8,000 would have covered my daycare expense anyway, with a toddler and an infant in full time care in 1990. That’s only $666 per month for both kids! It might cover in-home care, but not full time care at a licensed, credentialed center.
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Kai, glad you’re here to represent a viewpoint of a “they”
I largely agree that I have no desire to be involved in reproductive choices (which I pretty adamantly believe should be made by the woman whose body will be involved). But, below replacement reproduction is the path to human extinction. I’m not, actually worried about that, because I do think it will be self-correcting. Interesting to ponder, though.
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Some women are doing very nicely, breaking into management: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-camorra-women25-2009oct25,0,3547173.story
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