This The Public Interest article (What Do Women Really Want? By Neil Gilbert) makes a nice follow-up to my post on the gender gap from last week:
Today, a little over one in five women in their early forties are childless. That is close to double the proportion of childless women in 1976. Compared to a relatively few Ivy-League law graduates who have traded the bar for rocking the cradle, the abdication of motherhood poses an alternative and somewhat more compelling answer to the question: Who is opting out of what? Women are increasingly having fewer children and a growing proportion are choosing not to have any children at all. And those who have children are delegating their care to others. If there has been an "opt-out revolution," the dramatic increase in childlessness—from one in ten to almost one in five women—and the rise in out-of-home care for young kids would probably qualify more than the shift of a relatively small group of professional-class women from high-powered careers to childrearing activities.
The author discusses four general categories "that form a continuum of work-family preferences among women in the United States." Among women over 40, there are women who have three or more children and "derive most of their sense of personal identity and achievement from the traditional childrearing responsibilities and from practicing the domestic arts" (29 percent), women with one or two children (52 percent) who "are interested in paid work, but not so vigorously committed to a career that they would forego motherhood" and fall out into one of two subcategories: neo-traditional and modern, and women who are childless for whom "personal success tends to be measured by achievements in business, political, intellectual, and artistic life rather than in the traditional realms of motherhood and child-rearing" (18 percent).
The article goes on to discuss the U.S. family policy v. that of Western Europe, which categories of women these policies serve, and how they could be changed to provide women with a broader range of options:
The reality is that family policies can be friendlier to some life styles than to others. Recognizing this, we should explore alternatives to the conventional perspective on family policies designed to harmonize work and family life. The conventional approach is implicitly oriented toward helping mothers work while raising children. It is informed by male work patterns, which basically involve a seamless transition from school to the paid labor force along with a drive to rise as high as possible in a given line of work. This "male model" of an early start and a continuous work history imposes a temporal frame on policies to harmonize work and family life, and it stresses the idea of "balancing" the concurrent performance of labor-force participation and child-rearing activities. Child-care services, and even periods of parental leave, facilitate an ongoing and relatively stable work history—which is preferred by many, though clearly not all, women.
But the male model offers a narrow perspective on family and career choices. Viewing the issue from a "life-course perspective" reframes and extends the choices by including the possibility that a "balance" between motherhood and employment might be achieved by sequential as well as concurrent patterns of paid and domestic work. Such a perspective encompasses not only women who want to combine work and family life at the same time, but also those who might envision investing all their resources in child care and domestic activities for 5 to 10 years and then spending the next 25 to 30 years in paid employment.
Various measures could be initiated to support the choice of a sequential approach to balancing family and work. For example, we have seen that the federal government already provides about $16 billion in subsidies for a variety of cash and in-kind benefits to working parents who place their children in day care. The provision of similar supports through tax credits and home-care allowances to full-time homemakers with children under five years of age would afford parents greater freedom to choose between caring for children at home and consuming state subsidized day-care benefits. To guard against home-care benefits that would end up disproportionately subsidizing wealthy families, these schemes could be progressively indexed.
Interestingly, the author does nothing to challenge the assumption that women want to/should be the primary caregivers for their children. While he acknowledges the inequitable distribution of household duties in families with children and even seems to recognize that tradition male models of employment are problematic, we once again see no proposals that call on men to take on greater child-rearing responsibilities and/or modify their own career paths to dedicate more time to domestic activities. Perhaps I'm the only lady in North America who thinks having a house husband would be swell? Or has feminism retreated so far that we've just come to accept domestic gender inequities?
Posted by sarah at December 21, 2004 11:05 AM | TrackBack