Why
Gender Equality Stalled in Land of Free
It
was the ‘birthplace’ of feminism. But lack of initiatives by the federal
government and unfair work rules have forced many women to drop out of work in
the United States
This week is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s international best seller, The Feminine Mystique, which has been widely credited with igniting the women’s movement of the 1960s. Readers who return to this feminist classic today are often puzzled by the absence of concrete political proposals to change the status of women. But The Feminine Mystique had the impact it did because it focused on transforming women’s personal consciousness. In 1963, most Americans did not yet believe that gender equality was possible or even desirable. Arguing that “the personal is political,” feminists urged women to challenge the assumption, at work and at home, that women should always be the ones who make the coffee, watch over the children, pick up after men and serve the meals. Over the next 30 years this emphasis on equalising gender roles at home as well as at work produced a revolutionary transformation in Americans’ attitudes. It was not instant. As late as 1977, two-thirds of Americans believed that it was “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family”. By 1994, two-thirds of Americans rejected this notion.
The Revolution Stalls
But during the second half of the 1990s and first few years of the 2000s, the equality revolution seemed to stall. Between 1994 and 2004, the percentage of Americans preferring the male breadwinner/female homemaker family model actually rose to 40% from 34%. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of full-time working mothers who said they would prefer to work part time increased to 60% from 48%. In 1997, a quarter of stay-at-home mothers said fulltime work would be ideal. By 2007, only 16% of stay-at-home mothers wanted to work full time. Women’s labour-force participation in the US also leveled off in the second half of the 1990s, in contrast to its continued increase in most other countries. Gender desegregation of college majors and occupations also slowed.
Structural Impediments
Today the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie in people’s personal attitudes and relationships. Instead, structural impediments prevent people from acting on their egalitarian values, forcing men and women into personal accommodations and rationalisations that do not reflect their preferences. The gender revolution is not in a stall. It has hit a wall. In today’s political climate, it’s startling to remember that 80 years ago, in 1933, the Senate overwhelmingly voted to establish a 30-hour workweek. The bill failed in the House, but five years later the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 gave Americans a statutory 40-hour workweek. Between 1990 and 2000, however, average annual work hours for employed Americans increased. By 2000, the United States had outstripped Japan — the former leader of the work pack — in the hours devoted to paid work. Today, almost 40% of men in professional jobs work 50 or more hours a week, as do almost a quarter of men in middle-income occupations. When we look at dual-earner couples, the workload becomes even more daunting. As of 2000, the average dual-earner couple worked a combined 82 hours a week, while almost 15% of married couples had a joint workweek of 100 hours or more.
No Federal Initiative
Astonishingly, despite the increased workload of families, and even though 70% of American children now live in households where every adult in the home is employed, in the past 20 years the United States has not passed any major federal initiative to help workers accommodate their family and work demands. Meanwhile, since 1990 other nations with comparable resources have implemented a comprehensive agenda of “work-family reconciliation” acts. As a result, when the United States’ workfamily policies are compared with those of countries at similar levels of economic and political development, the United States comes in dead last. Is it any surprise that American workers express higher levels of work-family conflict than workers in any of our European counterparts? Or that women’s labourforce participation has been overtaken? In 1990, the United States ranked sixth in female labour participation among 22 countries in the OECD grouping. American women have not abandoned the desire to combine work and family. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1997, 56% of women ages 18 to 34 and 26% of middle-aged and older women said that, in addition to having a family, being successful in a high-paying career or profession was “very important’’. By 2011, fully two-thirds of the younger women and 42% of the older ones expressed that sentiment. Nor have men given up the ideal of gender equity. A 2011 study by the Center for Work and Family at Boston College found that 65% of the fathers they interviewed felt that mothers and fathers should provide equal amounts of caregiving for their children. And in a 2010 Pew poll, 72% of both women and men between 18 and 29 agreed the best marriage is one in which husband and wife both work.
A Difficult Choice
But when people are caught between the hard place of bad working conditions and the rock wall of politicians’ resistance to family-friendly reforms, it is hard to live up to such aspirations. When family and work obligations collide, mothers remain much more likely than fathers to cut back or drop out of work. But unlike the situation in the 1960s, this is not because most people believe this is the preferable order of things. Rather, it is often a reasonable response to the fact that our political and economic institutions lag way behind our personal ideals. Women are still paid less than men at every educational level and in every job category. They are less likely than men to hold jobs that offer flexibility or family-friendly benefits. When they become mothers, they face more scrutiny and prejudice on the job than fathers do. When women are married to men who work long hours, it often seems to both partners that they have no choice. Female professionals are twice as likely to quit work as other married mothers when their husbands work 50 hours or more a week. This is where the political gets really personal. When people are forced to behave in ways that contradict their ideals, they often undergo what sociologists call a “values stretch” — watering down their original expectations and goals to accommodate the things they have to do to get by. Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. We must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue.
Stephanie Coontz / NYT News Service ET130223
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