Equity After the Kids?

So, is it possible to have equitable division of home and childcare labor after having children?

I poked around today and found that many women blogging seem to think not. And are peeved that even for highly educated career-oriented women, it just doesn't seem to happen.

The most referred to book on the topic seemed to be: Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power, by Rhona Mahony, reviewed here.

The review states:
"Mahony argues that as long as women choose careers that don't maximize their earning potential and that give them flexibility, marry men who have more earning potential and less flexibility, and care more for their children as infants, they will always wind up doing more of the child care and housework."

So three potential whammmies: if you haven't already chosen a "primary earner" type career, OR married a man who earn less than you or has more flexibility OR you are better at or more experienced or devoted to children than he is, you will not achieve equity at home. That is quite a list. Breastfeeding alone would topple the odds within most couples. And then you pretty much have to start out as the primary earner between you. So whether you're my neighbor, a 20-something mother who's worked mostly as a waitress, or my former boss, a politician want-to-be corporate lawyer who would skip seeing her kids to pack in more meetings, you still get to face the lion's share of the work at home.

My old boss, is a very good example of this, come to think. She travelled the globe, earned over 500K per year, flew private jets, regularly was away from her two young boys from 5 am through 11pm at night (I know, because she was with me). She was also, ironically, rather famous for making some legal errors with her nanny. (Congress was unhappy about this and told her so, kind of publicly. Nannygate was the word they chose.) But I digress... And I remember, one day she had a phone call at work with her professor husband who was thus both more flexible and lessor earning from the list above. He was with the kids for the day and had NO IDEA what to do when her son almost suffocated from a peanut allergy, even though all the medicine DH needed was in a kitchen cabinet with typed up instructions. She flew out of her office into mine, nearly in tears: "Why does caring for the kids always all have to fall on me???"

No wonder this equity thing doesn't happen too often!

So, back to those of us in the less than 500K per year category. What do you do about this?

Well, here is a list of 8 tips of what to do to assure equitable division of labor with your husband. #6 is my favorite - choose the right guy! Basically, it says that being a full-time earner before you marry is NOT enough, and you have to consistently reframe and negotiate what working and earning money means.

And here is a response from Mary Tsao.

For a final installment on this topic, see Linda Hirshman's article in American Prospect, Homeward Bound, where she has named my notion that MANY women take years off from work to have children, the "drop-off story," and writes about it with unmitigating shock and surprise.

She asks:
"Why did this happen? The answer I discovered -- an answer neither feminist leaders nor women themselves want to face -- is that while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home."

Call it a glass ceiling (implying a societal dysfunction that penalizes women who try to move up), or call it a bunch of extremely high-achieving women (her sample is just these, unfortunately) who have decided that domestic life may be as important at times as the work they are being paid scads of money to do. This all may be about the inconsistency between corporate norms and expectations and the values of creating a healthy family. What if it turns out that the life feminists were viewing through the glass in 1960's is not all that great, we see now in 2006 that we've been invited in. It ain't what we hoped for. And after the mergers of the 80's and lay-offs and tech bust of the 90's, and the extreme pressues for quarterly earnings, blackberry-driven responsiveness, and globalization, this employee/employer compact really doesn't work so well, on a full-time basis, for most women with children. Hirshman never acknowledges this possibility.

Whichever way you state it, the point is that women are chosing to leave the workforce for a while. And that this is a completely different model than what the 1960's feminists argued and fought for, which her language of glass ceiling reminds us. It's not really about the ceiling if you're not pushing it or looking through it with envy. You're down by the window, opening it a crack to breathe in some fresh air, climb into the trees, explore places that are not run by corporate norms, and play with your kids for a while. And it may be for many that staying put in the company, or job-sharing or working part-time, or even taking a break from paid work, may be more consistent with your life values. And as a society we are truly unprepared to deal with this reality. Or support it, or reward it. What a shame.

And she has some rules too:
"There are three rules: Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry."

There's other really provoking stuff in there. She's seems afraid that the dropping out trend will lead back to the pre-feminism days of being uninvited to succeed, or stuck in the dead end job. I'll stop here and just urge you to read it.

I don't think any of it is a solution to equity in childcare and housework, but I think the broader context of realizing that society (and those that reward the primary earners) does not understand or condone drop-out behavior, which might in fact be the most rational response to the demands of today's employers. And unless we see these pressures for what they are, how can we negotiate a home life that benefits all?