Because it isn’t all around us, because we didn’t grow up with it, because it is so new, we need as many stories as possible of what genuinely sharing the workload looks like in a family..
As health professionals, Jayne and Tim both work 30 hours a week – Jayne over four days and nights, Tim over three days. When one is at work, the other does the household chores. If they are both at home they do them together.
Cooking, shopping, cleaning, laundry and all the running around after their three children are divided equally. ”There’s no real delineation,” says Jayne. ”Because I might work in the afternoon I’ll do the shopping, but it’s not like I have to get a meal together – Tim will cook.”
Tim adds, ”On Sunday, Jayne’s at work and I’ll make a slice for the week and soup for Monday night because we both work Mondays … I can’t believe this is interesting, don’t other families live like this?”
No, they don’t. Research shows the norm in two-parent Australian families is that women do 70 per cent of the housework. Even as women’s workforce participation has steadily increased since the 1970s, and the average Australian family features a full-time working father and a part-time working mother, women carry about three quarters of the domestic burden.
From here via Marijke.
Reading this couple’s story I can see that Bill and I are still only chipping away at the edges of dismantling our own traditional ‘work and family’ arrangement. We have some important elements in place though, because while I work part-time and Bill works full-time, he works one of his days from home and on that day he does the school pick-up and drop-off, along with a whole lot of other kid-related tasks, by himself. He cherishes that day but also finds it utterly exhausting. (Its aftermath is frequently chaos). Working from home while dealing with little kids is no picnic. But for me, it is the most carefree day of my week. There is nothing like sailing out the door to work while someone else tries to construct a healthy school lunch and cajole an unco-operative toddler through a nappy change behind you. Good luck with that honey.
We were doing better when my husband had a telecommuting job. He did the laundry during his workdays, and the afternoon childcare runs, more than half of the grocery shopping, the cooking and some other things. Now he spends 2 hours of his day commuting and he arrives home well after childcare centres close. It is a big big deal now for me to offload a childcare run. He still cooks and does the grocery mental chores (what are we out of? I have no idea. Soap and milk just appears in my cupboards as if by magic) but his change of job probably shifted 10 hours of domestic work my way.
If we can move closer to his work that will alleviate this significantly, but it will cost us something like $400 a week in extra accommodation expenses.
The major inequality has always been that his work requires international travel. While this can be no picnic for him (jetlag, time crammed in economy, loss of weekends to flights with no leave in lieu) it means a regular total dumping of all household responsibilities on me. The inevitable jetlag crash+cold picked up somewhere means an unproductive week (work and domestic) when he gets home too. His new job requires less international travel currently but his next promotion might result in spending up to 12 weeks a year travelling.
Tim in the article sounds like my husband. I once asked him why he thought he should do half the chores, and he looked at me l had sprouted an extra head and said something like “its just obvious.”
Well yes, honey, it is. But somehow, a lot of men have missed it.
OK, I realized after I hit Post that this sounds a bit like I’m bragging about My Nigel- who is no more perfect than any other person. He just has this one area figured out, for the most part. We still manage to argue about chores and child care, but we do so from the same base assumption that the division of labor should be equal, and he does default to doing things around the house in a way that many of my friends’ husbands don’t.
My point was just that I think that men who have this figured out don’t usually realize that everyone isn’t this way, which is a shame- they could be great voices for changing the status quo on a larger level, but they don’t realize that anything needs to be said.
Cloud, I wonder whether your husband’s attitude has anything to do with being a New Zealander. I’m sure it has it’s fair share of reactionary jerks, but it does just seem to be a far more progressive country than most – you know, giving women the vote in 1893, signing a treaty with it’s indigenous people, becoming a nuclear-free country in 1984….
I’m another one who doesn’t get why every family isn’t like this. My husband takes our child to nursery and picks him up (he drives, I don’t). My husband does all the cooking and washing up, and orders the main food shop each month (done online). He cleans the bathroom, and I do the laundry and the hoovering.
We alternate putting our toddler to bed each night, and also alternate the early mornings (when our son rises at 5.30 or similar). I don’t understand why everyone isn’t the same – I totally assume that a partner will share things equally and wouldn’t have settled with someone who thought that I should be doing more just because I’m a woman.
I want to know where they both found sub-40-hour jobs. In my experience, they’re rare as hen’s teeth – and in the US very rarely come with health insurance.
And Mary, I wonder how bad the international travel skews everything – home, job market, all of it. I have a friend whose partner does that, and it’s part of the reason she can’t have a fulltime job – to get the childcare coverage she’d need to cover his weeks away, they’d have to pay for it all the time (few child care workers are OK with the intermittent work) and that makes it cost-ineffective for her to work in her field. Another friend, married but childfree, had a hard time finding a high-travel job that would hire her – HR folks didn’t seem to believe that she’d really be OK away from home as much as she is (where they seem to not question it for men.)
A few points about international travel:
I notice in both your friend’s family and mine, the non-travelling partner is expected to either provide or organise additional childcare.
Even occasional international travel is almost impossible for breastfeeding mothers, so that means in fields like mine (open source software, very conference-heavy) and many academic ones you can either not publish for several years*, not breastfeed, or drag a jetlagged infant around the world with you and try and do 24/7 solo childcare while being a professional at week-long adults-only events.
Finally, it means that if both parents (if there are two) are in the same field (like we are) only one person can have a travelling job, because of the risk of needing to travel at the same time.
* This is field dependent, but in computer science many publications of record are made in conference proceedings, and you must appear at the conference to appear in the proceedings.
Ah, and also the tax situation in Australia is very carer-hostile.
1. If your employer assists with childcare expenses while travelling (or in any fashion other than providing a licenced on-site centre), this attracts punitive fringe benefits tax.
2. If you travel internationally, you have to come straight back, give or take a few days, or your airfare begins to attract FBT. So in the travelling-with-infant scenario you haul the infant straight to the conference, parent hir terribly, and haul hir home with no chance to recover in any way.
Oh yeah. It’s always on the nontraveling parent because the traveling parent has all the travel to organize. And it’s a total drag on the other partner’s career, since one person has to be at home. I see the same issue with military couples – if the grandparents don’t step in, one parent has to retire early, with much lower benefits & pension, because it’s just not possible to both be subject to being sent overseas at the same time.
Weirdly, my partner is also in open-source software (though not at all academic) and I wonder sometimes if his unwillingness to travel often has limited his career. It’s hard to see from my end because the field pays so much better than the pink-collar field I’m in, but I know he’s on the low end of the pay scale for his job title, and it’s some combination of never jobhopping (as most of our friends have) and only being willing to go to Germany every year or so instead of every time he’s asked. Both of which are due to family considerations as well as temperament – we’re unwilling to move cities while our son is in school, and when we didn’t have a kid it was because I had a great and not very replaceable job.
I agree, these sorts of arrangements are far too rare- but have to say a couple of things: First, I think 32 hours/week is the cutoff for benefits in the US- I think this because several companies that I have worked at have had this cutoff, and I can’t imagine they just arrived at that on their own.
Also, I wonder how much of the fact that these arrangements are rare is because people don’t ask for them? When I was coming back after having my first baby, my (awesome) supervisor asked what my ideal arrangement would be. I ended up with a 35 hour work week (with full benefits but reduced pay), which, given the way we handled hours at that job, I used to take every other Friday off. It was pretty sweet. But if he hadn’t asked me, I wouldn’t have thought to ask for that.
And now that I think about it, I suspect I could have the same arrangement at my current job if I pushed for it. I’m happy enough with the way things are right now, though, not to try.
Obviously, not everyone has the option for reduced hours, and those who do are probably at the higher end of the socioeconomic scale. But I wonder if more people have this option than realize it?
If there’s an hours cutoff for benefits, it’s got to be state by state (or union agreement by union agreement, in unionized industries – I’ve had the best luck finding part time in nonunion departments of union industries). I have had jobs where the benefit cutoff was 24, 28, and 30 hours.
But I *know* people are asking. Maybe it just varies office by office – I know a lot of professional white collar men who wouldn’t take any paternity leave because they knew it would cost them in the long run, so I can’t imagine anyone going to bat for part or flex time in their workplaces. I choose jobs mostly based on flexibility, so my workplaces have been full of askers…but still not full of part time arrangements. The job I just left got a ton of internal applications when we had an opening, because it was the ONLY part time staff job in a company where most people average 45-50 hours/week. The only common factor in applicants was that they really wanted to be part time – some were looking at huge pay drops to do it, and many were jumping career tracks completely. Before I got that job, I was working on a jobshare agreement with a coworker – half the women in the department were angling for flex or part-time, but management kept reorging us so often nobody could get a business plan put through with current job requirements.
It’s not just parents – I’ve mostly worked part time, and the world of people who need a job for benefits but have a significant commitment outside of work is huge. People taking care of their own parents, people with children, people with arts careers (I have worked with many quite successful artists – even a MacArthur grant doesn’t come with health or pension benefits), people starting small businesses, people hitting a lean time in the family business, farmers & their spouses.
It seems to me that it’s more of a management ideology issue than anything else (though the cost of providing benefits is important.) Some companies recognize you can work hard in part time hours, some think if you’re not sitting in the chair 10 hours a day you’re not committed to the bottom line, regardless of output. And some swing back and forth.
I think you’re right- this sort of thing would be state law, not federal. 32 hours must be the California rule.
I think the availability of part time options is going to be very industry specific. I don’t work in a unionized industry, so unions have nothing to do with it in my case. I wonder if they push much for these options? I honestly don’t know.
The company in which I had the 35 hour week arrangement was a consulting/contracting firm. We charged our time by the hour, and a lot of people worked out a lot of flexibility because of that. You are right- it wasn’t just the parents. I actually think that is good, because that keeps taking the flexibility from being a career killer.
My personal opinion is that in my industry, it would be easier to get a 30-35 hour/week arrangement than a 20 hour/week arrangement, and that the only likely path to such an arrangement would be to get hired into a standard full time job and then negotiate different hours. I have never seen a formal ad for a part time position or heard of a hiring manager looking for someone part time. In general, if we need less than full time work, we hire a contractor.
So yes, nowhere near as easy as it could/should be.
On the travel thing- you can luck out a bit on that, depending on where you actually live. I SHOULD travel more than I do, but I’ve been able to get around that partly because a lot of conferences come to my home town. That was pure luck.
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