Getting to 50/50: How Working Parents Can Have It All

"Nobody can have it all. As an economist, I bristle when somebody talks about ‘having it all’ because economics is all about trade-offs. We all have the same number of hours in any day and week, and we have to make choices about how we spend our time. So I believe that people—men and women—can have work and family. If they are in a two-career-family, if they are both committed to their own career and to their partner’s career, they can have work and family. But that’s going to mean that they have to make other kinds of trade-offs. Maybe they will exercise less, or have fewer social events on their calendar. Maybe they will see their friends less frequently. Something has to change in order to have work and family, if you were only having work before. What Sharon and Joanna are arguing is that you can stay in the workforce, even though you have young children. In many ways, their book is revolutionary from an economics point of view. Economists, beginning with Gary Becker, have argued that marriage is like gains from trade. If two countries trade with one another in economic theory, we know that each of them benefit. Becker’s idea is that the same kinds of gains from trade occur in marriage, where men specialize in market work, and women specialize in homework and childrearing. But more and more, that specialization is breaking down. Women are in the labour force, and men are more participatory, particularly in childrearing, but also in housework. Today, we have what sociologists call ‘companionate marriages’ — rather than marriages where the partners are looking for gains from trade. In the book, they are describing this new kind of marriage and arguing forcefully that it can work with two people having careers and a family as long as they try to get to 50/50 in the home, which means that their goal is to share housework and childcare equally. This is not to say that that happens every day or even every week. Perhaps it never happens, but that is the goal. They are trying to achieve a situation where children regard both parents as their primary parents, not simply their Mom. Many men in my generation—who did concentrate solely on their jobs and gave their family short shrift—say, today, that when they see their sons or sons-in-law participating much more as active fathers, they see what those benefits are because those younger men have a much closer relationship with their children. But Sharon and Joanna are arguing that particularly women who have a great deal of education—whose husbands are high earners and who drop out of the workforce because the family does not need their income—should stay in the workplace when they become mothers. Their research—as well as my own research—shows that often women leave the workplace to be fulltime mothers, in part because they want to be with their children fulltime — but also very much because they cannot find the flexibility at work that they are looking for. “Women who have no children, by and large, earn the same as men do. Women who have children…earn less.” My own work was on Stanford graduates from the class of 1980. So many of the women talked about their sadness at having to leave the workforce because they simply could not find flexibility. That book is called The Road Winds Uphill All the Way . It compares the graduates of Stanford with the graduates of Tokyo University. The women from Tokyo University also dropped out of the workplace because they couldn’t find flexible arrangements. The American childcare system is non-existent. There is no system. It’s every woman for herself, every family for itself. In the US, we don’t even have paid family leave except in some states and in some companies. We certainly don’t have very much paid leave for fathers. For mothers, the combination of no paid leave, grave difficulties looking for childcare and lack of flexibility in the job, means that they will leave the workforce. They then have less work experience when they come back, and the data show that women who leave the workplace pay a penalty, for the rest of their work life, of around 20% of earnings. Also, although people think that the decision to drop out of the workforce is a private one—and of course it is a private one—it is also one of those decisions that has what economists call ‘externalities.’ It affects many people indirectly. It affects the other, more junior people at work who see that it is not possible to combine work and family at that particular workplace. It affects institutions of higher education who see that their graduates are leaving the workplace. This is particularly a problem for professional schools — law schools and business schools. Interestingly, the medical profession in the US has figured out how to provide flexibility for women with children. It is OK for physicians to go part-time in many work settings. That is not the case in law, or in business, or in academia, and so women drop out. This has effects not only on their own earnings, but on the women who are coming up after them. Academia is more flexible for community college appointments and for what we call ‘adjunct’ appointments, where you can teach on an hourly basis. But if you want a tenure track or tenured position in a research university or a doctoral university, there’s no such thing as a part-time career. I don’t think they would say anything about your working in the way that you do. I think they would argue that journalism, indeed, has the kind of flexibility that many people are looking for. You’ve been able to keep your hand in your field. You have not had to drop out. But if you were working at a law firm, or working at your husband’s workplace, you probably would have had to make a decision to either stay in full-time and spend less time with your family or leave altogether."