Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Women's work revolution over?

Research suggests women may have hit a wall in the amount of work they can pack into a week.

By STAFF, WIRE REPORTS
Published March 4, 2006

	[Times photo: William Dunkley]
	Jennifer Reichow, right, of St. Petersburg reads to daughter Jamie before bed Thursday. Reichow, 45, left teaching because day care was stressful for Jamie. "I'd rather have my daughter being happy and comfortable. She'll have plenty of time later on to be anxious," Reichow said.

For four decades, the number of women entering the workplace grew at a blistering pace, fostering a powerful cultural and economic transformation of American society. But since the mid 1990s, the growth in the percentage of adult women working outside the home has stalled, even slipping somewhat in the past five years and leaving it at a rate well below that of men, various studies show.

While the change has been under way for a while, it was initially viewed by many specialists as simply a pause in the longer-term movement of women into the work force. But now, social scientists are engaged in a heated debate over whether the gender revolution at work may be over.

Is this shift evidence for the popular notion that many mothers are again deciding that they prefer to stay at home and take care of their children?

Maybe, but many researchers are coming to a different conclusion: Women are not choosing to stay out of the labor force because of a change in attitudes, they say. Rather, the broad reconfiguration of women's lives that allowed most of them to pursue jobs outside the home appears to be hitting some serious limits.

For Jennifer Reichow, leaving the work force was all about Jamie.

After Reichow, her husband and daughter moved from Minneapolis to St. Petersburg last spring, she began teaching dropout prevention for Pinellas County Schools. Because her husband also works, that meant the couple had to put Jamie, their 4-year-old daughter, in day care for the first time.

But the cross-country move and the stress of being away from her parents began to wear on their daughter.

So Reichow, 45, left her job at end of January. She plans to go back in 2007, after her daughter begins kindergarten.

"I do miss teaching," said Reichow, who had taught for five years in Minnesota. "But I also really enjoy working and playing with my daughter. In that sense, staying home is fulfilling."

But while the couple gained quality time with their daughter, they lost a second income.

"We figured out where we could cut corners financially," Reichow said. "But we forfeited having any decent savings.

"But I'd rather have my daughter being happy and comfortable. She'll have plenty of time later on to be anxious."

Since the 1960s, tens of millions of women rejiggered bits of their lives, extracting more time to accommodate jobs and careers from every nook and cranny of the day. They married later and had fewer children. They turned to labor-saving machines and paid others to help handle household work; they persuaded the men in their lives to do more chores.

At the peak in 2000, 77 percent of women in the prime ages of 25 to 54 were in the work force.

Further changes, though, are proving harder to achieve, stretching the daily challenge facing many mothers at nearly all income levels toward a breaking point.

"What happened on the road to gender equality?" said Suzanne Bianchi, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. "A lot of work happened."

Bianchi, who studies time-use surveys done by the Census Bureau and others, has concluded that contrary to popular belief, the broad movement of women into the paid labor force did not come at the expense of their children. Not only did fathers spend more time with children, but working mothers, she found, spent an average of 12 hours a week on child care in 2003, an hour more than stay-at-home mothers did in 1975.

Instead, mothers with children at home found the time for outside work by taking it from other parts of their day. They worked more. Bianchi found that employed mothers, on average, worked at home and on the job 15 hours more a week and slept 3.6 fewer hours than those who were not employed.

"Perhaps time has been compressed as far as it will go," she suggested. "Kids take time, and work takes time. The conflicts didn't go away."

Indeed, the research suggests that women may have hit a wall in the amount of work they can pack into a week. From 1965 to 1995, Bianchi found, the average time mothers spent doing paid work jumped to almost 26 hours a week from 9 hours. Time spent on housework fell commensurately, to 19 hours from 32.

Then the trend stalled. From 1995 to 2003, mothers, on average, spent about the same amount of time on household chores, but their work outside the home fell by almost four hours a week.

This is having broad repercussions for the economy. Today, about 75 percent of women 25 to 54 years old are working or actively seeking a job, up from around 40 percent in the late 1950s. That expansion helped fuel economic growth for decades.

But the previous trend flattened in the early 1990s. And since 2000, the participation rate for women has declined somewhat. It remains far below the 90 percent rate for men in the same age range.

There is one big exception to the trend: While the rate of labor participation leveled off for most groups of women, the percentage of single mothers in the work force jumped to more than 75 percent from 63 percent. That of high school dropouts rose to 53 percent from 48 percent.

Economists say these women were pushed into work with the help of changes in government policy: the expansion of the income tax credit and the overhaul of welfare in the mid 1990s, which replaced long-term entitlements with temporary aid.

Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard University, said in a keynote speech to the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Boston in January that the trend across nearly all groups of women had "led many to wonder if a "natural rate' of labor force participation has been reached."

A broad set of social and economic forces pushed women into the work force. From the 1960s onward, women flooded into higher education and began to marry later.

Goldin said a typical female college graduate born in the mid 1960s married at 26, three years later than the typical female college graduate born in the early 1950s.

This alone had large-scale implications for women's ability to work. Many families delayed the arrival of their first child. Today, about 43 percent of women 25 to 29 have children younger than 6, compared with about 71 percent of women in that group in the 1960s.

Further along in years, women's participation in the labor force is being restrained by a side effect of delayed motherhood: a jump in 30-something mothers with toddlers.

By 2004, about 37 percent of women ages 33 to 37 had children younger than 6, compared with 28 percent in 1979.

Most women, even those with young children, need to work. Many more want to.

But those who kept working are torn. Catherine Stallings, 34, returned to her job in the communications department of New York University's medical center last month because she could not afford not to. Dealing with work and her 5-month-old daughter, Riley, has been stressful for her and her husband.

"Usually, we are so tired we pass out around 10 or so," Stallings said. "And my job is not a career-track job."

Some economists argue that it is premature to conclude that the gender revolution in the workplace has reached its limit. Yet for the participation rates of women to rise significantly, they agree, mothers may have to give up more of the household burden.

There may be yet another, more subtle reason women choose to leave a traditional job.

Jewly Youschak chairs the Women's Council of the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce, and with her husband, Dennis, owns and operates the Inn at the Bay bed and breakfast.

She maintains many women are leaving the work force partly because corporate America has changed. For the worse.

"You see ethics that rub against your grain," she said. "In your core, you know those ethics are wrong.

"I left the airline industry with my husband because we saw things we didn't like, and we wanted to control our priorities and beliefs."

When they can, Youschak said, many of those women start businesses.

"The bottom line is that you have to protect you and your family, and corporate America isn't doing that anymore."

[Last modified March 4, 2006, 07:28:02]