Doing Difference

page two

Ozzie and Harriet Are Dead?

In 1996, psychologist Rosalind Barnett and media critic Caryl Rivers co-authored a book based on their study of 300 dual-earner couples in the greater Boston area. She Works/He Works was one of several books published in the mid- to late-1990s— including Susan Chira’s A Mothers Place (1998) and Joan K. Peters When Mothers Work (1997)— offering much-needed reassurance to employed mothers that they would not destroy their health, marriages or children’s happiness by working outside the home. When Barnett and Rivers evaluated the mental and physical health of the dual-earner couples in their study, they found that both men and women in couples who shared responsibility for the economic and domestic aspects of family life were doing very well— even when there were young children in the home. Even though Barnett and Rivers acknowledged that “from outmoded ideas about men, women, work and family flow flawed and ineffective corporate dictates and public policy debates that see balancing work and family as merely a ‘woman’s issue’ and peripheral to the workplace,” they predicted with great confidence that sometime in the early 21st century, the overwhelming advantages of the dual-earner/dual nurturer arrangement would overshadow traditional gender-bound ideas about work and family, and “collaborative” coupling would become the predominant ideological model for married couples with or without children. In a chapter cheerfully titled “Working Moms are Good Moms,” the authors cite a U.S. Census report projecting that “nearly 80% of mothers with infants and young children will be employed by 2005.”

In retrospect, Barnett and Rivers’ gleeful refrain of “Ozzie and Harriet Are Dead” was overly optimistic. While it’s true that over 70 percent of mothers with children 18 and under are employed in the U.S. (and most are employed full time), a minority of married mothers— just 26 percent— earn nearly as much or more than their spouses (compared to 54 percent of married women without children under 18). In 2002, three out of four married mothers with at least one child under six earned less than $25,000 a year, whereas 73 percent of fathers in similar households earned over $25,000 a year (49 percent of such fathers earned more than $40,000 a year, compared to 11 percent of mothers). Current data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that with the exception of one two-year interval, the labor force participation of mothers with infants hovered between 53 and 55 percent in the 12-year period between 1990 and 2002; since 1998, the number of mothers with infants in the paid labor force has been trending downward (workforce participation of mothers with children under six also declined from a high of 65.3 percent in 2000 to 64.1 percent in 2002). Another recent Census analysis found that the total number of children age 15 and under with stay-at-home moms increased between 1994 and 2002.

The dimensions of the “Opt Out Revolution” have been dramatically overstated by the media, but obviously something’s afoot— something possibly related to a couple of the less favorable findings of Barnett and Rivers’ She Works/He Works study. When it came to sharing housework in collaborative couples, men and women spent about the same amount of time on household tasks each week, excluding child care. But women were more likely to be responsible for the low-control “female” tasks necessary to keep the family clean and fed (such as cooking, shopping, laundry and cleaning), while men were more likely to spend time in high-control “male” tasks such as yard work, taking out the trash and looking after the car. And according to Barnett and Rivers, nothing mitigates the added stress of being responsible for “female” household tasks: “Whether you have a good marriage or a bad marriage, whether you are a parent or not …doing these tasks takes a toll” on women’s well-being— “and it doesn’t matter whether you have a liberal sex-role ideology or a traditional one.” Barnett and Rivers also found that in the dual-earner couples they studied, mothers with pre-school children spent 25 more hours a week than their husbands doing child care and put in 17 more hours of total work a week— including paid work, housework and child care— than dads.

Why do things on the work and family front seem to be getting worse, not better, for idealistic moms and dads who imagined the whole shared work/shared care model would be road-tested and ready for roll-out by now? In their new book Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs, Barnett and Rivers suggest the ideological drift of the last twenty years is partly to blame. “Incredibly, traditional ideas that we thought would soon vanish were back in full force. In the past few years, ideas of innate and rigid gender differences that were hurting the families we studied [in She Works/He Works] have reemerged, this time from new and unexpected places, dominating best-seller lists and becoming part of the academic canon. …Surely it was no coincidence that just as women successfully moved into the workforce in enormous numbers and challenged traditional male-female stereotypes, theories emerged that defined men and women on the basis of those very stereotypes.”

Could it simply be, as a number of minds great and small have proposed, that biology is destiny after all? That the survival of the human race has depended on men’s aggressive agency and women’s nurturing passivity since way back when, so that men and women literally evolved— almost like different species— to specialize in separate, interdependent social functions? It would certainly explain why more well-educated, middle-class mothers are bailing out of high-paying professional jobs to become “full-time” moms and the feminist ideal of even-steven co-parenting has been so difficult to sustain for even the most dedicated couples. Maybe we should forget about all that heady equality stuff and just give in.

Or maybe not. Barnett and Rivers and other progressive social scientists insist it’s not human nature, but human culture and the gendered structure of our society that’s holding women back. In Same Difference, Barnett and Rivers reviewed over 1,500 studies to determine if there is indeed a surplus of reliable data to support what most people accept as plain common sense: that men and women think differently, speak differently, behave differently, work differently, have different capacities for competition and caring, and want different things from relationships and family life because that’s just the way men and women are. Barnett and Rivers found that while differences do exist, they are small— it’s not so much that men and women are different, it’s that everybody is different. “Of course there are differences between the sexes— how could it be otherwise?” they write. “But more important is the size of the differences between men and women compared to those among women and among men. In most areas of life, the latter are much larger. If you are a woman named Sarah, you may be very different from Jessica, Elizabeth or Susan in the way you tackle a math problem, deal with subordinates, relate to your spouse, soothe your child, feel about yourself. In fact, you are just as apt to be like Richard, Tom and Seth in these areas as you are to be like other women.” According to Barnett and Rivers, “it’s situation, not sex” that determines men's and women's social behavior.

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sex, gender and the stories we live by

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