Do Working Moms Really Prefer Part-Time Jobs?

Do Working Moms Really Prefer Part-Time Jobs?

Interesting article...

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/do-working-moms-really-prefer-part-time-jobs/

December 16, 2011
By KJ DELL’ANTONIA


The National Marriage Project released an optimistic report this week on marital satisfaction and parenthood. Because “When Baby Makes Three” was edited by the director of the project, which aims to promote marriage by identifying “strategies to increase marital quality and stability,” and by the Director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, which seeks to increase “the proportion of children growing up with their two married parents,” this is not a report that focuses on numbers showing that marital happiness decreases among parents. It’s a report that looks at why that’s not true for a “substantial minority of husbands and wives.”

The result is a nice list of things successful married couples who aren’t made miserable by their kids do for and with one another. Tara Parker Pope wrote about it for last Sunday’s Times Magazine (“The Generous Marriage”). But hidden beneath the advice for couples was a section on the way social and cultural factors that are difficult for an individual to control impact marital/parental happiness. The less affluent and educated you are, the more likely you are to divorce. The more debt you have, and the more day-to-day worries about money, the less likely you are to describe yourself as “very happy” in your marriage (I recognize that this is not a surprising statistic). And if you’d prefer to work “part time” but find yourself instead working “full time,” then women, especially, are significantly more likely to be unhappy with their marriage (and presumably with life in general).

But why do so many women say they’d prefer to work part time in the first place? I spoke briefly to W. Bradford Wilcox and asked him how the question was phrased. What 58 percent of women responding to the Survey on Marital Generosity really said was that that they preferred to work, not “part time” per se, but 34 hours a week or less (only 20 percent of men said the same). That’s not a result that’s unique to this survey: a 2009 Pew survey on workplace demographics found that 61 percent of mothers with young children would prefer to work part time. My former colleague at Slate’s XXFactor blog, Jessica Gross, was momentarily surprised by those numbers. Why, she asked, the huge contrast between what married men and women with children want?

Could it be the way they’re phrasing the question?

Both men and women want flexibility in the workplace to support our family lives. According to the Families and Work Institute’s report on the status of workplace flexibility in the United States, in 2008, 49 percent of employed men with families reported experiencing work-family conflict (up from 34 percent in 1977). The same report points out that workplace flexibility is just as important to the job satisfaction of low-wage employees as it is to high earners, and just as feasible, albeit in different ways. But the report concludes that the “culture of flexibility appears to be stagnating,” with little growth and fears among employees that taking advantage of flexibility that’s offered will interfere with their employment.

In the absence of workplace flexibility, the one way to guarantee that a job will allow you to meet the demands of family life is simple: work fewer hours. So when women tick their way through a survey on work and family in whatever form and reach the question about work hours, many of us are looking for a question that’s not there. “Thirty-four hours or less” doesn’t really represent a desire for part-time work, with its overtones of secondary and lesser roles. It represents a desire for something “other.”

Into that desire comes so much of what we’ve been talking about lately at Motherlode: issues of available, affordable child care, health care, safe housing and even healthy school meal programs. With those things, the need for shorter hours wanes. Without them — if, like Soni Sangha, your child is one of the nearly 10,000 kids who don’t get a slot at any of the public pre-K programs in New York City (where 28,817 applicants vie for 19,834 positions) — 34 hours or less is suddenly the only viable option. (Read about Sangha, who created a co-op pre-K for her son, and investigated the legal status of other parents who’ve done the same, here.)

Of parents who want to work, do more moms than dads really want to work part time? Or have women just accepted a reality that working fewer hours in the absence of true workplace flexibility for both parents is more conducive to a smooth family life? Would fewer work hours make you happier, or is it the flexibility of the hours that counts?