Families and Work Institute Study
 

http://mensnewsdaily.com/glennsacks/...stitute-study/

Families and Work Institute Study
Posted on Apr 3, 2009

This is an informative study done by the Family and Work Institute. It
summarizes trends in work, education and attitudes about family and work
over the past years, generally since 1970, but some comparisons cover
shorter and longer periods.

It begins by comparing men's and women's work habits since 1950 and shows
that women's participation in the workforce has increased markedly and men's
has declined. (The study's brief explanation for that phenomenon manages to
ignore the obvious - that men's decreased participation is due to women's
increased participation.) It touches briefly on the current recession and
on increased rates of employment by women with young children.

The study moves on to educational attainments of men and women and finally
deals with attitudes about work and family among men and women.

By dealing with trends instead of snapshots of specific periods of time, the
study offers some interesting insights. First, it seems clear that the
vastly greater presence of women in college will continue the trend toward
greater workplace participation and earnings by women. It's unquestionable
that greater education results in greater earning potential on average. So
whatever the balance of men and women in the workplace, women will be
earning more than before and maybe more than men in the next generation.

What the study also suggests is that one of the major factors is
contributing to the wage gap - women choosing lower paying jobs - is likely
to become less true in the future. Attitudes of younger workers indicate
that women and men have become equal in their desire for greater
responsibility on the job. That in turn suggests that women will gravitate
less to jobs like teaching and nursing and more to higher paying jobs. That
will go a long way to eradicating the wage gap.

Along those same lines, women's propensity to periodically drop out of the
workforce may decline in the near future. An astonishing study done by the
Institute for Women's Policy Research showed that over a recent 15-year
period, women earned in the aggregate 38% of what men earned. Fewer than
half of the women studied had earnings in all 15 years compared with 84% of
men and one-third of women had four or more years with no earnings compared
with 5% of men.

Women's attitudes towards work suggest that phenomenon may change
significantly over the next generation. And men's attitudes towards family
and childcare suggest the same thing. The study indicates radical changes
in attitudes by women towards work and men towards childcare since 1977.
During that period, the amount of time men with children under the age of 13
spend with their children has increased 50% from 2 to 3 hours per day, while
women's time has remained the same at 3.8 hours per day.

In short, women are working more and men are spending more time with
children. And both sexes seem to agree that both trends are appropriate.

Now, there are problems with this report. Most important, it is often
difficult to tell who it's talking about. Are these people married or
unmarried, co-habiting or living apart? Are they employed full-time or
part-time? Do they have children or not? If so, how many and how old are
they? The report deals with data from the FWI study, but also from other
sources like the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So it's
not always clear who is being discussed. Whatever the case, the people
responding to the survey are employed and that alone skews the results.

What also skews the results is that only about 55% of people contacted
agreed to give information. That self-selecting function means that these
people, while reflecting the demographics of the population at large, still
don't represent that population.

Finally, the report traffics a lot in attitudes, which is fine as far as it,
goes. But we know that attitudes and actions often differ. Many women say
they value work, but in the event, they tend to take long periods off. They
say they want greater father involvement in childcare, but often move to
prevent it.

So take this report with a grain of salt, but take it nevertheless.
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I hope you can read PDF files, this one's about a 2MB download and worth the
read.

http://familiesandwork.org/site/rese...e_Changing.pdf

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