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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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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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