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Over at the Motherblog, Dana points out that the average household has a tremendously inequitable distribution of child care. In a home where both parents work, women spend 11 hours a week caring for the kids and men spend...three. Whoa. Of course, this isn't because husbands and wives sit down and set up a schedule where women do about four times as much child work. Rather, it just sort of...happens that way. People are busy. The guys look at the work and assume someone else will take care of it. The women look at the work and decide they'd better get it done. Societal expectations reinforce this division of labor. In fact, the whole thing was well-put by Top Chef's Tom Colicchio in a recent blog post about why so many women drop out of cooking even as their careers show great promise:
Women are reluctant to enter the culinary world because they believe (and this is not unjustified) that a cooking career is incompatible with raising children, which leaves those of us who want to hire, promote, and mentor women with a slimmer field to choose from than we’d like. And to an extent, they're right: The bottom line is our society does not yet provide women in the workplace with the type of social supports, like high-quality subsidized child care or extended parental leave, that allows them to fully go for it, and the impact this has on the scope and depth of a career is profound. Right or wrong, men plunge into their careers without much thought about how they’ll navigate the work/family balance. They assume someone -- spouse, parent, paid caregiver -- will materialize to take care of it (and usually someone does.) This one assumption opens up an entire world of possibility to a young person in a way that can’t be overstated. Ask yourself how many female Ferran Adrias, Thomas Kellers, or Joel Robuchons have chosen a different path -- say, catering or opening a bakeshop -- because it seems more family friendly? These may be great career choices, but they aren’t the breeding grounds of culinary legend.And it's self-perpetuating. If the top achievers in a given career have managed to sidestep issues like balancing childcare and professional responsibilities, then they're not likely to think to structure their workplace in a way that's sensitive to those tensions. It's not that they're explicitly trying to discriminate or create a male-heavy workplace. It just sort of...happens. Not hiring women may be different in intent than structuring a workplace such that it's much harder for women with a family life to excel. But in effect, the two are basically the same. Similarly, slacking in your child care responsibilities because you think making school lunches is "woman's work" may be different in intent than doing less child care because you forgot it needed to be done and your wife decided not to continually nag you. But the effect is, again, the same. The passive workplace discrimination and the passive shifting of personal responsibilities sadly work to reinforce each other. Guys in the workplace don't see why women can't do what they did, and guys at home justify their reduced housework by pointing to their demanding jobs. Conversely, women have more housework and childcare responsibilities, and thus less time to devote to the workplace and less of the scheduling flexibility that's currently required for advancement. So men advance professionally, and justify their personal habits on those grounds, and women pick up the slack, and thus don't advance as far professionally.
