Divisions of Labor

Harry writes about an article by Mary Ann Mason in the Chronicle.

Our study of faculty members at the University of California revealed that mothers, on average, worked 95 hours a week, with 43 percent of those hours devoted to child care and housework and the rest to professional activities. Fathers worked 80 hours a week, with only 31 percent devoted to their domestic duties.

Some might dismiss that as a phenomenon of an older generation that is on the wane. But the 8,000 doctoral students we surveyed at the university revealed the same pattern — except they worked longer hours. Graduate students who were mothers, on average, worked 101 hours a week and spent about half of that time on child care and housework. Student fathers worked 89 hours, with 37 percent spent on home duties.

Both Harry and Mason have very charitable and reasonable commentary on this study noting that men are doing some work and deserve some considerations. My brain got stalled out on the lack of equality, and I can't manage to say anything nice.

My brain also stalled out on the sheer number of hours that we work. Damn. We need to get a life.

We had a great chat about academia and parenthood back in February, but it's good to get some numbers.

Comments

[Wendy]

My brain also stalled out on the sheer number of hours that we work. Damn. We need to get a life.

I love the tv show Chuck (which you all should be watching), and I can't help thinking of Morgan: "Gentlemen, I think I speak for all of us when I say that the only reason I took this job at the Buy More was to do as little work as humanly possible."

And... that's all I got.

[af]

I'm not so shocked by those numbers; if you do the math, it turns out faculty and grad students are working about 50-55 hours a week at their regular jobs, which doesn't seem like so much to me. I'm not saying childcare and housework aren't work - and certainly women shouldn't bear the burden of them disproportionately - but certainly childcare, at least, is part of the "life" we're supposed to "get," right?

[Siobhan]

This book is getting a lot of positive mentions on my bloglines. Apparently one of the central theses is that the most important career decision you will ever make is who you marry. I've been saying this ever since I started participating in those ubiquitous "Balancing Motherhood and Academia" panels, but there's understandably a lot of resistance to this idea. Maybe having a source to point to that seems more authoritative will help.

[Stephen Karlson]

"We need to get a life."

The recession is likely to induce observers of higher education to tell us that we should be lucky to have work, and we should not complain about being asked to do the work that four people used to do.

[Ragtime]

According to these numbers, grad students work 15 more hours per week, spend about 18 more hours per week on "domestic duties" and 3 fewer hours devoted to professional activities.

I guess we can all agree, then, that grad students work less hard at their jobs than the rest of the faculty, primarily because their homes collect dust a lot faster.

[laura]

My guess is that grad students have younger kids that need more attention.

[Wendy]

I'm not saying childcare and housework aren't work - and certainly women shouldn't bear the burden of them disproportionately - but certainly childcare, at least, is part of the "life" we're supposed to "get," right?

This is a good point, af. What are we defining as domestic work? I am engaged in child care from 3 to 6 pm most days. But I spend some of that time checking e-mail and dozing off, much to the irritation of my husband who thinks I shouldn't start cooking dinner *when* he comes home. ;)

What would I have to be doing to define that time as non-work? Sometimes I feel like all my waking hours are work of some kind. What's leisure? How do I define that?

[Madeleine]

Also, grad students probably can't afford to pay someone to cook, clean, or provide childcare as much as faculty can.

[Ragtime]

My guess is that grad students have younger kids that need more attention.

Probably, but breastfeeding kids need a lot of that time from the mother. Grad student moms, in this study, did about 57% of the domestic work, while grad student dads did about 43%.

Maybe a truly egalitarian system would assign the men a greater percentage of other tasks to make up for the inability to lactate, but that's a separate question. As it is, this seems pretty close to "even, except for the breastfeeding."

[Amy P]

"Also, grad students probably can't afford to pay someone to cook, clean, or provide childcare as much as faculty can."

Good point.

[Madeleine]

Breast-feeding is relatively small piece of the issue, I think. Toddlers and preschoolers need huge amounts of attention, and school-agers need help with homework and chauffeuring to sports and other activities, etc. I don't think extended breast-feeding is common enough to show up in this kind of a large sample.

[harry b]

I think breastfeeding is a bigger part of the issue than Madeleine says, not because there's lots of it (I agree that the other stuff is more significant in data) but because it helps establish a pattern of unequal care, which continues into toddlerhood. Sure, men should do at least half the other domestic tasks, but why not have them do half the feeding (or all of it)?

(Note: the studies of the health effects of breastfeeding, admittedly not a representative sample, do not control for background factors of socio-economic class, family size, etc. And even if they did, most bottle-fed children do fine, so why not sacrifice a little of their benefit for the sake of the parents having a more egalitarian relationship, and a more shared intimacy with the infant?)

[bj]

Feeling snarky, but pregnancy also establishes an unequal relationship. Why don't we have someone else gestate our baby so we. An establish an equal parenti g relationship, too?

True that person, right now will have to be a woman. But, she wouldn't be the mom.

I agree that pregnancy and breatfeeding sets up unequal parenting. But I think there are better solutions than trying to circumvent biology. For example, invoved sacs can do more of the other childcare (our deal did include diapers. And though not a fair trade it did build an intimate relationship with dad )

[bj]

sorry for the typos. Let's blame the iPhone.

[Amy P]

Now that I think about it, I've never known any graduate student parents who put their kid in daycare, whereas I know many faculty families with children in daycare.

[harry b]

That's ok bj (both the typos, and the potential snarkiness). Well, having seen my wife go through 3 pregnancies I'd certainly have relieved her of some of that burden if I could have. I could have relieved her of some of the burden of breastfeeding (but didn't because she was committed to doing it, although she didn't like it). But look, if it isn't a burden, but a joy (and I know both are, for some people), then why count them as work? As af says, a lot of the work of childrearing is part of the life we want to have (certainly it is in my case). But, in the early weeks and months a pattern is often established in which men are excluded from a certain kind of intimacy and care, and both parents need a deeper commitment to an egalitarian emotional relationship (with each other and the child) than most have in order to maintain it. I agree that if they do have that commitment there are other ways of building intimacy with the father, but what I'm saying is that they require commitment that most people (or perhaps just many people) don't have.
Am I rambling? It feels like it.

[Julie G.]

I'm reflecting that these days as an academic I'm working way more than 55 hours per week. But I have a manuscript deadline.

As to complaining and female rights to it. To redress my comment on an earlier post about men preferring video games to housework while unemployed: in the first 2 weeks of my child's life, my husband declared that if I was in charge of everything going into the child, then he was taking care of everything coming out. My daughter was two weeks old when he taught me how to change a diaper.

[will]

I didnt read the link so feel free to disregard what I say, I wonder about the reporting.

Is there pressure on women to report greater hours on domestic duties?

There is difficulty in these kinds of surveys. Do I get credit for the entire time the kids are with me, no matter what I am doing? So watching the kids while they watch tv or being in the house while they do their homework?

A day at home counts for what? A day at the office?

[will]

Darn it. Wendy stole part of my point and said it better!

[Madeleine]

I agree that breastfeeding can set up an unequal parenting dynamic, but I just don't think the actual hours of breastfeeding are what's driving these statistics. So I think we may not be disagreeing, Harry B.

[Siobhan]

harry b, that point is also made in this month's Atlantic.

My favorite line of the article has to be:

"This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing."

[Amy P]

Siobhan,

I only read the first several paragraphs of the Atlantic article, but it looks like excellent blog fodder.

[harry b]

Oh thanks Siobahn! I've had these thoughts for so many years (basically since my 12 year old was three days old). Its so great to see someone else thinking them. And I like Hanna Roisin a lot -- God's Harvard is great, apart from the bit where she inadvertantly reveals she has no idea who Wycliffe was!

[harry b]

Amy P - done:
http://crookedtimber.org/2009/03/12/how-much-better-is-breastfeeding/

[Wendy]

Grrrr. Please don't be posting blog entries and comments on BF I disagree with* a half-hour before I have to go to class.

*I don't disagree with the content so much as the annoyed tone.

[MH]

You hardly ever hear this mentioned, but brand new teeth are very sharp. For sound chromosonal reasons I've never breast fed, but I do know that an 11 month old can bite hard enough to break skin on my shoulder through a shirt.

[Siobhan]

MH, there's a lot we never hear mentioned. I practically started crying at our "Breastfeeding Basics" class before our firstborn when the instructor matter-of-factly told us that the baby would be eating every one to two hours. Oh really?

[MH]

I have no memory of the up every hour or two phase. I assume lack of sleep prevented them from forming. After a few months, we'd get him every three or four hours. That wasn't bad because it meant that you had a good shot at one or the other parent getting six hours of sleep. My trick is that you can feed a young baby while watching TV with the sound off. (I should remember to thank those with deafness for the captions).

[laura]

damn. you guys are having a great chat w/out me. I'm typing very quietly as the kids take a midterm. but i can't do too much. back in 2 hours.

[Amy P]

"MH, there's a lot we never hear mentioned."

A major problem is that both childbirth education and breastfeeding education have been captured by cultists. Take, for example, What to Expect's belief that a whole wheat bagel should be a rare (but excusable) indulgence for pregnant women. Or the childbirth educator I once met who liked to refer to "labor discomfort" rather than "labor pain."

[Siobhan]

Amy P, that same instructor told us that if we made the proper effort to anticipate our baby's needs, she would never cry. And at that point, we were laughing into our sleeves and I was able to go from overwhelmed and on the verge of tears to dismissing her as a kook.

[harry b]

Not to mention the complete lack of instruction on the possibility that after 30 hours of labour and failure to dilate you might be rushed into an emergency C-section.

Penelope Leach, though, always seems pretty sensible to me.

[MH]

Our instructor wasn't as demonstrably false as Amy and Siobhan mention, but we still got lots of very bad advice. I think we could have avoided a (thankfully brief) stay in the NICU if we'd have listed to the floor nurse instead of the lactation consultant.

[Amy P]

"I think we could have avoided a (thankfully brief) stay in the NICU if we'd have listed to the floor nurse instead of the lactation consultant."

I get very concerned about too aggressive attempts to push breastfeeding on mothers with limited social capital, especially when it's treated as a do-or-die type thing and there isn't appropriate professional back-up. It's really easy for a small baby to become dehydrated, and there have been some very sad cases.

The lactation consultants I've dealt with have been pretty sensible, and when things weren't working out, they set us up with a hospital grade pump, which I am the world's biggest fan of.

[Siobhan]

MH, did you deliver at Magee? We did and I'd echo your comment -- our nurse was awesome and did a far better job of getting us started on BFing than the LC did.

Amy P, all hail the Symphony! We rented one for seven months.

[MH]

Yep.

[Wendy]

From the CT comments: "Breastfeeding is a natural and inherent part of the mammalian lifecycle and if there is any social construct that doesn’t mesh well with it, it’s the social construct that is inconvenient."

I am the furthest thing from an extremist on this issue, but I'd like to see more emphasis on the ways that bottlefeeding is tied into social constructs that are, actually, a result of misogyny or attempts to deal with misogyny.

Also, a friend of mine whom I told about this article said she'd seen it on a parenting list and wrote in reply (in part): "it seems a kind of glib, journalistic attempt to pull
studies out of context in order to draw the conclusions she's looking for."

IOW, I'm surprised to see AmyP endorsing this article considering her previous critiques of the media. ;)

[Amy P]

Wendy,

I said it was good blog fodder. That's not an endorsement.

[Wendy]

AmyP, fair enough.