There are five widows for every widower.
Kevin, 37, is a computer programmer, making $80,000 a year. His
wife, Jennifer, stays home to take care of their two year old. She
is pregnant with another child and eager for them to buy a home.
Kevin doesn’t like being a programmer, but fears that a career
change will mean a salary cut.
I ask Kevin if owning a home was important to him. He replies
that it’s “very important to Jennifer.” I ask how he felt about
having the second child. He says, half-heartedly, “Okay…
Jennifer really wants it.” I prod further: “When you first called
me, you said you feel the stress is killing you. Should you be
shouldering all the family’s financial responsibilities?” A tear
wells in his eye: “Jennifer reminds me that before we got married,
I agreed to have two children. She says, and I guess I agree, that
to bring our kids up right and maintain a home, is a full-time job.
And she doesn’t have my earning capacity.”
Kevin rubs his head and sighs.
OVER THE PAST 17 YEARS, I have been a career and personal counselor
to 1,500 middle- and upper-class women and to 500 middle-to-upper
class men. Because of our relationships’ confidentiality, I have
learned much about what women really think on a number of
issues.
Most surprising to me, is that most of the women,
including many Ivy League graduates, either don’t want an
income-earning job or will only work part-time in an unusually
pleasant job.
An article in a recent New York Times Sunday magazine
suggests that my clients are not an anomaly. It reported that the
number of stay-at-home moms has increased 13 percent in less than a
decade, and among working women, two-thirds work part-time! This is
true even among our most educated — the graduates of colleges that
bestowed on them a much competed-for slot based on the assumption
the student would aspire to careers that would utilize that degree
to make a big difference in the world.
Indeed, few of those women’s application essays indicated they
planned to be housewives. Yet among Stanford’s class of ‘81, in
just their first decade after graduation, 57 percent of mothers
spent at least a year at home full-time. One in four stayed home
full-time for three or more years. A survey of the women from the
Harvard Business School classes of 1981, 1985, and 1991 found that
only 38 percent of all women — even if they were childless — were
working full time.
Beyond the elite colleges, among white men, 95 percent of all
MBAs in the U.S. work full time, while the number for white women
was just 67 percent. And “full-time” doesn’t mean the same for men
and women. Among my 1,500 female clients and many friends, very few
are willing to sacrifice work/life balance to work the 60 plus
hours a week it normally takes to rise to the top of a profession.
Yet women’s groups complain that women are “underrepresented” in
the power professions: senior executives, professors, etc., because
of a “glass ceiling” they claim is erected by men.
Of course, there are many ambitious, achieving women who are
men’s equals or superiors. But a significant percentage of my
female clients and friends prefer the life of a housewife, perhaps
augmented by a pleasant little part-time job, even if it means
their husband, whom they claim to love, must work long, hard hours
on jobs that few women would consider. For example, the vast
majority of people who work in iron foundries, coal mines, and
other clanging, polluted environments are men. Over 93 percent of
workplace deaths occur to men.
“Dan,” a client of mine, has avoided breathing carcinogenic air
but his life is still at risk. He has two masters degrees in
counseling, but here in the Bay Area, where it seems there’s a
therapist under every rock, hasn’t been able to land a job as a
counselor. He has a few private clients, which in total earn him
$6,000 a year. He adds $8,000 as a mock patient in a medical
school, and at night, Dan, 54, moonlights as a waiter at a large
restaurant. He explains, “It’s almost a quarter mile from the
kitchen to the farthest table, so when I get home at one in the
morning, I’m exhausted. But I’m still so wired, I need a couple of
glasses of wine to get to sleep. If I’m lucky, I get five hours of
sleep before I have to get up again.”
Dan’s wife Denise, a Cornell graduate, is 47, and says she’s a
musician. But during their years together, her net income has
averaged just $800 a year. When Dan begs her to get a job that
pays, she objects: “But I love being a musician. I’m trying to make
a living at it.” He keeps urging her to get a paying job, but after
a while, he gives up. He can’t make her get a job.
Meanwhile, Dan continues to drag himself through life like an ox
yoked to a plow, a beast of burden. “I don’t know how long I can
keep this up,” he admits. Statistically, he’s right. It may be that
male biology preordains men to shorter lifespans, but medical
science is unequivocal that stress kills. Belying the biology
argument, in 1900 males and females had the same life
expectancy.
TO BE FAIR, some men encourage their wives to stay home, but often,
the impetus comes from the woman. Many women use dubious arguments
to convince their husbands they should have, at most, a part-time
job:
It’s better for the children. Yes, on average, kids
with stay-at-home-mom do a bit better, but that is largely because
a couple that can afford to have mom staying at home are, on
average, from a higher socioeconomic class, which confers many
other benefits on the child. Millions of children with working moms
do just fine.
Having reviewed the literature, I can say what counts most is
quality time: reasonably consistent, loving, limit-setting but not
punitive parenting, even if it begins after the workday. And even
if a child accrues a small net advantage from having a stay-at-home
mom, that advantage is usually more than outweighed by the great
pressure added to the husband’s life and the lifestyle decrement
that comes from the lack of a second income. Having to provide all
the family income also precludes men from considering rewarding but
not lucrative careers such as teaching, and most jobs in
non-profits, the arts, journalism, etc.
Taking care of the kids and home is a full-time job.
These women stretch homemaking into a full-time job with activities
far less beneficial than a second income to the family and
certainly to her husband’s health and quality of life: preparing
home-cooked dinners most nights, sitting with other moms watching a
playgroup when a babysitter could do that.
Being a homemaker is at least as stressful as being in the
work world. These women point to their having to deal with a
frequently crying baby or claim that being at home is a three-ring
circus. But fact is, much of the stay-at-home mom’s day is spent on
low-stress tasks such as supermarket shopping, playing with the
baby, making dinner, and chatting with friends while baby is
napping. That life is much less stressful than most out-of-home
jobs, which are filled with unpredictable commutes, ever increasing
workloads because of the relentless downsizing, bosses with
unrealistic expectations, co-workers who don’t pull their weight,
and tough tasks, which if not completed satisfactorily can result
in criticism or even firing.
I don’t have your earning power. Dr. Warren Farrell’s
authoritative research debunks feminist organizations’ specious
statistic that women earn 79 cents on the dollar. When controlled
for hours on the job, performance evaluations, and years of
experience, women earn $1.01 for every dollar men earn.
The reason women have fewer years of experience is that they
disproportionately elect to stay home with their children, or even
if they work “full-time,” they work far fewer hours than their male
counterparts so they can spend more time with their kids or on
their avocations. Many more women than men — full-time workers and
not — ensure they have time for yoga, get-togethers with friends,
art class, volunteer work, and visits to the day spa. Since 2000,
despite the economic downturn, the number of spa visits nationwide,
the vast majority of whom are made by women, has doubled!
MOST OF THE MEN I work with haven’t even really stopped to think
about what their wives have done to them. They accept their plight
of having to work, work, work at jobs they don’t like, ever pushing
for promotions, without really questioning it. Men have been
preprogrammed to be the hunter, the provider, to keep their nose to
the grindstone no matter what. Many wives only encourage it. Just
today, a client who earns more than $200,000 a year as a
not-partner attorney at a major firm, said that if he doesn’t push
right now to make partner, “my wife will kill me.”
But when I ask male clients to step back and think about it, so
many of them acknowledge that their wives have tried — usually
successfully — to subtly or not so subtly coerce them into being
the primary or sole breadwinner, the beast of burden. Those women
use the above arguments plus manipulative techniques such as
crying, guilt-tripping, screaming, and forever promising to look
for work but making feeble efforts.
Meanwhile, many men live stressed-out lives: work 10 plus hours,
commute home, and drop into the couch exhausted. Their reward: an
early grave. Despite an epidemic of obesity among women, there
are five widows for every widower. Yet all we hear about is
another fundraiser for breast cancer.
Men need to think about whether they feel they’re shouldering an
unfair amount of the stress, and if so, speak up authoritatively,
and resist coercion. More men should consider whether they might be
wiser to work part-time and do a larger share of the child-rearing
and domestic duties.
More women need to hold up their economic end of the marital
partnership and stop complaining about gender unfairness in the
workplace. It’s simply not true.
(I changed a few irrelevant details about my clients to
protect their anonymity.)
