The United States has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world. Despite what is often reported, new mothers don’t “opt out” of work. They are pushed out by discriminating and inflexible workplaces. Today’s workplaces continue to idealize the worker who has someone other than parents caring for their children. Conventional wisdom attributes women’s decision to leave work to their maternal traits and desires. In this thought-provoking book, Joan Williams shows why that view is misguided and how workplace practice disadvantages men—both those who seek to avoid the breadwinner role and those who embrace it—as well as women. Faced with masculine norms that define the workplace, women must play the tomboy or the femme. Both paths result in a gender bias that is exacerbated when the two groups end up pitted against each other. And although work-family issues long have been seen strictly through a gender lens, we ignore class at our peril. The dysfunctional relationship between the professional-managerial class and the white working class must be addressed before real reform can take root. Contesting the idea that women need to negotiate better within the family, and redefining the notion of success in the workplace, Williams reinvigorates the work-family debate and offers the first steps to making life manageable for all American families.

Comprises 13 essays grouped under three headings: fathering and providing; role allocation and role change; and workplace organization and policy, which examine men's attitudes towards work and family responsibilities. Discusses how the traditional role of fathers as providers is evolving to include their role as nurturants and how men have begun to adjust their work to accomodate their families. Shows how parenting and household responsibilities are considered within the workplace and the occupational structure.

Life is a journey and success takes some work! Dr. I.V. Hilliard, seen nationwide on the Changing Lives Through Faith television broadcast, helps men begin an amazing scriptural journey of worth, faith, and success starting with their commitments.

In this book, the author builds on decades of complex research to examine the gender pay gap and the unequal distribution of labor between couples in the home. The author argues that although public and private discourse has brought these concerns to light, the actions taken - such as a single company slapped on the wrist or a few progressive leaders going on paternity leave - are the economic equivalent of tossing a band-aid to someone with cancer. These solutions, the author writes, treat the symptoms and not the disease of gender inequality in the workplace and economy. Here, the author points to data that reveals how the pay gap widens further down the line in women's careers, about 10 to 15 years out, as opposed to those beginning careers after college. She examines five distinct groups of women over the course of the twentieth century: cohorts of women who differ in terms of career, job, marriage, and children, in approximated years of graduation - 1900s, 1920s, 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s - based on various demographic, labor force, and occupational outcomes. The book argues that our entire economy is trapped in an old way of doing business; work structures have not adapted as more women enter the workforce. Gender equality in pay and equity in home and childcare labor are flip sides of the same issue, and the author frames both in the context of a serious empirical exploration that has not yet been put in a long-run historical context. This book offers a deep look into census data, rich information about individual college graduates over their lifetimes, and various records and sources of material to offer a new model to restructure the home and school systems that contribute to the gender pay gap and the quest for both family and career. --

More important, Coltrane suggests that as fathers participate more fully in raising their children and performing traditionally female household tasks, men will themselves be transformed by the experience in profoundly positive ways and American society as a whole will move closer to true gender equity.

Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn’t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.

This provocative volume is comprised of psychological, socioeconomic, and cultural perspectives on couple dynamics, particularly gender dynamics, and the future of marriage. Featuring data on married, cohabitating, male/female, and same-sex couples, the authors of the book's chapters analyze the changing impacts of work, parenting, and the health benefits of marriage for men and women. Trajectories in the evolution toward gender equality provide the backdrop for discussions of women and men as partners, parents, and workers in contemporary society. Contributors also keep a sharp focus on the complexities of gender issues as they intersect with crucial contexts of cohort, class, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Among the topics covered: Gender equality and economic inequality: impacts on marriage. Expansionist theory expanded: integrating sociological and psychological perspectives on gender, work, and family change. Gender, work, and family: action in the interactions. Changes in U.S. mothers' and fathers' time use: causes and consequences. A case for gay fathers. Gender, marriage, and health for same-sex and different-sex couples Gender and Couple Relationships documents social roles and social change with fascinating insight to advance research in fields of psychology, sociology, demography and economics and to the benefit of work organizations, policy makers, family and couple therapists and other mental health professionals.