Fantastic New Data From Pew

I can't help but to comment...

You might have noticed a lot of headlines yesterday about women as breadwinners. This is because Pew Research Center released new data around money earning and housework dynamics in different-sex, American marriages. Basically, Pew has given us fresh data to confirm what we already knew: the United States still has a gender problem. CBS MoneyWatch reached out to me for comments on the Pew data yesterday morning. I was happy to share my thoughts, but I can’t help digging in a little deeper…

The full range of findings are published in In a Growing Share of U.S. Marriages, Husbands and Wives Earn About the Same, which breaks down wife/husband’s time into four categories: paid work, leisure, housework and caregiving. The full report is fascinating, though I don’t expect most to read the whole thing. So I’ll pull out some findings that I thought were particularly interesting.

1.     First, all data is collected from married, different-sex couples. This study does not collect data on same-sex or queer relationships, nor non-binary people. And I feel this lack of representation is worth calling out. Studies must have parameters – they can’t collect all data about all people.  But I want to recognize who is left out of this study, and hope that in the future we can all shift to a broader definition of partnership, and include non-binary people in these studies. (According to another study done by Pew last year, 5% of American young adults do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth – that’s more than 2.5 million Americans.)

2.     “In egalitarian and breadwinner wife marriages, husbands spend considerably more time on leisure activities than wives.” Even in egalitarian marriages where each person brings in about the same amount of money (currently 29% of American different-sex marriages,) women are still doing more physical labor and caregiving work in the home than their husbands – according to Pew, an average of 4.5 more hours a week. Over the course of a year, that means husbands have 234 more hours of time than their wife. And this isn’t even capturing cognitive labor! (More on that below.) Nor is it capturing the cumulative stress to women from all of the extra cognitive and physical labor tasks… and working full time. This is not just a problem for women; it is a problem for our collective perception of marriage.

And if you have read my book, you know where I am going next… this is also a problem for men. What can happen to women during those 234 hours of additional housework and caregiving work during the year? Stress, anxiety, and perhaps growing resentment towards one’s spouse are likely. But those hours of caregiving work also create space for women to develop stronger emotional bonds with family - and more meaningful relationships with kids. And the absence of those 234 hours for husbands can mean the absence of those relational opportunities. When we collectively push men into the breadwinner space, we rob them of home space experiences.

3.     “Among wives ages 25 to 34, 11% are the breadwinner in their marriage, whereas 22% of wives ages 55 to 64 out-earn their husbands.” This mirrors other data that demonstrates a significant drop in wages during a woman’s reproductive years, because culturally, motherhood is still more time consuming than fatherhood. Not just pregnancy and birth – but the caregiving hours and household management that comes with caring for an infant / child. 

4.     “After adjusting for household size, marriages in which both spouses work tend to have much higher incomes than marriages with a sole provider.” Economic arguments rarely motivate me, but I know they motivate others – and this is a strong statement. When men do more at home, this allows their wife to increase her hours in a professional space, which often leads to higher pay. This is not just a benefit for her, but for the entire family.

At the very end of the article, Pew shares some of their political demographics. And while there is a difference, I think the real story is in the similarity. Both the majority of Democrats/Left Leaners (85%) AND Republicans/Right Leaners (68%) believe it is best when men and women devote equal amounts of time at home and at work. In a polarized country it is hard to find an issue that is a clear winner for the vast majority of Americans. Seems that maybe gender equality is one of those issues.

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Last – I want to plant a seed about the data Pew collected. These new stats were generated based on the American Time Use Survey, housed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Which is reliable and trustworthy. But from my understanding of this study, cognitive labor was not measured – only physical tasks. This is where we run into a lot of issues that I am not convinced a time use survey would capture.

• If I am taking a 20-minute walk, but the whole time I am thinking about what needs to go on my “to do” list, and making notes on my phone. Is that leisure?

• If I meet three friends at the playground and chat while our toddlers play, is that leisure? Or rather, is that my preferred leisure? Or a compromise, because I have childcare responsibilities?

• If I am both taking care of my kids on a Saturday morning AND cleaning the house – which box do I check?

• If I am sitting at my desk at work, with one eye on email and one eye on a sign-up website for kid’s summer camp, is that work?

My point is that this data is great – it gives us great information about where we are in 2023. But it doesn’t tell us the whole story. It doesn’t capture the exhaustion that one might feel when they’re constantly multi-tasking; constantly monitoring work and house and kids. It doesn’t capture the story about masculinity; our culture’s narrow definition of masculinity, and how hard it can be for men to push away from work and take a greater role in the home.

I love this Pew report – and I predict we’ll be quoting for years. But statistics are often best used not as an end result, but as the beginning of a conversation. So, my hope is that we all continue to deep a little deeper: to find time to discuss the “why” behind these statistics, and even more importantly - to find ways in our day-to-day life to change our actions and words, and move the needle towards gender equality.