Although women today enjoy equal opportunity in the workplace, family obligations may limit their participation in the workplace and thus their earnings. Not pleased with this outcome, the equity police are redirecting their investigations away from the office and into the private domain of the home, as reflected in an Indiana study by sociologists Carla Shirley and Michael Wallace. Quantifying what they consider an unfair "gendered division" of domestic labor, they find that women's greater duties at home not only hurt their earnings, but also boost that of men.

 

The researchers analyzed data from the 1996 Indiana Quality of Employment Survey, focusing on the 437 respondents who were working and were either married or cohabiting, and comparing the results to the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey after which the Indiana survey was patterned. While they discovered that women are doing less domestic work than they did twenty years ago, their total domestic workload (childcare and housework) still far exceeds that of men's. Moreover, they found that the earnings of women, but not men, were inversely related to their time spent on  housework and childcare (p <. 10 for both variables).

 

In addition, the earnings of husbands were significantly affected by their wives' employment, not vice versa. The more the wife worked outside the home, the less the husband earned (p <. 01), although the variation in wives' employment hours showed that only full-time work exerted this effect, whereas part-time work actually increased the husband's earnings. However, among non-working class women, relative to working class women, having an employed husband lowered their earnings, suggesting what the researchers concede are "obstacles to the dual-career aspirations of non-working class couples."

 

Disappointed that these gender dynamics show little change since 1977, the researchers lament: "Gender inequality in domestic work [still] perpetuates the gender inequality in the labor market." How they would go about eliminating these "continuing inequalities" is not clear, although they claim that "family-leave" policies may not be enough because they reinforce traditional gender roles. Would they support a federal czar to regulate how husbands and wives mediate their division of labor?

 

As scary as that sounds, by failing to concede that their findings might reflect natural sex differences, or that the family-work dilemma primarily affects mothers who work full-time outside the home, the two sociologists are left with little more than high-handed, statist solutions to achieve what they presume all women want.

 

(Source: Carla Shirley and Michael Wallace, "Domestic Work, Family Characteristics, and Earnings: Reexamining Gender and Class Differences," The Sociological Quarterly 45 [2004]: 663-690.) Review 69 [2004]: 151-169)

 

                      

   

Memorable Quotes Selected by Babette Francis 

 

 “......Though a people can survive the advanced degeneracy of its men, as many have, it cannot survive that of its women. If a people’s women cease to bear and raise enough children that people dies. If most of its women decide career, freedom, and pleasure are more important than hearth and family, that people dies. In no other area of life does the accumulation of individual decisions more profoundly affect society as a whole. Feminism kills......” Joseph  D’Agostino, Population Research Institute.

 

Despite weak males in government, media and society pandering to feminists over the years.   Feminists have NOT been appeased.  Instead they’re still going on about the same issues, refining them and devising new ones.  As Heywood Brown said, “Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian.....”  .

 

New Zealand Labour MP John Tamihere courageously came out of the closet declaring himself “a proud Kiwi male.  I believe that the pendulum of political correctness has swung too far.  I am sick and tired of hearing ahout the deficit model where as red-blooded heterosexual men we are supposedly the creators of all that is bad and evil in this world”