A briefing paper prepared  for the Council on Contemporary Families’ Symposium Parents Can’t Go It Alone—They Never Have.

Two-thirds of mothers today work outside the home in wealthy Western countries. Despite this similarity, mothers’ experiences managing their work and family commitments vary a lot from country to country. It’s easier to be a working mother in some nations than others. Why? One main reason is that countries offer very different public policies to support families.

National governments offer different kinds and levels of policy supports because societies have diverse beliefs about who should work for pay and provide care to others. Such policies give us a glimpse into national culture: Policies are powerful symbols about what a nation thinks women and men are capable of, good at, and deserve. These policies matter. My research shows how.

I conducted interviews with 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States for my new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving. I wanted to understand what working mothers themselves say helps and hinders their work–family balance. It was immediately clear that moms in the United States were more stressed, guilty, overwhelmed, and fatigued than the mothers I spoke to in Europe. In the United States, managing family and paid work is seen as a personal struggle. In Sweden, Germany, and Italy, citizens think of childrearing and work–family reconciliation as matters of public concern. In these European countries, public policies help ensure that people have the time and resources needed to care for their loved ones. These policies vary in their effectiveness, but they exist. In the United States, adults are encouraged to find solely private solutions for childrearing and housework.

The United States has no national work–family policy to support caregiving. We are the only wealthy nation on the planet with no paid parental leave. No universal health care. No universal social insurance entitlement. No guaranteed income. No universal child care. And no minimum standard for vacation and sick days.

To be clear, mothers didn’t say it was a breeze to work and raise kids in Europe. But it was far easier because of the various work–family policies available to women and their families in Sweden, Germany, and Italy. Let’s take a close look at what these policies are exactly. This can help give a sense for what could be possible here in the United States.

Parental Leave (Job-protected Paid Leave Available to Both Parents)

After the addition of a new child to the family, parents’ jobs are protected in the three European countries, and they are entitled to paid leave. The length of leave and wage replacement rate varies. In Sweden, couples have an entitlement to 16 months (480 days) paid at 80 percent of previous wages, up to a ceiling. This time is meant to be divided between parents, and it can be used flexibly until children are 8 years old. Each parent has an exclusive right to 3 of the 16 months. This “use it or lose it” model is meant to incentivize both parents to take time off. It means that unless fathers take at least 3 months off, the family is entitled to only 13 months. In Germany, couples can take up to 12 months of paid parental leave total, paid at roughly two-thirds of their net earnings, also up to a ceiling. If moms and dads share parental leave, they get 2 bonus months, for a maximum of 14 months. As in Sweden, parents can take leave flexibly anytime until the child is 8 years old. In Italy, parents are each entitled to 6 months of parental leave at 30 percent pay. Parental leave is an individual, nontransferable entitlement, and families can take 10 months total. Again, parents can use these days flexibly at their discretion until their child is 8. If the dad takes at least 3 months’ leave, the family gets an additional month for a total of 11 months. Of course, that means in Sweden and Germany, more families can afford to spend more time with newborns, whereas in Italy, only those who can afford to live on 30 percent pay can use the time allotted them. Although Italy may not be as generous as the other European countries I studied, it is far better than what we have here in the United States, which is no paid leave. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) gives eligible employees up to 12 weeks unpaid, job-protected leave to care for a new child or an ill family member, or to recover from an illness. Even that protection applies only to businesses with more than 50 employees, and workers must have worked for at least 12 months and a minimum of 1,250 hours to qualify.

Maternity Leave (Job-protected Paid Leave for Mothers Surrounding Childbirth)

In Sweden, mothers have the exclusive right to 3 of the 16 months’ parental leave at 80 percent pay. Employed women in Germany may take maternity leave for up to 6 weeks before childbirth and are required to stay home for 8 weeks afterward, receiving full pay. Mothers in Italy are required to take 5 months of maternity leave at 80 percent pay. Although requiring women to remain home may seem paternal, it is surely more appreciated by families than no statutory entitlement at all, which is what we have in the United states: no right to paid maternity leave after the birth of a baby.

Paternity Leave (Job-protected Paid Leave for Fathers During or Following Childbirth)

Fathers in Sweden have the exclusive right to 3 of the 16 months parental leave at 80 percent pay. In Germany fathers have no entitlement to paternity leave for men. If both parents take at least 2 months parental leave, they earn 2 extra months paid leave, for a total of 14 months. In Italy, as of 2018, fathers have 4 days mandatory paternity leave at 100 percent pay. They are required to take these days within the first 5 months of birth while mothers are also on leave. Before 2013, there was no designated paternity leave whatsoever. Five days may not seem like much, but that’s 5 more days than fathers have a right to in the United States.

Paid Vacation and Holidays

In Sweden all workers have 25 days per year paid vacation days. Many receive more as a result of union agreements. If a person falls ill while on vacation, those days aren’t counted against the vacation allowance. Swedes get 11 paid holidays per year. In Germany, workers have a right to 20 days per year minimum. As a result of collective agreements, most receive 30 days. Those working less than full time get proportionally fewer days. Depending on the state, Germans enjoy between 9 and 13 paid holidays a year. In Italy workers are entitled to 20 days per year minimum. As in Sweden and Germany, because of collective bargaining agreements, most receive at least 25 days. Italians have 10 paid holidays annually. Once again, the U.S has no minimum federal standard. The U.S. government designates 10 federal holidays per year, but paid holidays are at employers’ discretion.

Paid Sick Days

In Sweden, if you have been employed for at least 1 month, an employee gets roughly 80 percent of income for the first 14 days of illness. After that the employer contacts the state, which works with the person’s doctor to determine eligibility for extended sickness benefits. Unemployed or self-employed people get a sickness benefit from the government. And parents may stay home with a sick child for up to 120 days a year until children reach 12 years (paid at 80 percent of wages, up to a limit). For seriously ill children, there is no limit to the number of days parents can take off work. Workers in Germany may take as many personal sick days as needed over the course of a year at full wages. All employees get 10 days per year to tend to a sick child, at 70 percent pay. In Italy, parents can take unlimited unpaid days off work to care for ill children under 3 years, and 5 days unpaid annually for kids ages 3 to 8 years. For seriously ill family members, workers can take 2 years at full pay (with a cap) total. Here, too, the United States is the outlier, with no minimum federal standard. Eligible workers may use FMLA for their own serious illness, or to take care of a seriously ill family member, for up to 12 weeks, without pay.

Child Care

Sweden provides universal child care for children ages 1 to 12 years. The cost for parents is income-related up to a low ceiling, and it’s free for low-income families. The maximum rate for even the wealthiest families is about US$160 per month. In Germany, universal care is available for children ages 3 to 6 years. As of August 2013, all children older than 1 year are legally entitled to a child care space (although these are still difficult to come by in some places). A recent nationwide study found that in Germany day care costs families on average US$192 per month. In Italy, child care is universally available for children ages 3 years and over, but is difficult to attain for children below 3 years. A recent survey found that child care costs families US$343 monthly, on average. The United States has no state or federal child care systems. The limited federal child care provisions are means-tested for only the poorest families. The average cost of private child care is US$799 per month ($9,589 a year)—more than the average cost of many in-state college tuition levels.

What Do U.S. Policies Imply about American Values?

Given all this, what message do you think the U.S. government sends to residents with these policies—or should I say, the lack of policies? You are on your own. You are owed nothing. Yet, regardless of marital or parental status, wealth, race, region, or religion, every single person needs care throughout their lives. No one is an island. Society would collapse without care. Other countries came to this realization a long time ago. The United States lags way behind: It is exceptional for its lack of policy support for caregiving and families. That’s not a title we should be proud of.

The United States was founded on the belief that citizens have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that government is meant to protect these rights. If we truly believe this nation should be at the forefront of human rights—a country where residents can truly lead free and happy lives alongside those they care for and care about—then the path ahead is obvious. We don’t need to start from scratch in envisioning better policy supports. The benefits already available in other countries are models from which to choose.

We need to pass robust, egalitarian work–family policies at a federal level. I suggest we start with paid family leave and affordable, high-quality child care and health care for all. We can do far more and far better for U.S. families. Our future depends on it.

Caitlyn Collins, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis, c.collins@wustl.edu, is the author of Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press, 2019).  Portions of this report appeared in Working Mother.

The birth rate is falling throughout much of the world. Yet many people still want to be parents, and they invest great time, energy and love in their children. The essays in a new symposium by CCF offer research evidence on the state of parenting among a diverse group of American parents. Each essay suggests possibilities for how our society might come to the aid of today’s parents.

Kathleen Gerson busts the myth that there is such a thing as “having it all.” On the basis of interviews with 120 young adults (33–47 years old), she found four basic patterns for managing the conflicts between the world of work and raising children. Some are hyper-traditional, with men in very time-consuming jobs and women without paid work doing intensive mothering. Others opt out of the dilemma of balancing work and family problems by remaining single or childless. Another pattern Gerson found was in families where women “do it all” rather than have it all. In these families, both mothers and fathers work for pay, but mothers continue to do the primary parenting. Finally, about one-third of the people she talked to can be described as egalitarians, experimenting with building an equal partnership despite the obstacles. Only the egalitarians prefer the choice they have made; most of the others would prefer egalitarian relationships, but have not found a way to achieve them in a society that demands more from workers than ever before, and with a philosophy of childrearing that requires intensive attention. Gerson suggests that it’s time to change the workplace, so that families can live the lives they desire.

Maureen Perry-Jenkins offers some concrete suggestions for what needs to change so that low-wage workers can meet their families’ needs. In interviews with 360 low-income working families, a shortage of time was a recurring theme. Parents needed time to sleep, care for babies, and connect with their partner, but they also needed predictability in their schedules. Control over time makes it possible to have last-minute doctor appointments or a needed sick day. Jobs need to have predictable schedules. But beyond that, workers talk about the benefits of autonomy and the ability to get respect for taking initiatives at work. Conditions at work affect parents’ mental health and their relationships with their children and partners. Perry-Jenkins suggests that to support today’s families we must to improve workplaces and build cultures of respect and support. One way to support the next generation is to pay attention to the conditions of work for their parents. Work matters.

In the next essay, Lorena Garcia argues that the world around us matters a great deal for our families. Garcia interviewed 68 middle- and upper-middle-class Latinx parents in the Chicagoland area. What she found was both optimism and worry. The parents were optimistic that they had the knowledge and financial resources to help their children pursue their dreams. Yet they worried, especially about their sons. They worried about the vulnerability of Black and Latino boys to gun violence in the city. Even though most did not live in high-crime neighborhoods, they worried about gang-related violence and violence at the hands of the police. They gave their sons a version of “the talk,” trying to help them reduce their vulnerability to police racism. Garcia reminds us that all parents are concerned for their children’s safety, but that particular worries vary by race and class. Despite economic privileges, the Latinx parents in her study had serious concerns about their sons’ physical safety. No parent should have to go to work worried about their children’s safety. Garcia shows us that good family policy must include reducing gang-violence and police racism.

Dawn Dow offers a view of African-American mothering that is at odds with the presumption that all mothers similarly feel a conflict between paid work and parenting. In interviews with middle- and upper-middle-class African-American mothers, Dow found that working for pay is considered part of a mother’s responsibility—that financial support for children is part of mothering work. Indeed, stay-at-home mothers are more likely to have to explain their choice than are those in the labor force. What sets these mothers apart from how other American mothers talk about parenting is that they felt supported by their families and communities for their paid labor. They have often been raised in a household with two incomes and lived in communities where a woman’s strength and independence are seen as virtues. Their families and communities provide emotional and instrumental support for employed mothers. Dow’s research reminds us that not only must we change the structures of workplaces to support parenting, but we must support cultural expectations and communities that validate parents’ ability to combine earning a living with caring for others.

Although some of the essays in this symposium are all about mothering, Stephanie Coontz reminds us that dads count too. She suggests that a major obstacle to the successful coordination of work and family life is the assumption that the problem belongs only to mothers. If fathers were not presumed to be entitled to focus solely on earning a living, mothers would never be presumed to have to do it all. A historian, Coontz reminds us that this exemption of fathers from the demands of family life is not traditional at all. For millennia, fathers and mothers shared the duties of making sure everyone ate and supervising the children. Coontz provides data on the kinds of parental leave available to fathers, and shows the inequity of providing more or better leave to mothers. Coontz suggests, however, that when paternal leave taking becomes more normative, as in Denmark, it can lower the motherhood penalty in wages and increase household wages. Indeed, fathers who take parental leave raise more egalitarian sons. This suggests that feminists must work as strenuously for fair and generous paternal leaves as we do for maternal leaves.

In the final essay of the Symposium, Caitlyn Collins takes us on a deep dive into the social policy that makes it easier or harder to be an employed parent. She interviewed 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. The European countries have quite different social policies, but all have more family-related policies than does the United States, so employed mothering is less stressful in those countries than in the United States. The kinds of job protections that matter include parental leave for caretaking, maternity leave surrounding childbirth itself, paid vacations and holidays, mandatory sick days, and available and affordable child care. Collins ends by suggesting that the lack of policies in the United States sends the message that our families are on our own—that the community owes nothing to those raising the next generation of citizens. The United States lags behind other societies and is exceptional for the lack of support for family life.

The essays in this symposium show why parents cannot do it alone, and why they should not have to. It is time to focus on what parents need from the rest of us to successfully raise the next generation. These essays suggest that parents need workplace policies that presume all workers are also caretakers at some point in their lives. Every child deserves a parent whose work does not challenge their mental health, a parent who can be effective at work while also providing caretaking, and neighborhoods that are safe. These essays show that the family policies we need include parental leave and workplace flexibility, but those alone are not sufficient. Reducing gun violence, reducing racism and its effects, and creating workplaces where employees feel respected are also among social policies needed to support American parents and their families. are also among social policies needed to support American parents and their families.

Barbara J. Risman is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She is also a Senior Scholar at the Council of Contemporary Families. 

The question of how having children affects parents’ wellbeing has been debated by social scientists and the public for decades. While research studies on this topic have found varied results—in part depending on who is being studied and how wellbeing is defined—some areas of consensus have emerged. First, when people are asked to reflect on their overall happiness or general satisfaction with life, parents tend to report lower life satisfaction than non-parents. This is especially true in the U.S. Second, and somewhat at odds with the findings on life satisfaction, when reporting their experience of positive and negative emotions during regular daily activities, parents tend to report more positive emotions than non-parents. Third, the impact of parenting on wellbeing is gendered: fathers experience a greater increase in positive emotional experiences during daily activities than mothers do.

So why might the day-to-day experience of parenting be more favorable for fathers than for mothers? Researchers have proposed various explanations, including that mothers suffer from insufficient sleep and leisure time, that mothers multi-task more and find multi-tasking more stressful, and that fathers enjoy parenting more because they are more playful in their interactions with children. In our recent study, we focused on how, when, and where parents undertake childcare as a potential explanation for gender differences in parents’ reported emotions. Caring for children involves many different types of activities undertaken in many different circumstances including, for example, taking a family trip to the playground, bringing children to and from school, and changing an infant’s diaper in the middle of the night. There is a substantial body of research on gender and parenting that shows that not only do mothers continue to do more daily childcare than fathers, but that mothers and fathers differ in terms of what activities they do for children and the circumstances in which those activities take place. Our study sought to bridge research on the emotional experience of parenting with research on gender differences in caregiving. In other words, we wanted to know if the context surrounding caregiving activities contributed to gender differences in the emotional rewards of parenting.

First we looked at parents’ reported emotions during childcare. We examined how happy, stressed, and tired parents were when caring for their children as well as how meaningful they found the activity. Consistent with other research, we found that parents generally experience childcare as happy and meaningful but that fathers are happier, less stressed and less tired than mothers when caring for children. Next, we developed the concept of the ‘care context’ as a way to measure how one childcare activity can be different from another. To develop the care context, we considered not only the type of activity parents were doing, but also when and where the activity took place, who else was present, and how much care was involved. We found substantial differences in the care context by parent gender. For example, fathers’ activities were more likely to be recreational (e.g. play) and to take place on the weekends. Meanwhile, mothers’ activities were more likely to be ‘solo’ parenting—parenting without a partner present—and to involve an infant. We also found evidence of mothers’ time fragmentation: although mothers’ childcare activities were typically shorter than fathers’ activities, mothers tended to have spent more cumulative time in childcare each day. We discovered multiple links between the care context and parents’ emotions while caring for their children. Indeed, all aspects of the care context—the type of activity, when and where it took place, who was present and how much care was involved—were related to parents’ reported emotions, often in complex ways. For example, parents reported more happiness and meaning when caring for an infant, but also higher levels of tiredness.

Finally, we tested whether gender differences in the care context helped to explain why fathers are happier, less tired and less stressed than mothers during childcare. We found that once we accounted for the care context, the gender difference in happiness disappeared and the difference in stress was reduced. However, the gap in tiredness was not reduced. So, overall, we concluded that differences in parents’ emotions during childcare result partly from general differences between mothers and fathers (i.e. that mothers are generally more tired and more stressed than fathers) and partly because, on average, fathers’ childcare activities are different than mothers’ childcare activities. Using the data that we have on reported emotions during specific activities, we can’t say why parents’ engagement with their children is gendered in a way that produces more emotional rewards for fathers. What’s clear from our analysis, though, is that gender differences in parents’ wellbeing are partly due to differences in how, when, and where mothers and fathers care for their children.

Cadhla McDonnell is a CAROLINE Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Trinity College, Dublin. Reach her at mcdonc11@tcd.ie. Nancy Luke is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Demography at The Pennsylvania State University. Reach her at nkl10@psu.edu. Susan E. Short is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. Reach her at susan_short@brown.edu.

Reposted with permission from This Chair Rocks.

What affliction do Americans fear most? Alzheimer’s disease. I’m one of them, unless so many bones give out that I have to be carried around in a shovel. But facts comfort me. Abundant new data shows that our fears are way out of proportion to the threat—and that those fears themselves put us at risk.

Fact #1: Dementia rates are falling.  As I reported last April, the likelihood of you or me developing dementia has dropped—significantly—and people are getting diagnosed at later ages. That’s despite a surge in diabetes among older Americans, which significantly increases the risk. Numbers remain high—an estimated four million to five million Americans currently have dementia—but that number pales in comparison all the people who are worried about getting it, and about aging in general. Why is that important?

Fact #2: Worrying about dementia—and about getting older—is itself a health risk. We’ve known for some time that attitudes towards aging affect how the mind and body function at the cellular level. New research published on February 7^th in the prestigious Public Library of Science journal confirms that finding, reporting that people who associate old age with becoming useless or incompetent are more likely to develop dementia than people with a more positive outlook.

Scientists consider a gene called ApoE to be the primary genetic risk factor in late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, yet many who carry it never develop dementia. How come? Could environmental—and therefore modifiable—factors play a role?  The new study, led by Yale’s Becca Levy, worked with a group of 4,765 people over age 60 who were dementia-free at the start, more than a quarter of whom carried the gene. Levy and her team interviewed them regularly over the course of four years, asking them to rank their feelings to prompts such as, “The older I get the more useful I feel.” They found that people with more negative attitudes were twice as likely to develop dementia. In other words, positive age beliefs confer protection against cognitive decline—even among people who are genetically predisposed to the disease.

Both experimental and longitudinal research show that stress, which links to dementia, may be the mechanism. Levy’s team found that positive attitudes about aging can reduce stress and help us cope with ageist messages that bombard us from the media and popular culture. People assimilate cultural beliefs from early childhood on, and as these stereotypes become more relevant over time, we tend to act as though they were accurate, creating self-fulfilling prophecies. (More here about Levy’s theory of stereotype embodiment.) Positive beliefs (e.g. late life is inherently valuable, old age is a time of growth and development, olders contribute to society) help keep us healthy by buffering stress and prejudice: the effects of ageism. Negative beliefs (e.g. it’s sad to be old, old people are ugly, aging means becoming a burden) make us vulnerable to disease and decline.

It’s time for an anti-ageism public health campaign.

We’re stuck with our genes, but not with our behaviors or attitudes. Interventions work. Last year New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata described the decline in dementia rates as “what seems to be a long-term trend, despite researchers’ failure to find any effective way for individuals to protect themselves from Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia.” That is no longer the case.

Reputable researches are careful not to overstate their findings, but the scientists behind this new study note that that their findings have far-reaching social implications. In personalized medicine, for example, education could bolster positive attitudes in people at higher risk of developing dementia. On a broader scale, as Levy points out, the research “lays a foundation for creating a public health campaign to beat back against ageism and negative beliefs about aging.” I’ve been making this case for years.

No matter how you feel about the longevity boom, or just about hitting that next big birthday, everyone wants olders to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible. Imagine the benefits to health and human potential of replacing negative stereotypes about age and aging with more nuanced, positive, and accurate portrayals. The 65+ population of the US is expected to double by the year 2030. Let’s get cracking!

Author and activist Ashton Applewhite has been recognized by the New York Times, the New Yorker, National Public Radio, and the American Society on Aging as an expert on ageism. She blogs at This Chair Rocks, speaks widely at venues that have ranged from the United Nations to the TED mainstage, has written for Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times, and is the voice of Yo, Is This Ageist?  The author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, Ashton is a leading spokesperson for a movement to mobilize against discrimination on the basis of age.

Last year, people all around the world tuned in to watch the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, an American actress, and this year the couple welcomed their first child. With a black mother and a white father, Markle identifies as biracial and is one of the first Americans to marry into the British Royal family. Black women have been excluded from Western princess imagery until recently with the Disney Princess Tiana, who spent most of the movie as an animal. Yet, with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, for the first time in living memory, an Afrodescendant woman was the star who ends the movie as a princess in a real life royal wedding.

2017 was not only the year that Prince Harry proposed to Markle, it also marked the 50^th anniversary of the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision outlawing state anti-miscegenation laws. To celebrate interracial love, The New York Times ran an editorial titled “How Interracial Love Is Saving America” by Sheryll Cashin. The author cited research by the Pew Research Center on how 17% of newlyweds and 20% of cohabiting relationships are either interracial or interethnic, many times higher than in 1967. Cashin saw the enlightened whites who had married across color lines as being at the forefront of a New Reconstruction in the Trump Era. Many people think that as an important symbol of racial harmony, Prince Harry and Ms. Markle will change the world. Like these U.S. newlyweds, their love will be the acid melting the boundaries separating blacks and whites.

Unfortunately, it is not true.

Between 2008 and 2012, I interviewed dozens of husbands and wives in black-white marriages in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. I expected them to reveal how they have been able to break down or blur racial and ethnic boundaries in their own lives. Instead, I was surprised to often find the exact opposite. Couples told me how their mere presence could be a spark triggering harassment from strangers in public. Los Angeles couples revealed that they saw individuals perpetrating hostility towards them; blacks, particularly black women, were very overt in their displeasure with interracial couples. For example, Stella was a white woman in her mid-twenties and lived in a predominantly white neighborhood with her black husband, Edward. They went with another black-white couple to a restaurant in Los Angeles. Stella said, “[W]e walked by a group of black girls, and…these two girls were looking right at us and the one girl goes, “That’s such a shame.”

This was different from the reactions Angelino couples received from whites. Mark is a white man married to Kelly, a black woman. He knew white man who had used racial epithets to describe blacks in the past. When he encountered the man again at a family gathering some time later, Mark explained encountering him once more.

And I’m sitting there talking to him, and [Kelly] walked up, and he said, ‘I got to go.’ And he walked away.  Turned around and walked away. And of course, I knew why.

White hostility to his relationship, as it was for other couples I interviewed, was subtle but also a reality. This was true even in Brazil, a society known for its large mixed-race population. Survey research has shown that most Brazilians, whether they identify as black, brown, or white can point to ancestors of different races in their backgrounds. Still, in Rio de Janeiro, the couples I interviewed talked about avoiding the famous South Zone areas of Copacabana and Ipanema because they were predominantly white and very wealthy. It was in these spaces that black women and their white husbands were mistaken for being a prostitute with her pimp. It was also in these neighborhoods that black men were unwelcome, whether with a white wife or not. Far from changing hearts and minds of locals, for the couples that I interviewed, being in an interracial marriage opened up new ways to be antagonistic towards people of color and the people who love them.

The same has been true for the Royal Couple. The Daily Mail tweeted a story of Meghan Markle moving “(Almost) Straight Outta Compton.”  Markle received a racist letter filled with a white powder, emulating Anthrax terrorist threats. These were just two of the many hate mail letters that the couple has received. Given the backlash that these couples endure, it is naïve to pretend that their interracial marriage will be a nail in the coffin of racism.

Many of us forget about Queen Charlotte, Prince Harry’s ancestor, who gave her name to that city in North Carolina. Wife of King George III, Charlotte was a descendant of the black branch of the Portuguese royal family. Yet, her reign did nothing to better the lives of the millions of blacks under her rule, including slaves in the US South or British holdings in the Caribbean.

Perhaps this new royal marriage is a nice symbol of racial harmony. However, it will take much more than a fairytale romance to minimized racial inequality whether in the United Kingdom or the United States.

In the twenty-first century, no one ever says that a man marrying a woman should bring about gender equality. In fact, whether in terms of working couples’ unequal distribution of domestic chores or the wage penalty for motherhood versus the wage bump for fatherhood, marriage and the family can be an institution that reproduced gender inequality. Similarly, we should not expect interracial marriage should lead to greater racial equality. While interracial couples can serve as important symbols, their existence does not reduce inequality.

Rather than waiting on interracial couples and their multiracial offspring to magically end racism, we everyday people need to be involved in anti-racist activism. This can mean checking out the efforts of a local YWCA; joining and funding protests and organizing efforts for black lives; getting involved in local efforts to end mass incarceration; funding nonprofits that support undocumented immigrants. It could also start off by forming reading groups for books like Racism without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla Silva to understand how 21^st century colorblind racism has replaced Jim Crow. Those steps are far better than taking the easy route of false claims of colorblindness and waiting for a never-coming miracle of race mixture. Interracial love, like all forms of love, is something to be celebrated. But as we watch the royal nuptials, let us remember that they cannot save us from our racism. Only we can do that.

Chinyere Osuji is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University at  Camden. In her book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (2019, NYU Press), Osuji compares how interracial couples in Brazil and the United States challenge, reproduce, and negotiate the “us” versus “them” mentality of ethnoracial boundaries. Boundaries of Love is based on over 100 interviews with black-white couples to reveal the family as a primary site for understanding the social construction of race. 

Reposted from the LA Times

In the wake of the mass shooting in El Paso, the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern U.S. history, my attention seized on the living as much as the dead. I couldn’t shake images of children running across a Walmart parking lot fleeing for their young lives. According to one witness, a young girl ran to a car and frantically (and successfully) tried to open the door. “You could just see the terror in her face,” she said.

Almost 18 years ago the girls running from terror were my twin sisters Joelle and Shauna. They were 15 when they fled the attack on the World Trade Center. Days before, they had transferred to the High School for Leadership and Public Service, a city block from the towers.

Hearing eyewitness accounts of children in El Paso running from bloody chaos, who moments before had excitedly stocked up on back-to-school supplies, reignites the personal horror of Sept. 11 for my sisters and me. Having witnessed the long-term effects of terrorism on my family, I worry about the accumulating trauma on these young mass shooting survivors and their not yet fully formed adolescent brains. They have lost friends, family members, neighbors and the ability to unsee the violence they witnessed. How will this carnage affect them in the months and years to come?

For my sisters and me, that September morning irreparably obliterated a time bursting with promise. As I peeked out the window at that now-infamous, piercing blue sky, I brimmed with the excitement of my senior year of college.

As I watched the towers fall from my bedroom window in Chelsea, Peter Jennings’ somber voice on TV in the background, I felt like those tearful relatives in El Paso being interviewed on TV about searching for their missing loved ones. I couldn’t locate my sisters. I called the school over and over, but no one answered. Subway service stopped before I could hop on a train to find them. I tried to steel myself for the possibility that my sisters might come home in body bags. And I waited.

They finally returned home around 4 p.m., covered in thick white ash, seemingly unharmed. High on adrenaline, they sounded almost upbeat as they chronicled their experiences: the debris and the boot that hit their classroom window, initial confusion about whether to leave the school building or stay put (against the teacher’s orders, the class left en masse), running around the southern tip of Manhattan to escape the dust storm from the towers’ collapse, the kindly businessman who helped them break into a fancy restaurant for shelter, water and tablecloths they used as masks. They pulled from their backpacks charred papers that fluttered from the fallen towers. We saved them in a shoebox, and almost two decades later a whiff from the box brings back that smoky, ruinous day.

In the days and weeks afterward, whenever I asked if they were OK, my sisters replied with an exasperated, “We’re fine.” They weren’t. The unraveling would happen in the months to follow. They cut classes and soon stopped going to school, as if sucked down a harrowing rabbit hole they couldn’t climb out of.

We fought as I pleaded with them to go to school. But who could blame them? For my sisters, school had become the site of a mass murder. Even when they wanted to return, they felt powerless to dig themselves out from under an avalanche of missed work. It’s no surprise that standardized test scores have been shown to drop when a murder happens in a neighborhood .

Five years earlier, we had lost our mother. Sept. 11 compounded our family traumas, blasting a hole though whatever progress we’d made toward healing those wounds. I could never have imagined that with the fallen towers, my relationship with my sisters would also implode. That I’d become estranged from the girls who were my best and often only friends. Years piled up where we didn’t talk.

My sisters turned 33 this summer. We’re finally all speaking again. But I tiptoe around landmines. Communication is fragile. We don’t talk much about certain things, including that day. But my sisters recently opened up a little. Shauna spoke of her participation in a Columbia University study of survivors enrolled in the World Trade Center health registry. “Sometimes I think I’m invincible, like if I’ve survived that, I can survive anything,” she says. That feeling of invincibility may be reflected in the higher rates of risk-taking behavior, such as binge drinking, found among Sept. 11 survivors. Joelle has also spoken of residual trauma, saying: “That really messed me up more than I thought.”

Both finished their GEDs, though neither completed college. I still mourn the loss of their education, but they have managed to gain some emotional, physical and financial stability despite how the ground shifted beneath their feet and concrete rained down on them that September day. I’m proud of the strong, resilient women they’ve become. Shauna has packed a thousand lives into one, having an endless series of adventures. Joelle is a mother of four, soon to be five, secure in the love of the family she has nurtured.

The terrorism that has reverberated through my family since that Tuesday morning was foreign. Today domestic, white nationalist terrorism threatens us as U.S. citizens of Latin origin. It’s frightening to think about how we could become targets. Since the El Paso shooting, I keep thinking about Joelle, who shops frequently with her children at their local Walmart in Arizona.

My nephews and niece are half-Mexican. They have brown skin and dark hair. They face the risk of becoming the second generation of terrorist attack victims in our family, potential targets of hate, if they wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time — sadly, places like school, the park, the mall, an outdoor festival. Must I be afraid to go to the Cardenas supermarket in my heavily Mexican and Central American neighborhood? Must I fear for my life and those of my family and neighbors because of what we look like, where our families come from, and where we live?

Ya basta. Enough.

Stacy Torres is an assistant professor of sociology at UC San Francisco.

Couples who follow stereotypical ideas about what a wife should do report the least satisfaction and the most conflict.

Originally Posted at NBC News

Few events in modern life are wrapped in as much “tradition” as engagements and weddings — especially for heterosexual couples. Surprise proposals from men on bended knees; diamond rings; virginal white dresses with flowing trains; proud fathers walking glowing daughters down the aisle to waiting grooms.

Not all traditions match modern tastes, of course. Instead of a cake, for example, it was customary in the Middle Ages to serve a “bride pye” at wedding celebrations. The earliest recorded recipe for such a pie included lamb testicles, oysters, sweetbreads, fruit, butter, egg yolks and lemon.

While many of the rituals we embrace today — or have thrust on us by wedding planners — sound more palatable, they too can leave a bad aftertaste, especially when they reinforce the notion that marriage is the biggest day in a woman’s life and becoming a wife the most important identity she will ever acquire. You see, even when we “just play” at stereotypes, we absorb some of them — and they affect other people’s expectations of us. Studies show, for example, that when a woman is described to people as a wife, rather than, say, a friend or colleague, they expect her to take major responsibility for cleaning, even if they know she works full-time. They hold a “wife” to higher standards of cleanliness than a man or a single woman, even a cohabiting one, and judge her more harshly when she doesn’t meet those standards.,

Far be it for me to suggest that women give up white dresses, dispense with the father-daughter dance, or even challenge the convention that the man must surprise the woman with an elaborate proposal. Still, it’s worth updating some of these traditions or seeking out others that offer more realistic visions of the marital partnership most couples now hope to establish.

To craft a wedding that takes the best of different traditions and integrates those with the values of contemporary couples, it helps to reflect on where those traditions came from, when they came into being and what alternative traditions they pushed aside. Take the custom of the man asking the woman’s father for her hand in marriage, a tradition that wedding industry analysts claim has recently come back in style.

The tradition of the father “giving” the bride to the groom reflects the fact that until the middle of the 19th century, marriage permanently transferred legal authority of a woman from her father to her husband. An unmarried woman could escape her father’s control over her finances only once she turned 21. But in the 1950s and ’60s the majority of women married before turning 21, and for them the transfer from father to husband meant they never became fully adult in the eyes of the law. Until the mid-1970s, a wife still needed her husband’s permission to take out a loan, sign a lease, open a business or even apply for a credit card.

Some couples have modernized this ritual by asking both sets of parents to approve the match and get to know each other as in-laws. In one marriage I attended, the bride and groom, accompanied by their entire families, walked to meet each other, and then the couple proceeded together to face the officiant.

Such modifications actually draw on a very different, and even more ancient, marital tradition. Among the earliest hunting and gathering bands of the Paleolithic world, and still today among some of their descendants, marriage was a way of turning strangers into relatives. Weddings were about creating ever-widening relationships and mutual obligations among new in-laws and neighboring communities. At my son’s wedding, he and his bride “gave” both sets of parents away to each other, having us exchange leis to symbolize our commitment to the new network of relatives we had acquired.

Many of the most popular “traditional” wedding customs today actually come from a small sliver of history when women were bring pushed out of their central roles in economic and social life and offered idealization of their beauty and purity as (rather scant) compensation. The gasp of surprise, pretended or not, when presented with a ring; the emphasis on the size of the ring and the beauty of the bridal gown, the father walking the bride to the waiting groom, and later the groom lifting her over the threshold — all these rituals come from a time when women had to rely on men to take the initiative in all things and hope that their husbands would provide for them.

That’s not how medieval and early modern Europeans regarded marriage. Everyone knew that a man could not run a farm or business on his own, and in colonial America it could be hard for a man to get a license to open an inn unless he had a wife to be his co-worker. Wives were sometimes called “yoke-mates.” The old German wedding custom of Baumstamm sägen nicely sums up the idea that marriage depends on the woman’s contributions as well as the man’s. There, the first thing a bride and groom do after the ceremony is to each take hold of one end of a cross-cut saw and vigorously saw the log in half to demonstrate they can work together.

The word “Mrs.” was originally derived from the female equivalent of the title “master.” It designated a “mistress” — a woman “who governs” — whether married or unmarried. Only in the 19th century, at the height of what historians call “the cult of female domesticity,”did “Mrs.” came to indicate a woman’s marital status rather than her socioeconomic status. And that marital status was considered far more important than any of her individual achievements. Women increasingly lost even their first names when they wed, becoming only “Mrs. John Smith.”

Women’s understanding that marriage required them to subordinate their personhood to the role of devoted wife helps explain why so many women began to think of their wedding day as their last occasion to shine.

A name was not all women lost. As the perceptive French writer Alexis de Tocqueville explained, 19th-century American women “irrevocably” surrendered their legal independence and access to public life once they entered the bonds of matrimony. When one man heard that his childhood friend was engaged, he confided to his diary that the “idea of her being married seems to me much the same as her being buried.” Many women recorded similar fears in their own diaries.

Women’s understanding that marriage required them to subordinate their personhood to the role of devoted wife helps explain why so many women began to think of their wedding day as their last occasion to shine. When Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, her ornate white wedding dress with its long train created a sensation. Being a real queen, Victoria had to propose to Albert, a piece of pageantry that few women have adopted even now. But copying Victoria’s wedding dress — and later the three-tiered white wedding cakes that were introduced at her daughters’ weddings — was a different matter.

It’s often suggested that the white wedding dress caught on because it stood for purity, signaling that the bride had protected her maidenhood until the ceremony. But probably more important was its role as a uniquely female status symbol in a world where women could no longer become entrepreneurs or “mistresses” in their own right. Dresses with trains at least three yards long were what women wore when in attendance at the royal court, and white was the color debutantes wore when presented to the queen. The fact that white dresses were expensive to make and exceptionally difficult to keep clean in a world where rooms continually accumulated soot from fireplaces and most streets were unpaved only added to their cachet. As Bride’s Magazine put it in 1949, wearing such a dress could make a woman “queen of the day, surrounded by your ladies-in-waiting.”

Fifty years ago, wedding rituals that reinforced stereotypes of men as protectors and providers and women as delicate homebodies worked well for many couples. As late as the 1970s and ’80s, couples who followed stereotyped gender scripts after marriage reported higher relationship satisfaction than couples who experimented with nontraditional arrangements such as shared breadwinning, housework and childcare. But today, egalitarianism is an increasingly important predictor of marital satisfaction. The good news is that in marriages formed since the early 1990s, couples who share child care and housework equally report the highest relationship and sexual satisfaction. The bad news is that couples who follow traditional ideas about what a wife should do report the least satisfaction and the most conflict. So couples looking for happiness in the years after their wedding day might consider updating old ceremonies, or crafting new ones, that reinforce their commitment to equality from Day One.

Stephanie Coontz is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage” and is Director of Research at the Council on Contemporary Families.

We are nearing the end of summer, which means vacation season for families is ending. But for sociologists like me who study vacations and tourism in terms of second homes, the fun keeps going on and on.

The family vacation is changing, and companies in the business of housing families who are on vacation are noticing and revising their platforms to suit (and likely impact) the changes. Case in point: VRBO’s new platform allows extended families who are geographically separated – a big portion of their client base – to collaborate via an online shared platform about potential homes for an upcoming vacation stay where they can all be together. Companies that broker private home spaces in a virtual commercial space spend lots of time and money trying to figure out what kind of data may be useful to better meet client needs and to boost profits, and this business is not slowing down anytime soon.

VRBO studied user-interface data to uncover how spread-apart families select homes to share when they’re on vacation together. I collect data about vacation homes, too, but as a social scientist interested in the social construction of the meaning of home, family, and community, I study how the families who own the homes that are sometimes rented out to other families talk about these spaces. I have conducted semi-structured interviews of several dozen vacation homeowners from across the U.S. who represent a fairly wide range of affluence, from those who have a run-down cabin in the woods that is only used in mild weather and doesn’t have modern plumbing, to those who have a multi-million dollar property on a shoreline or in a mountain resort. Some of these property owners use the properties for vacation, some for investment to rent out only to people they do not know, and many are in between these formal categories. I have also conducted a content analysis of lifestyle television shows featuring families searching for vacation homes (and sometimes rental incomes), and field research of burgeoning tourist town meetings filled with heated debates about short-term vacation home rental regulations. In other words, I study the qualitative dimensions of how the meaning of vacation homes varies among homeowners when the properties are used by family members or friends, or by strangers, and I embed the meanings in broader neighborhood and community contexts.

Rather than solely looking at data on reported vacation home values and demographic shifts in the U.S. vacation home market, which are crucial if you want to understand the national picture of reported property statuses or taxes, I ask questions about what people actually do (regardless of what they report) and how they define what their vacation homes mean to them. As a family sociologist who studies material culture and the social construction of spaces and places, I capture meaning by asking about how spaces are defined, how home objects may matter, and how the home is defined in light of the larger community’s classification as a tourist destination or not. After all, formal classifications of second homeowner as fixed categories that require certain taxation rates and time limits for homeowners to reside there are limited in their capacity to capture the reality and dynamism of ownership across time, geographic space, and use.

Most importantly, I assess whether the meaning of vacation homes changes depending on which visitors count as “family.” I came up with this project, by the way, when I visited a relative’s condo that was sometimes used (for a small fee) by relatives of friends and friends of relatives, and I wondered if the homeowners took down the picture of my son before they let others stay there.

My research reveals that the simple classification of second homes into governmental classifications that are based on taxes and time spent there does not show what people actually do with, and believe about, their vacation homes. How the homes are used and framed by homeowners (and the companies they use to advertise) shapes the ebbs and flows of the sharing economy. As my interview responses reveal, sometimes people call a property their primary residence but do not actually live there and instead rent it out for others’ vacations. Sometimes people define a space six hours away as their family vacation home more than someone who has an accessory dwelling unit on their primary residence property that is rented out to tourists (which is, per governmental classifications, not considered a second home). Why? Because in the first instance, the home is never used by strangers, and in the second instance, the home is never used by family members. In both instances, they are defined as family vacation spaces. Maybe the definition of a second or vacation home is more based on who occupies it than where it is, whether it is part of a primary residence, or what its formal governmental classification is.

In addition to complicating formal classifications of properties and homeowners, my preliminary analysis reveals that vacation homeowners downplay the impersonal, selfish, and inauthentic in economic exchange that may occur with vacation homes, such as when a friends of a family member use it and a cleaning fee is required but mentioned only casually and handled informally. At the same time, homeowners emphasize the significance of social connections over economic gain when they talk about the vacation home, regardless of whether they use it or rent it out to other families in a formal exchange. They do this by focusing on cherished objects or spaces as significant for family connectedness in a time when geographic mobility and generational divides are viewed as increasing and the preservation of family “stories” and “values” are framed as threatened. Especially for those who keep the home for use within the family and close friends, this leads not only to nostalgia about past family vacation memories, but what I label as “imagined future nostalgia” for the next generations, who may or may not be interested in keeping or sharing the property with extended family members. For the older homeowners I interviewed in these situations, this is clearly framed as a geographically-situated genealogy project, not as a financial investment. For some of the people in my interview study, however, the desire to keep the family vacation home in the family for generations to come was a desire not shared by their children and grandchildren, who sometimes turned toward the idea of short-term vacation rental as a way to afford to keep the home while still being occasionally available for family that would have less time to spend together as their busy lives and geographic mobility seemed to increase with each generation. In this sense, the sharing economy is framed as an option for those who are not quite ready to get rid of the family vacation home, but can’t quite afford to keep it if it sits empty as their siblings, cousins, and other family members find it harder or less desirable to meet up during the few vacation days they may have each year.

In terms of lifestyle television depictions of families seeking vacation homes, I found both similarities and differences between homeowners who talked about their prospective vacation homes as family-only versus those who talked about them as simultaneous family vacation homes and investment properties. Those who wanted to use the vacation homes for investment purposes and not just as family-only spaces tended to focus on spaces and objects that would yield more guests and higher fees, whereas those who wanted to use the homes for their own families and nobody else tended to focus their comments on whether they could imagine family and friends enjoying themselves in the spaces. Those who mentioned investment opportunity included more frequent and explicit reference to money, whereas vacation-only families more frequently mentioned personal emotional connections to the spaces.  Finally, proximity to amenities and the owners’ primary residences mattered: for those using it only for family vacations, it was important to have access to the property be easy (in other words, not too far away from their primary residence). For those treating the vacation property as primarily an investment, proximity to amenities was highlighted as mattering more than proximity to the owner’s primary residence. After all, travel is becoming increasingly about experiences rather than just places.

Of course, regardless of homeowner type, the television representation of all vacation home searches had a lot in common: similar predictable plot formulas, a focus on renovation potential, and a desire for escape and leisure and increased closeness for whichever family occupied the space. And, despite the vacation home rental industry being available only to those families affluent enough to afford the fees, the produced message of these shows was to suggest that people from varying demographic backgrounds can access these homes (hence, the title Beachfront Bargain Hunt). Finally, with few exceptions, there was a striking absence of reference to the role of insiders and outsiders in terms of who counts as a local, as well as any community-level impacts such as housing affordability, tourism labor, and environmental degradation. In this sense, despite the visual and rhetorical focus on neighborhood and community, the aim of the shows is to emphasize these as sites for amenities and experiences, and to individualize family space use as private decisions that are removed from any responsibility for the communities in which the families may reside.

Today, private home spaces are increasingly public parts of the sharing economy. Of course, affluent members of society renting out vacation homes is not new in U.S. society (just watch season 2 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel for a pop culture reference to this phenomenon; or just watch Dirty Dancing). Renting out parts of properties in order to make ends meet has also been part of the history of those who are less affluent. What I study is whether the new norms of families meeting up for vacations in rented-out private spaces that belong to private homeowners (as opposed to a set of cabins in the Catskills or a boarding house in Chicago), and the increase in entrepreneurialism via the sharing economy, have shaped the meaning of vacation homes differently than decades ago.

My research, which is ongoing, touches on important fields of study, including how homes are defined as “priceless” places despite their presence in capitalist exchanges, how success in the sharing economy may be a new marker of privilege based on meritocratic efforts in entrepreneurialism, race and class inequalities and the “politics of exclusion” in housing affordability  and gentrification in tourist and other areas, and the social psychological and cultural impacts of the “vacation self” as we social scientists witness and study the changes in travel and mobility patterns across generations.

I wrote this post during the last weekend of summer, perched on the deck of my in-laws’ vacation home overlooking a calm piece of the Puget Sound, where it’s difficult to tell by looking at the water whether the tide is coming in or going out.  My family schedules a getaway a week or two before school starts if we can, because it allows us to elongate the summer, at least as we define it. Otherwise, when August 1^st rolls around, I will start thinking summer is over and start fine-tuning my syllabi, and all of us will transition into school and work mode and forget that we also like to play games and splash in some water.

Four doors down from our extended family’s vacation home is a property that is listed on a short-term rental site. Nobody here has really talked about what that may mean, or whether they find this to be interesting, helpful, or troubling – except for the occasional murmur of “those people do not understand how to be on a beach filled with clams, tiny crabs, and oysters.” When neighbors have family members visit, everyone is excited to meet them. The couple next door, for example, knows my name (and, as of this trip, now knows my dog’s name). People make an effort to get to know each other along the shore, except at the place that is rented out to strangers. Those people are met with a friendly yet distant vibe. They are not locals, even as people like my in-laws who are only there part-time are not quite locals either.

I continue to ponder all of these preliminary findings and ongoing questions, and I wonder: when are these family members planning to display a picture of my son for all of the family-only visitors to admire? And what will happen to the picture if they decide to rent out the vacation home someday to people we don’t know?

Michelle Janning is the Raymond and Elsie Gipson DeBurgh Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her research focuses on the intersection of spaces, material culture, and interpersonal roles and relationships. She is expanding her focus to include the constructed meaning of neighborhood and community, especially as it relates to any dwelling homeowners consider to be a “second home.” Her work is featured at www.michellejanning.com.

In today’s labor market, women earn about 80% of men’s wages. This statistic and discussions of gender equity in pay have been covered by the media with renewed force in recent months, in part sparked by the U.S. women’s national soccer team suing the U.S. Soccer Federation for gender discrimination relating to unequal pay in March 2019. What factors contribute to the gender wage gap? Some argue that the time women spend out of work and the work lapses they experience for family and caregiving reasons explains part of the gender wage gap—that is, among other factors, the different employment trajectories men and women experience over the life course is one roadblock in reaching gender wage equality.

We investigate the linkage between employment trajectories and the gender wage gap in a forthcoming article in Demography. Using national data of the work histories of more than 6,000 individuals (NLSY 1979), we first identify six different employment trajectories from ages 22 to 50 (see Figure 1). We find that men’s and women’s levels of work attachment over the life course vary significantly; some follow steady work at high levels, others have low attachment to work either early or late in their careers, and some experience temporary declines in employment. Although steady employment trajectories are the most common overall; we find important gender, racial, and class disparities in the ability to secure steady work. For example, women are underrepresented in the group that follows a steady high level of attachment (36% are women), and women are more likely to experience low levels of employment either in the early career or temporarily around the late thirties. We also find that women across racial/ethnic groups and Black men are more likely than their counterparts to experience non-steady employment. Individuals who have experienced poverty are also at heightened risk of having lower and intermittent employment levels.

Figure 1. Employment trajectory groups of men and women across the life course

Source: NLSY 1979 data, from 1979-2014 surveys.

This analysis shows that relatively advantaged demographic and social groups are more likely to secure steady and high levels of work throughout their lives—which also have the highest wage pay off later in the career. We then ask: within employment trajectories—that have similar levels and timing of work attachment—how does the gender wage gap vary? We find that in the trajectory with highest levels of steady employment, the gender wage gap is the largest: among those who have steady and high levels of employment throughout their lives, women earn about 78.9% of men’s wages (see Figure 2). Men have higher wages than women across trajectories, but in non-steady paths this wage premium is reduced. In other words, men are relatively more penalized than women for not working continuously at high levels.

These findings suggest that even if women’s employment trajectories become more like men’s, the gender wage gap would remain persistent. This places women in a double bind; either they experience less gender wage inequality in low attachment trajectories, or access relatively higher wages in steady work paths that have a larger gender wage gap.

Figure 2. Predicted wages by trajectory and gender.

Note: The model includes a set of individual, family, and work characteristics. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals.

Why are men relatively more penalized than women for following non-steady employment trajectories? Non-steady and lower attachment paths are commonly associated with women who experience work lapses due to caretaking and family responsibilities. Employers might perceive men who follow these paths as violating breadwinning norms and expectations about what an ideal worker’s employment trajectory should be. Weisshaar’s recent article in American Sociological Review shows that in the hiring process, family-related work lapses are penalized relative to continuous work and even compared to unemployment spells. Both mothers and fathers who had family-related work lapses are penalized, but in highly competitive markets, fathers seem to fare worse. Fathers who had family-related lapses are also perceived to be less committed and reliable than mothers—suggesting that the role of employers’ preference could be a partial explanation of the reduced wage premium we find for men who follow non-steady employment trajectories.

Advancing towards equal pay will require cultural, policy, and workplace changes. Expanding work opportunities to create equal access to steady employment throughout the life course is important—and paid family leave policies taking effect in some states are a good start. But our work shows that encouraging women to work more will not be enough. We also need to ensure equal wages for similar work—as fought for by the U.S. women’s national soccer team—and to change workplace policies and cultural gender expectations around caretaking so as to reduce the penalties associated with family-related work lapses and parenthood.

Tania Cabello-Hutt is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow her on Twitter at @TaniaHutt and reach her at tcabello@unc.edu.  Kate Weisshaar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow her on Twitter at @kateweisshaar and reach her at weisshaar@unc.edu. 

Deborah J. Cohan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina- Beaufort whose work has appeared in numerous academic and non-academic publications. She is the author of the popular blog “Social Lights” for Psychology Today, is a regular contributor to Inside Higher Ed, and is frequently quoted in major media outlets. Here we ask her questions about her new sociologically inspired memoir, Welcome to Wherever We Are. Learn more about her at deborahjcohan.com.

BJR: What made you, a sociologist, decide to write a book about your own life experiences caring for your ailing father?

DJC: I have been actively reading and formally studying memoir in earnest since I was at the end stages of my dissertation in graduate school. I found myself growing impatient with various aspects and profound limitations of academic writing and was looking for a creative outlet. Ever since I was a child, writing was something that felt available and important to me. However, growing up, I was less of a reader because all that was shoved down my throat in school was fiction. And, my dirty secret is that I still don’t read fiction! Once I discovered memoir though, it all made sense. At its best, memoir is essentially a very creative sociology.

The analytical and interpretive properties of both sociology and memoir are quite similar. Sociology is about giving people the tools and the vocabulary to seek multiple truths about individuals, societies and the social forces that constrain and support their very being; sociology offers us the opportunity to then take this information to question, reflect, re-evaluate and put the pieces of our own lives together again, to see how the private “I” fits into the larger public “eye.”

Memoir involves possessing the sociological imagination, connecting biography to history, and understanding how private troubles of one’s personal milieu are indeed public issues related to the social structure. Memoir is about excavating identity and salvaging a sense of self. It is also about the power of finding and using one’s voice.

It is qualitative and ethnographic. The best memoir writers take the particulars of their own lived experience and write their hearts out in a way that connects with others and the larger project of what it means to be human.

Sociological theory, and feminist analysis, which I rely on heavily, helps us to uncover truths no matter how discomforting or disquieting they can be or how deeply one must probe to discover them, and yet this journey toward truth is often enlightening, magical, and transforming. Sociology gives us the opportunity to re-think our place in history, to imagine the future direction of the world, and perhaps to dream about how we might engage in tikkun olam, a Hebrew expression for repairing and healing the world. Memoir has become an extension of all of that for me. The writer Dorothy Allison said: “…Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.”

Long motivated by a continuous thread I have followed since I began college, both my academic writing and my memoir tell stories at the intersections of gender, family, home, identity, race, class, violence, trauma, grief, loss, rage, creativity, social justice, and social change. These tend to be the issues I write about regardless of genre, and I have published a book, academic articles, book chapters, essays, articles for the mass media, and poetry. The breadth and depth of my writing showcases fluency and versatility with genre because of my belief in the promise of sociology and how we must make ourselves relevant in public discourse. I consider myself an interdisciplinary sociologist, a feminist sociologist, and a public sociologist—creating and applying sociological insights for public knowledge and for the public good.

BJR: Are there any sociological lessons that you can share from the story you share in this book?

 DJC: That’s a great question and there are so many!

In sociology, we often say that things are not always as they seem. This is most definitely true. My book sheds light on how abuse is not black or white, and that there is multidimensionality to abusers. In my case, my father was both adoring and abusive; both are my lived realities. Also, in the book you learn that I was raised in an upper middle class Jewish home, and domestic violence is still very much cloaked in silence, secrecy and shame in households like that. The book punctures assumptions around abusers, survivors, marriage, divorce, social class, etc.

Back in college, I got interested in homelessness among children and adults. I wanted to understand the structural conditions that lead some people to a life on the streets. We know there is a connection between homelessness and violence. As time has unfolded, I have found myself compelled by how traumatic experiences of violence leave us homeless, even metaphorically, in our bodies, in our relationships, and just in our very existence. Writing memoir about family violence became a way to come home to myself.

Sociologists are concerned with how relationships come together and break apart. Sociology consistently asks how we form connection and community with one another and how we become alienated from each other. Studying intimacy and violence provides rich ground for examining these dynamics and processes.

Also, in sociology, we aim to understand why people are cruel to each other, especially in a context of intimacy, sexuality, family, and love.  Domestic violence cuts to the core of human experience of intimacy, vulnerability and relations of domination.

Furthermore, many of us have an interest in social justice and social change and operate from the assumption that sociological writing is not just about creating knowledge for knowledge’s sake but that it is also about forging solidarity with suffering human beings. Domestic violence and violence against women offer us the possibility to think about the nexus of relationships between social problems, personal healing and recovery, and social change.  As sociologists, we are trained in asking questions and observing the complexities and nuances of human behavior, and domestic violence cases like what I experienced provide an opportunity for deep, ongoing sociological inquiry.

BJR: Given the connection between the personal and the political, can you help the reader understand if there are any implications for social policy from your experiences as a caregiver?

DJC: I hope that the book compels readers to think about ways that we can talk more honestly about domestic violence, and especially how to have those conversations intergenerationally. When I began caregiving for my father, I was in my thirties and not yet on the tenure track and cobbling together a series of contingent academic jobs back and forth in two states. I spent a lot of money I didn’t have to travel to see him and I remember thinking how fabulous it would be if there were grants for people in my situation, simultaneously doing public service with teaching and also intense caregiving. I felt choked by my living expenses, student loan debt, and caregiving bills. It was clear to me then—and remains so—that we need a much greater, supportive infrastructure in our social institutions to help people navigate this and to buffer against the extreme loneliness that people face in these distressing and grief-filled circumstances. Growing up, I was one of very few only children with older parents. Now that this is an increasingly common demographic, it seems like as a society we will have to better offer support as people reconcile the dilemmas of aging and caregiving from the complicated context of tiny and tender family dynamics.

Barbara J. Risman is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She is also a Senior Scholar at the Council of Contemporary Families.