A new study of Quebec’s recent non-transferable parental leave for fathers demonstrates just how effective this generous benefit is in getting fathers more involved at home. With new benefits, fathers increased their participation in parental leave by 250 percent. In households where men were given the opportunity to use this benefit, fathers’ daily time in household work was 23 percent higher, long after the leave period ended. Background and details of economist Ankita Patnaik’s innovative study are provided in this briefing report, prepared for CCF.

This briefing is based on a study by Dr. Ankita Patnaik. The original paper is available here and is forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics. This research was funded by Cornell University.

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Take another look at CCF’s online symposium on intimate partner violence.

This year, as was the case in 2015 when CCF convened experts on intimate partner violence, we continue to see a marked increase in attention to rape and sexual assault, especially on college campuses, by the media, local authorities, and the White House. The new focus on this problem is beneficial, but its persistence in recent cases is troubling.

History of rates of crime and intimate partner violence

The Council on Contemporary Families Online Symposium on Intimate Partner Violence, reports a decline in IPV that parallels a decline in violent crime overall in the United States. Nevertheless, the series explains, while rapes and sexual assaults may be declining, they are still undercounted. Furthermore, while rates of IPV are unacceptably high on college campuses, those rates are even higher among women not enrolled in four-year colleges.

CCF director of research and education Stephanie Coontz writes in her introduction, “Violent crime has been falling in the United States for more than two decades, after rising sharply between the mid-1970s and 1993. In 2013 the murder rate was lower than any time since the records began in 1960, while violent crimes in general were at their lowest point since 1970.”

Is the decline in violent crime reflected in rates of IPV? Two reports in the series answer yes. Samuel Walker (University of Nebraska) indicates in “Interpersonal Violence and the Great Crime Drop” that “Between 1993 and 2010 IPV fell by 64 percent.” CCF intern Jessica Wheeler’s examination of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) in “A Review of National Crime Victim Victimization Findings on Rape and Sexual Assault” suggests that rates have been declining since 1973–with important caveats such as the NCVS’s neglect of military populations.

Undercounting on college campuses – and neglecting women who aren’t in school

In a detailed study of “Sexual Assault on Campus” University of Michigan scholars Elizabeth Armstrong and Jamie Budnick explain that while rates of IPV are declining, these rates are systematically underestimated – and have been from the beginning of IPV data collection.

For example, Armstrong and Budnick report, a national panel of researchers unanimously concluded that the NCVS techniques “likely inhibit reporting of assaults. Studies have consistently shown that many women do not label as ‘rape’ or define as criminal many sexual incidents that are unwanted and meet standards of forcible rape.” In addition, the way the NCVS is collected does not ensure privacy. “The interviewer is required to question everyone 12 and older at designated households, which means that all residents know what others are being asked. These oral interviews may be overheard,” which can inhibit people’s responses about controversial issues, explain the authors. Their report includes a detailed overview of data sources on sexual assault so that readers can examine the strengths and weaknesses of available data directly.

How common is IPV? The authors cite surveys ranging from a low of 14 to a high of 25 percent, which suggests that “the 1 in 5 statistic so frequently quoted is reasonable, even though inexact. The two most comparable recent surveys—the CSA and OCSLS [see data sources] — converge on a figure of 25 to 26 percent of college women experiencing sexual assault while in college.”

Jennifer Barber and colleagues, also at the University of Michigan, report in “Women not Enrolled in Four-Year Universities and Colleges Have Higher Risk of Sexual Assault” about a detailed study of college-aged women first collected in 2008. The Relationship Dynamics and Social Life Study (RDSL) found that women who never attended or dropped out of 4-year colleges — a group that on average comes from lower-income backgrounds — reported slightly higher rates of IPV. What’s more, these women were more likely to have a history of IPV (21 percent of non-college women versus 13 percent of college women in their study) and less likely to report that their friends and family would be supportive if they reported instances of rape or domestic violence. “There appears to be a higher incidence of, and tolerance for, such violence among the disadvantaged than among the privileged,” Barber and colleagues conclude. Since IPV has serious long-range health consequences for women, they report, this makes it all the more important “that the care and consideration we are giving sexual assault on college campuses must be extended off campus.

Stephanie Coontz returns to the bigger picture when she argues in her overview that while progress toward gender equality and mutual respect continues, women’s rejection of the double standard has risen faster than men’s. Despite the decline in forcible assaults, there may be new ways in which women are vulnerable to predatory or exploitative young men. “Today’s young women feel safer than earlier generations in openly expressing their erotic interests, and many do so without incurring the stigma or shame that used to be heaped on women who expressed their sexuality. Women also feel a new entitlement to drink alcohol and to party hard without being assaulted or taken advantage of. And they should be so entitled. But not all men have caught up with the new values that give women the right to say yes and the right to say no. There are subgroups of men, especially in settings that encourage rowdy masculine bonding, who still feel a sense of sexual entitlement, including some who actively attempt to incapacitate women with drugs or alcohol.”

Most Americans agree that entrepreneurship is an important component of economic growth and job creation. Small businesses accounted for two million new jobs last year, and innovative start-ups like those in Silicon Valley are key contributors to our GDP.

But women are a vastly under-tapped resource when it comes to growing a vibrant economy. For instance, in 2014, woman-owned firms in the United States employed only six percent of the workforce and created less than four percent of all business revenues—a figure that is about the same as it was in 1997.Women are a vastly under-tapped resource when it comes to growing a vibrant economy.

In a recent analysis of survey data from 24 countries between 2001 and 2008, I find some surprising evidence about different kinds of gender gaps in entrepreneurial activity and the relationship between those gender gaps and government policies. It turns out that having more women entrepreneurs does not necessarily mean that more women are running large or lucrative types of enterprises. When it comes to entrepreneurial startups, in contrast to our experience with the benefits of having more women enter traditional workplaces, sometimes fewer ends up meaning better. more...

There are memes all over the internet proclaiming that men who do housework “get laid” more often. Google “men who do housework,” and you’ll find, “Porn for Women:” a calendar featuring shirtless men doing household chores. What’s so sexy about men doing housework? The underlying message winks at the fact that, in the US, women continue to do the bulk of household labor even though almost as many of them work for pay outside the home as do men. Even after more than a century of feminist movement, most heterosexual households are still organized along gender lines. Heterogendered tradition still valorizes (and separates) male breadwinners and female caregivers. In this context, men who relieve women of housework are seen as rare, exotic, and even “sexy.”

Of course, real housework isn’t sexy at all. Preparing meals, doing laundry, washing dishes, cleaning – these are tasks that never end. Another common internet meme asks, “Don’t you just love those 12 seconds when all the laundry is done?” We noticed that you could create a lively, acerbic Pinterest page just on gender and housework!

So what does it look like when “real men”—men who consider themselves breadwinners and heads of the household—do housework? Why would these men do housework in the first place? They might do it if they became unemployed. We interviewed 40 men who lost their jobs during the recent recession. Most (85%) of these men expressed traditional viewpoints about gender in the home, saying that men should provide for women and children. And yet, after losing work, most (85%) of these men became financially dependent on their wives or girlfriends. This caused an ideological as well as financial quandary for them. Because their beliefs about masculinity were tangled up with employment, they had to redefine manhood while they were unemployed.

So how did these men prove their manhood? They tackled housework, and they crushed it “like men.” Ben, who called himself, “Mr. Housework,” explained that he mopped, vacuumed, and steam cleaned the floors multiple times a week. Richard said, “I won’t even use a mop on a floor, just on my knees and stuff. I find it somewhat cathartic, believe it or not, but I roll the rugs up, the ones in the kitchen, shaking them outside, leaving them [to air] out.” Our subjects embraced housework to do their part in the family, and they redefined women’s work as hard work—work befitting men. As Brian said, “I would prefer to be working but I just have to step up and be a man in a different kind of manner.”

So it apparently takes a recession to blur the division of labor in traditional household. Will this blurriness last as the economy recovers and men go back to work? Maybe. If “heads of households” and “men’s men” see household labor as real work, this could elevate its worth in larger society, making it less surprising and funny when men and women cross gendered boundaries in their homes.

Kristen Myers is Professor of Sociology and Director of Center for the Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality at Northern Illinois University. Ilana Demantas is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at University of Kansas. They write about their research in detail in “Being ‘The Man’ Without Having a Job And/Or: Providing Care Instead of ‘Bread’”—a chapter in Families as They Really Are.

“Why this? Why now? And what does this say about the state of the feminist zeitgeist?” That’s the focus of the newly launched #SignsShortTakes. In April, the platform used Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family to address “broader questions of reach and resonance” about work/family policies in the United States. The symposium was hosted by Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, which has been a leading journal for critical examinations of feminist issues since 1975.

A number of reviewers from the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) joined in the dialogue, with insights that are expanded upon in CCF’s briefing paper series on housework, gender, and parenting.

Several commentators highlighted concern about what was interpreted as an elite target audience for the approaches Slaughter recommends. Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts’ economist and a CCF scholar, argued that wealthy women already have “much better family-friendly policies in their workplace than others do.” Improvements secured by privileged women who are most able to demand them might not be enough for low-income women and their families. Calls for women to simply demand time off from an employer, for example, “are premised on the notion that workers are indispensable,” and “wield some leverage in the workplace,” even though “the problem of women’s economic advancement is largely one of working-class women and occupational segregation,” according to Premilla Nadasen. Proponents of what Tressie McMillan Cottom named trickle-down feminism imagine that, “caring about the well-being of elite women means elevating powerful women who will take care of the interests of less powerful women.” Cottom suggested that wealthy white women may be just as antagonistic to the needs of low-income and non-white women and their families as are wealthy white men. more...

Repost from 9/8/2015.

The commercialization of everyday life usually gives me a headache, but I guess I can always take a Tylenol. After all, as Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who directed Tylenol’s recent #HowWeFamily advertising spots, put it, the “family brand” is “helping to dispel the fears around difference,” to “get people to understand diversity” by introducing them to a wide range of families in videos that show that “at the end of the day, no matter the gender of the parents, the color of the family’s skin, the religion that they come from, the background that they come from, all of these families have the same concerns. They want what’s best for their kid, they want to care for each other and create a home that’s safe and happy.” And sometimes, of course, they need a decent painkiller.

The Tylenol spots—of immigrant families, of mixed-race families, adoptive families, gay-parent families, military families, step-families, stay-at-home dad/working-mom families, and so on—are charming, well produced, and surprisingly rich and moving. The parents, some of whom are also celebrities, are appealing and articulate, the kids are cute, and the politics are unapologetically liberal. The introductory video takes direct aim at old notions of what and who makes a family, offering the company’s “modern take on the Norman Rockwell family.” It’s an easy target, but still.

“When were you first considered a family? When you fell in love? When you got married? When you had kids?” a kind woman’s voice asks over soft music and images of straight couples holding hands, getting married, holding kids. Then, over similar images of same-sex couples and mixed-race families: “When did you first fight to be considered a family? When you fell in love? When you got married? When you had kids? Family isn’t defined by who you love, but how.” (Pause, then: “Tylenol.”) Many of the participants challenge the idea of a “normal” family, while also asserting that, as one of them puts it, “We are, at heart, all the same.”

That people have families in a wide variety of ways, throughout history and across cultures, is well established if also still widely ignored. These Tylenol images, along with TV shows like Modern Family, are part of an ongoing demotion of the ideology of One True Family (married, heterosexual man and woman with kids), and an emerging celebration of family diversity, in popular culture —even as the legal system lags behind. That’s great, and certainly better than the stigma, discrimination, and sanctimony which nontraditional families still routinely face.

Still, it strikes me as significant that the Tylenol campaign, like the similar family representations that have been popping up, downplays the ways these families move differently through the world, glosses over the origins of the new kinds of families, like my own, that they celebrate, and focuses on only particular forms of non-traditional family. One might wonder, for instance, about the experiences of the white parent of kids of color in the face of racism, immigrant families in the midst of Trump-driven nativism, same-sex parents whose children participate in a fiercely heterosexist culture. One might wonder, too, why we don’t get sunny videos about women who chose to be, or have found themselves as, single mothers, or about multi-parent-by-design families, or #HowWeFamilyWithoutMoney. One might wonder about the birth families, egg and sperm donors, surrogates, and ex-spouses whose lives, labor, and emotions were part of the family creation process but who are invisible in #HowWeFamily. One might wonder about those marginalized members of our broader family—in the communal membership sense of “family” long used by queer people—who can’t, don’t, or don’t want to benefit from the respectability garnered by participation in conventional marriage and family institutions. One might wonder, that is, whether the demolition of the idea that there is a single “normal” family requires the erasure of the ways social inequality shapes family creation and family life.

We really shouldn’t expect advertising to show that to us, of course. That’s not Tylenol’s job. Sometimes corporate actions contribute to progressive social change—in this case, when their branding interests are served by presenting non-traditional families as symbols of liberal tolerance—and oftentimes not. But we should wonder, and we should talk, about the less comfortable, less pretty inequities that are an inherent part of family-making old and new. That family diversity has become a corporate marketing tool can be flattering to some of us. But buyer beware.

Joshua Gamson (@joshgamson) is Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco and a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. His most recent book is Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship.

One of the consistent findings of sociological research in recent decades has been that couples who had a child before getting married had substantially higher odds of divorcing than couples who married first. This held true even when researchers controlled for other factors that tend to distinguish such couples from those who marry directly—education, family background, race and ethnicity. But considering the tremendous increase in premarital cohabitation and childbearing over the past quarter century, and in light of new evidence that many other longstanding “laws” of marriage and divorce have been overturned (e.g., see “It’s Not Just Attitudes: Marriage Is Also Becoming More Egalitarian”; Are Individuals Who Marry at an Older Age Too Set in Their Ways to Make Their Marriages Work?), we set out to investigate whether this particular sociological “rule” still applies. more...

For all of its craziness and scariness, the 2016 election campaign has hammered home for millions of Americans the degree to which massive inequities permeate our daily lives and threaten our democracy.

Unfortunately, understanding how inequalities affect us has yet to permeate the education policy world. While the transition from narrow, punitive No Child Left Behind Act to the Every Student Succeeds Act represents real progress, there is still a widespread belief that schools are the main drivers of achievement gaps and that they can, and should, be responsible for closing them. Correcting this fallacy is critical to getting the education system we need – one that is both equitable and excellent – and will help correct some of those larger inequities as well.

In reality, the same systemic forces that have sucked most of the income and wealth from the bottom half of our population in recent decades and channeled it into the top one percent have substantially widened income-based achievement gaps. Without intentional measures to direct a broad range of educational and other resources to reversing that trend, gaps will continue to grow. And because big disparities in parents’ – and society’s – investments in children begin at birth, those resources need to be channeled early.

Many of us know that students from poor families, and especially low-income students of color, are often two to three years behind by the time they begin high school. What is far less widely known is that those same students began school that far behind. In other words, our highly inequitable school system, which consigns students with the greatest deficits to the least credentialed and experienced teachers, is doing more to maintain gaps that children brought with them on their first day of kindergarten than to create them.

A study by my colleague, Emma Garcia, finds that, in fact, students in the bottom social class quintile lagged their highest-social class peers by a full standard deviation in both reading and math at kindergarten entry. Those same students were about half a standard deviation behind on such social emotional skills as persistence, self-control, and social interactions, which are equally critical to academic, and life, success. Mind you, education researchers typically translate that “standard deviation” into two or three years of schooling. Let that sink in: one in five students start kindergarten one to three years behind, whether behaviorally or academically.

When we looked across racial groups, the gaps were smaller, and could be explained substantially by social class. Given that nearly half of black five-year-olds who started school in 2010-11, and almost two thirds of English-Language Learner Hispanic children, versus just 13 percent of their white peers, are living in poverty, however, shifting the comparison groups doesn’t improve those students’ real life contexts.

Schools didn’t start these problems. And the evidence tells us that schools alone can’t fix them.

Early fixes that will work.

Luckily, there is also some very good news on this front. Unlike fixes for our bigger, broader societal inequities, strategies for closing these early childhood gaps are well understood, extensively documented, and, miraculously, have fairly wide support across the political spectrum. A paper just published by five EPI researchers lays out both the multiple societal problems created by our failure to make the needed public investments in quality early child care and education, and the broad set of benefits to be reaped from righting that wrong.

First and foremost, an ambitious national investment in early childhood care and education would help get all our children to the starting gate in much better shape. Another recent study, conducted jointly by the National Institute for Early Education Research and the Center for American Progress, suggests that universal pre-k alone would narrow math gaps by between 45 percent and 78 percent (black- white and Hispanic-white gaps, respectively) and virtually eliminate pre-kindergarten reading gaps.

But the benefits to the investments we propose extend much further. Ensuring a living wage for child care providers would not only improve their quality of life and enhance their contributions to the economy, but help stabilize the workforce and, ultimately, benefit the children they care for. Because child care is such a burden for young families – as expensive as rent or more so in many cases – making high-quality child care available would provide a benefit of about $11,000 annually for Florida families with an infant and a preschool-aged child who are earning the state median income. And removing this barrier to women’s workforce participation would help bring American women in line with their international peers, with potential gains to the gross domestic product of as much as $600 billion annually.

As the election comes closer, we must continue to push all candidates in both parties to focus on the severe problems working Americans face. Let’s make the early childhood investments we suggest front and center. By our analysis they are low hanging fruit—politically and economically.

Elaine Weiss is the National Coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, where she works with four co-chairs, a high-level Advisory Board, and multiple coalition partners to promote a comprehensive, evidence-based set of policies to allow all children to thrive in school and life.  Major publications for BBA include case studies of diverse communities across the country that employ comprehensive approaches to education. She has also authored two studies with EPI economist Emma Garcia on early achievement gaps and strategies to reduce them.

Why are families less economically secure today? After all, there’s been four decades of families seeming to have the opportunity to earn more and do better—this largely due to women’s movement into the U.S. workforce. According to a new report, women’s increased earnings and hours have been vital in the American family’s search for economic security. How has that search gone? Heather Boushey and Kavya Vaghul’s new report “Women have made the difference for family economic security” offers some answers.

Boushey, Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and research team member Vaghul used data from the Current Population survey to focus on changes in family income between 1979 and 2013 for low-, middle-, and professional-income families. They delved into the difference between men’s and women’s earnings regarding greater pay, as well as women’s earning as a function of more hours worked. They also looked at other sources of income between 1979 and 2013. more...