Couple inequity

When a couple has children, women spend disproportionate time at home, and men at the office – it will take effort from many sources to balance the scales

When a couple with demanding jobs has children, something has to give. All too often, among heterosexual couples, the change is that the woman’s work slows down.

“Women are disproportionally on call at home and men are disproportionally on call at the office,” says Claudia Goldin, an economic historian at Harvard. This gendered division of labour is furthered by working arrangements designed to improve work-life balance, such as flexible hours. Women usually take these arrangements, and find their earnings and career development affected as a result. “Flexible schedules create ‘mummy tracks’,” Goldin explains. This has occurred in the Netherlands and other countries where part-time workers tend to be female.

The issue of couple inequity is larger than any individual couple, and couple inequity is bound up in gender inequity itself on a larger scale. Although traditional, ingrained gender roles are difficult to budge, there are practical ways to relieve the time pressure on working parents. These include after-school programmes and more support for the elderly, for whom women spend more time caring.

But it’s not just a matter of social policy. Men need to step up, to insist on spending less time at work and more time at home.

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Image credit: Piero Zagami and Michela Nicchiotti.