For Families, Layoffs Shift Responsibilities, Roles
Featured Guest Blogger March 12th, 2009
Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her penetrating coverage of U.S. social issues. She writes the popular “Balancing Acts” column in the Sunday Boston Globe, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Gastronomica, and on National Public Radio. Her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, details the steep costs of our current epidemic deficits of attention, while revealing the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus in a world of speed and overload. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.
The news seemed promising: married women, who’ve been contributing a growing share of median family income for years, are becoming crucial breadwinners during the recession.
But taking a closer look at this trend for my Balancing Acts column, I realized that working wives’ new clout isn’t entirely cause for celebration for many dual-earner families.
Many families are depending more on women financially because recent steep layoffs have hit men hardest. And this rejiggering of roles is hurting many families, since women more often work part-time and earn less on average than men in the same jobs. This is just one more reason why families today are so squeezed and couples are under enormous psychological stress.
Speaking with couples in this situation, I could hear terror and desperation in their voices. Many had always sought to be equal providers, or at least to take turns being the main provider. But a layoff steals the power of choice away from people and robs them of their secure feelings about the future.
In the long run, it is promising that women are contributing more to family finances, and that men are doing more at home. But to help families in future, we need equal pay, along with real flexibility in gender roles, so that men and women can adapt their work/home responsibilities both to their desires and to their family’s needs in times of lean and plenty. Such advances could ease some of the pain that many families are experiencing today.
