Are American Husbands Slackers?

Sorry i just cut and pasted this story from an email, it holds truth... its not another whos better male or females its a story i thought that may interest some of us..


Are American Husbands Slackers?
By Jeffery M. Leving and Glenn Sacks (some journalists...)

In the wake of the death of feminist pioneer Betty Friedan, many women?s advocates are asserting that the revolution she began is only half complete: career opportunities have opened up for women, but these careers are being undermined and sabotaged by women?s disproportionate and unfair household obligations.

Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, recently asserted that the ?gender caste system is still alive and well in most of our households?The outside world has changed enormously for women in these past 40 years. But home life? Think about it. Who routinely unloads the dishwasher, puts away the laundry and picks up the socks in your house?...The answer, for a great many families, is the same as it was 50 years ago...[Friedan?s] description of the lives of women in the 1950s sounded just too much like the lives of women today.? As feminist professor Linda Hirshman recently noted, ?The glass ceiling begins at home.?

Careers and wage-earning have certainly increased the demands on women?s time--have American men refused to hold up their end by contributing more at home? Are American husbands slackers?

Warner, Hirshman, and other feminist critics compare the work men and women do at home but fail to properly account for their disparate obligations outside the home. Census data shows that only 40% of married women with children under 18 work full-time, and over a quarter do not hold a job outside the home.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics? 2004 Time Use Survey, men spend one and a half times as many hours working as women do, and full-time employed men still work significantly more hours than full-time employed women.

When both work outside the home and inside the home are properly considered, it is clear that men do at least as much as women. A 2002 University of Michigan Institute for Social Research survey found that women do 11 more hours of housework a week than men but men work 14 hours a week more than women. According to the BLS, men?s total time at leisure, sleeping, doing personal care activities, or socializing is a statistically meaningless 1% higher than women?s. The Families and Work Institute in New York City found that fathers now provide three-fourths as much child care as mothers do?50% more than 30 years ago.

Yet even these studies understate men?s contributions because they only count the hours devoted to a task without measuring the physical strain and/or danger associated with the task. A man doing eight hours of dangerous construction work in the 100-degree heat is credited with no more "work" than a woman who works in an air-conditioned office or who does childcare or housework in the comfort and safety of her own home (and without a supervisor breathing down her neck).

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, more than three million workers a year are treated in hospital emergency rooms for occupational injuries?the vast majority of them suffered by men. Nearly 100,000 American workers have died from job-related injuries over the past decade and a half, 95% of them men. Of the 25 most dangerous jobs listed by the U.S. Department of Labor, all of them are between 90 percent and 100 percent male.

The sacrifices made by men like Terry Helms, one of the 12 miners killed in the Sago Mine disaster last month, are unrecorded in the studies. Terry?s son Nick told the Associated Press that his father ?had endured numerous injuries in a 30-year career and hated mining because of the dangers.?

?[My father] is very selfless,? Nick said. ?[He] refused to quit because the job put food on the table?He gave his life in there so I could go to the movies.?

It is true, as Warner and Hirshman assert, that work outside the home is often more interesting than work done in the home. Yet it is also true that work done in the home?particularly time spent with one?s children when they are young?is often more satisfying than wage work.

Feminists? persistent criticism of men has combined with women?s traditional expectations of their husbands to place men in a double bind. A man may be a devoted caretaker of his children or a talented cook, but if he is unable to provide for his family, he is not respected. Yet when a man works long hours to fulfill the breadwinner role which he is still expected to perform, he is blamed for not contributing as much at home as his wife does.

Feminists are right to complain that with long work weeks, the high cost of child care, scant union protections, and inflexible workplaces, working women often face a trying juggling act. But they?re wrong to place the blame on husbands, who do their fair share and often make great sacrifices to provide for their wives and children.

Its so easy to generalise. Every household is different, but i get the jist of the report.

I do feel very sorry for men in the trend of persistent men bashing, yet they are not allowed to say a thing back about women anymore.

Freedom of speech, for the women only? I want equality not supremacy.

well said treeb, i like this report, and im all for mens rights.. unlike feminism, mens rights wants equality.

I really want to meet a femenist and ask them why??
to every thing they have done...

I will say that the men I've had in my life were never slackers, they helped around the house and we shared most chores. I do think that the work market is still very sexist. we still get paid less to do the same job.

ive got another story about that.. hang on i see if i can find it..

I didnt write this so dont shot me!!!

The Gender Pay Gap Myth...

Tuesday, April 16, 2002, is Equal Pay Day - the day on which many organizations protest wage discrimination between men and women. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median income for all women is about three-quarters that of men, although the results vary significantly among demographic groups. Feminist organizations and some politicians point to these statistics as evidence of the United States as a patriarchal society that discriminates against women. But a closer examination leads to a different conclusion.

The Good News.

When women behave in the workplace as men do, the wage gap between them is small. June O'Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, women's earnings approach 98 percent of men's. Women who hold positions and have skills and experience similar to those of men face wage disparities of less than 10 percent, and many are within a couple of points. Claims of unequal pay almost always involve comparing apples and oranges.

Lifestyle Choices

Women make different choices, and those choices affect how they work. Women often place more importance on their relationships - caring for children, parents, spouses, etc. - than on their careers. A study by the Center for Policy Alternatives and Lifetime television found that 71 percent of women prefer jobs with more flexibility and benefits than jobs with higher wages, and nearly 85 percent of women offered flexible work arrangements by their employers have taken advantage of this opportunity.

Entry and Exit from the Job Market.

Women are more likely to enter and leave the workforce to raise children, take care of elderly parents or move with their families. Working mothers are nearly twice as likely to take time off to care for their children as are working fathers in dual-earner couples. Yet time out of the workforce is an enormous obstacle to building an attractive resume and working up the corporate ladder. Women 25 years of age and over have been with their current employer 4.4 years, on average, compared to 5.0 years for men. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey reveal that women between the ages of 18 and 34 have been out of the labor force 27 percent of the time, in contrast to 11 percent for men. Women ages 45 to 54 who have recently re-entered the workforce after a five- or 10-year break are competing against men who have had 20 years of continuous experience.

Part-Time Work.

Women are also more likely to work part-time. In 2000, one-quarter of all women employees worked part-time, compared to less than 10 percent of men. Nearly 85 percent of those who worked part-time did so for non-economic reasons; e.g., to spend more time with the family or to further their education. In general, married women would prefer part-time work at a rate of 5 to 1 over married men.

While part-time work usually increases flexibility, the part-time worker loses out on promotions and pay increases. Part-time work also tends to mean lower hourly pay. Shorter labor stints and part-time work contribute to the probability of working for the minimum wage. Nearly two-thirds of minimum wage earners are women.

However, women's wages hold up quite well to men's wages when comparing specific job categories. [See Figure I.] Among adults working between one and 34 hours a week, women's earnings are 115 percent of men's. Among part-time workers who have never married, and who thus confront fewer outside factors likely to affect earnings, women earn slightly more than men. These statistics suggest that skill level, tenure and working hours - not gender - determine wages.

Occupational Choices.

Beyond work behavior, women gravitate to sectors of the economy that compensate workers at lower levels. While women hold 53 percent of all professional jobs in the United States, they hold only 28 percent of jobs in professions averaging $40,000 or more in annual compensation. For example, fewer women have chosen to enter such technical fields as computer sciences, math and science teaching, medicine, law and engineering. In 1998, women earned only 26.7 percent of computer science degrees.

Closing the Gap.

Despite all these factors, the gap between men and women's wages has been closing. Figure II illustrates that over the last 20 years women's earnings have jumped at least 12 percentage points relative to men's earnings, closing the wage differential at every level of education. A change in women's work expectations also has tended to close the gap. Until the 1970s, a minority of women expected to work after marriage. Today, almost 75 percent of young women expect to be working at age 35.

Changing work expectations are an apparent cause of women's increased focus on education, and the enrollment of women in higher education has grown much faster than that of men. Women were awarded more than 50 percent of associate's, bachelor's and master's degrees in the 1990s. Women currently earn more than 40 percent of Ph.D.s, medical and law degrees.

The narrowing of the gender wage gap approximately one percentage point a year since 1980 is particularly significant, since during the 1980s and '90s the overall wage level rose little and the wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers grew. Without enhanced skills, women's wages likely would have fallen further behind men's. However, market pressures have helped to generate corrective mechanisms, and as the costs of denying employment to women mounted, prejudices were set aside.

Conclusion.

Women's work-life patterns and their occupational preferences are significant factors in determining wages. Rather than being "funneled" into low-wage, low-prestige and part-time positions, women often choose these occupations because of the flexibility they offer. After adjusting for these factors, scholars find that the difference between men's and women's earnings is very narrow.

Those who still cite women's 76 cents for every male dollar as evidence of sexism fail to take into account the underlying role of personal choice. The "wage gap" is not so much about employers discriminating against women as about women making discriminating choices in the labor market.

Mark dont put all feminists in one basket. Most women i know simply want equality in the work place or in their home and relationship.

Its not all about emascualting men and reigning supreme. Of course there are the extremists, as there are on the other foot. Men exist who feel that a woman is very much a second class citizen.

So what im saying is, most women and men want equality in life. Its about choice at the end of the day and feminisim was about making choice available to women.

i couldn't have said it better.

your right i shouldnt, its wrong of me too do so.. the problem i over come in my mind is that the extreme of them have had free running. i'll try not to get caught up in the pigeon holeing...

They make me mad too, you know how i feel, i love men to be men and i HATE seeing hen pecked husbands made miserable by some hitler wife, or a woman making a man look small and stupid, same as i hate seeing it the other way around too.

Kinda gives your own sex a bad name, same as im sure you get enraged by wife beaters and chauvanists.

dam right and i think ive done a few topics here expressing my anger for dumb arsed men..

i really wish that women and men could just get the exact same...

but with out distroying there feminism or musculism...

It's what makes us attracted to one another though.

Maybe in a few generations we will acheive genuine equality, in my eyes this would be tolerating/accepting/loving the opposite sex for being exactly that, the opposite masculine/feminine and treating each other as such with the great respect they deserve

If your ying and yang are out of whack there is no harmony

that day i feel racism may end... except our differences and get on with our lives... thats what i say...