Men still put work before family

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Washington: A new study has questioned the idea that traditional gender roles between husbands and wives have remained the same in this modern era also.

The research, conducted by UC Sociology Professor David Maume, finds that in the case of urgent child care, women are more likely to leave their jobs to attend to their children.

Maume says conventional wisdom suggests that over the generations, men are getting more involved in family life as women are becoming more career oriented. But, he says this study suggests that men’s commitment to work remains a priority over family duties.

Maume analyzed data from the 1997 and 2002 editions of The National Study of the Changing Workforce. Men and women in dual-income families were asked which parent was more likely to leave work if a parent needed to take care of a child due to illness or other urgent child-care events.

Maume says that his findings hinted to a large gender disparity in providing urgent child care, with 77.7 per cent of women taking time off from work and 26.5 per cent of men reporting that they attend to child-care needs.

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The study inserted control factors for the number of dependent children, having a preschool child, education-level, work hours reported, employment as a professional or manager, annual income and spouse’s annual income. They also took the years they worked with their employer and their expected chances of moving up in the organization.

“Looking first at the effects of the controls, then the job-related factors and then the demographic and familial predictors, the pattern of results increasingly suggests that urgent child care is viewed as a parenting problem and that families remain persistently traditional in solving this problem,” Maume states in the paper.

He adds that the gender differences in providing emergency child care exist despite the ideology of traditional families versus contemporary families that support equally sharing the housework, child-care and other family/work issues. “There has been almost no change in men’s priorities. Men put work first, and women adapt their work around the family, including both their children’s and husband’s work schedules,” Maume says.

The study suggests more research into how dual-working couples negotiate their responsibilities as parents and providers. Maume also suggests that since more men are reporting an equal share in family responsibilities compared with those a generation ago, future research should examine how men are actually adjusting their work/family prioritiy.