Ripple Effects
May 4, 2011
I just came across The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything By Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, edited by Heather Boushey and Ann O’Leary | October 16, 2009, that reports a statistic that both surprised me and confirmed my growing suspicions:
Now for the first time in our nation’s history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families.
I am a wife and a mother and a co-earner in our family. I just re-entered the workforce a few months ago after the birth of our third little girl, now eight months old. I am proud to be a working mother and co-contributor to our household income, therefore, as you might imagine, this subject is near and dear to my heart.
The report contains several“reflective essays” and data points from multiple contributors on how the growing number of women in the workforce, or in some cases, women re-entering the workforce has a ripple effect on everything – from a macrosystem’s perspective to a microsystem’s perspective.
The report is broken into digestible, thought-provoking essays that touch on specific issues facing American families in this “new reality” and calls for a need for new policies to address this “new reality”.
Here are a few excerpts from the Executive Summary:
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“…men and women are indeed negotiating everything—from the daily struggle over whether the husband or wife will drop off their child at school in the morning to major life decisions about whether a family will relocate to further one spouse’s career even if it hampers the other’s”.
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“…institutions have failed to catch up with this reality….there is still a long way to go”.
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“Up until now, government policymakers largely focused on supporting women’s entry into a male-oriented workforce on a par with men…who presumably had no family caregiving responsibilities. Too many workers—especially women and low wage workers—today cannot work in the way traditional breadwinners once worked with a steady job and lifelong marriage with a wife at home”.
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“Child and parental care, home maintenance, food production, and cleaning—once done by unpaid wives of male breadwinners…is now the work of immigrant women…hardworking immigrant women have helped make possible other women’s mass entry into the workforce”.
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“…women’s outstanding performance in educational institutions, especially higher educational and professional schools, demands that employers create, workplaces that attract, retain, develop and exploit (in the best sense of the word) this tremendous resource”.
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“…mainstream media outlets often suggest that women have “made it”…yet in real life there are far too few women among the highest ranks of the professions and millions of everyday women struggle to make ends meet and juggle work and family”.
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“…most men have chosen the path toward acceptance of greater gender equality and often relish the extra earnings women bring into the family—but that some groups of men continue to struggle with the idea of widespread employment of women and mothers as it has made them question their very notion of masculinity”.
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“…most stable, high-quality marriages are those where men and women share both paid work and domestic work. This is a shift from generations ago when the most stable marriages were those where husbands specialized in paid work and wives did all the domestic work.
