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At first glance, the cover of a recent New Yorker seems to depict a simple spring scene: parents celebrating the warm weather by taking their children to the park. Look closer though and you will notice that the park-going parents are not the soccer moms you might expect. Rather, they are all fathers. There is one mother present, dressed in a pink shirt, and she looks markedly out of place in the sea of khaki cargo pant-clad fathers.

Liza Mundy kicked off a May 3^rd �鶹������ý Foundation event on the future of work and family by showing the cover to the audience and announcing: we are in a new age of hands-on fathers. Mundy, a Schwartz fellow at �鶹������ý, recently published The Richer Sex in which she argues that 40 percent of working wives now out-earn their husbands and that this percentage is only going to continue to rise. Increasingly, husbands are a family’s secondary earner and they are doing more housework, more cooking, and far more childcare. In fact, a found that “in a reversal of traditional gender roles, young women now surpass young men in the importance they place on having a high-paying career”: 66% of 18-34 year-old women say that a high paying job is one of the most important things in their life or very important, as compared to 59% of men. Mundy largely credits this flip to the fact that women outnumber men on college campuses around the world and, as a result, have higher earning potential in our increasingly knowledge-based economy. 

Despite having grown up thinking that reaching absolute parity with men was the end-goal for women, Mundy has come to think that maybe the old-fashion specialization model with one primary earner and one secondary earner has its advantages. If a woman really wants to rise to the top of her field and have a family, maybe a supportive husband with a second-tier career is what she needs.

Brigid Schulte, another panelist and a Schwartz fellow at �鶹������ý working on a book on the struggle American women face in balancing work and family, has just returned from a reporting trip to Denmark and said that the New Yorker cover scene of fathers out with their children was a much more common sight there. This is partly a cultural matter, but also a matter of policy: Denmark’s Minister for Gender Equality has implemented progressive parental leave policies and encouraged fathers to take solo paternity leave. Jens Bonke, a senior researcher at the Rockwool Foundation in Copenhagen, a time use researcher Schulte spoke to, predicted that by 2033 there will be complete parity in the amount of time Danish men and women spend at work and on household chores.

That milestone is not in America’s foreseeable future. And even if it needn’t be an expressed national objective, Schulte argued that Denmark offers us invaluable lessons. American women entered the workforce in mass in the 70s and changed their lives drastically but our country’s workforce policies and definition of the “ideal worker” remain stuck in the 50s. Society still considers women to be the primary caregivers for their children and yet also expects them to work impossibly long hours and put their careers above all else.  As a result, Schulte sees American mothers as being caught in “a state of breathlessness”—forever juggling their obligations to their children with the demands of their careers.

Phil Longman, the third panelist and a senior research fellow with the �鶹������ý Foundation’s Health Policy Program, took a step back and gave the audience a sense of the broader demographic changes occurring worldwide. He pointed out that despite the common perception that the world’s population is ever expanding, a tremendous decline in birthrates and a great aging of the population is occurring throughout the world. This trend has not been as dramatic in the U.S. as it has been in other places, like Japan or Western Europe, but it is occurring nonetheless. Last year, the percentage of Americans who were married reached an all-time low.

While they all approached the issues differently, the panelists agreed that theNew Yorker cover speaks to the real workforce and family changes that are occurring in the U.S. However, we have not yet reached complete gender equality or the ideal workplace policies—there is much more still to be done for working parents in the U.S.

–Caroline Esser

Participants

Featured Speakers

Schwartz Fellow, �鶹������ý Foundation
Author, The Richer Sex (and recent TIME Magazine cover story)

Schwartz Fellow, �鶹������ý Foundation
Author, Overwhelmed

Phil Longman
Senior Research Fellow
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Author, The Empty Nest                                                                                                                                                        

Director, Early Education Initiative
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Author, Screen Time

Moderator

Director, Workforce and Family Program
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