Many stats in the beginning of the news story caught my attention (taken directly from article referenced above):
- Until 1964, a woman could legally be fired when she got married. Even a woman with a college degree likely made less than a man with a high-school diploma.
[My thought on this...holy cow, really? We sure have come a long way for womens' rights.]
- For the first time ever among those age 44 and younger —-more women than men have college degrees.
[That's right girls--way to go!]
- "We found that increasingly, women are more likely to marry husbands who have lower education levels than they do, and lower income levels than they do," says D'Vera Cohn of the Pew Research Center. From 1970 to 2007, husbands whose wives earned more than they did jumped from 4 percent to 22 percent.
[Anectodally I know of three women at work who make more than their husbands, and all three have more formal education than their husbands. ]
- Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History. Coontz says that in a 1967 poll, two-thirds of women said they'd consider marrying a man they did not love if he had good earnings potential.
"Now, women have a completely different point of view," Coontz says. "They say overwhelmingly — 87 percent — that it's more important to have a man who can communicate well, who can be intimate and who will share the housework than to have someone who makes more money than you do."
As it has become more and more difficult for families to live on a single-earner income, this makes sense to me. [The discussions of WHY this is, and the fact that many over-spend and probably could live within the means of one earner if they lived on a budget is a topic for another blog.] As a working woman, I understand the importance of a husband who is willing to cross traditional gender roles when it comes to housework, who is as involed in raising our son as I am, and who is loving and caring and can communicate with me. With both of us working full-time, we are both spread too thin to try and take on many of those traditional roles.
While I feel this is not the most optimal situation for our family (both of us working), based on my own tiredness and stress levels alone, there are some positive things that have come from it. For instance, Nathan makes a huge effort to spend time with Cooper, just the two of them, every day as I commute to/from work. I think Cooper has bonded with his father much more than your average baby since he has had much more time with him.
In addition, Nathan and I have always been a great team, not conforming to many traditional marriage roles. Many in my generation seem to be the same way in their marriages, and I think those 1950s stereotypes are somewhat a thing of the past--at least in homes where husband and wife are both formally educated. The more the education gap/lower education, it seems that the roles fall back into more of a split. I'm not talking about out of home vs. in-home work, I'm talking about household chores, child care, etc., which now that I think about it, probably does stem from the fact that the lesser educated person usually stays home with the kids and does more of the household duties....hmmmmm...
Well, this is a bit of a stream of consciousness as I write without editing since my lunch break is nearly over. Hope this hasn't been too choppy to understand what I'm trying to say.
One more point and then I gotta get back to work. Another stat in the news story said that women still only earn 77% of what their equal counterparts make in the workplace. It makes me a little upset to know that a man in my same position probably makes nearly 25% more than I do. I am not a big womens' libber or anything, at least not as far as saying that women should be given EXTRA rights or EXTRA opportunities when compared to our male counterparts, but I DO believe in equality. If I am doing the same job, with the same skill set, and doing just as well, I should be paid the same. However, I do understand the difficulty from an employer's perspective of having your female employees constantly come/go due to maternity leave and child care. But as more and more companies start offering paternity leave, and as men share in child care more and more, I hope th gap in our wages begins to close a bit more.
As I reflected on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. yesterday, the things he stood for, the movement he started, I also reflected on my own human rights, some of them being related to being female, and I am glad to know that things have improved greatly, but I think we still have a ways to go...
That's MY opinion anyway. And since this is MY blog, well that's all you get. :)
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