Do mums want to work outside the home?

80 per cent of American mothers consider staying at home or working only part-time as ideal.

Nicole M. King | May 10 2016 | comment

The News Story - 2016’s best & worst states for working moms

With Mother’s Day just past, WalletHub has released this year’s analysis of the best and worst states for working moms.

To conduct the study, analysts compared the states and the District of Columbia in three key areas: 1) child care, measured by such factors as day-care quality, cost of child care, and availability of pediatric services; 2) professional opportunities, which took into account the “gender pay gap,” female unemployment rate, ratio of male to female executives, etc.; and 3) work-life balance, as indicated by parental leave policy, length of the average woman’s work week, and women’s average commute time.

The results? Vermont, Minnesota, and Connecticut ranked the top three states, and South Carolina, Alabama, and Nevada brought up the bottom of the list. WalletHub also states that “blue states are more friendly to working moms.” The story concludes that “It’s clear that something must be done in order to increase workplace gender equality and ease the burden on working parents, but there is significant debate about what that ‘something’ should be.”

But polls reveal that what moms really want might be to exit the workplace altogether.

The New Research - Mothers know best

While the media continues to glamorize the minority of mothers with careers, moms themselves aren’t fooled. Judging from a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, American mothers have few illusions that working full-time outside the home is all that it is cracked up to be. In fact, American mothers find outside careers even less appealing than they did in 1997, when the labor force participation rate of women (not just mothers) had reached an all-time high.

Based on telephone interviews conducted during the winter of 2007 with a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 adults, the Pew study found that less than one of every five mothers with children under 18 (19 percent) claim that full-time work outside the home is ideal for them, whereas 80 percent consider staying at home or working only part-time as ideal. Even mothers who work full-time outside the home share this basic orientation, as 70 percent stated that not working at all or working only part-time would be ideal. Compared to Pew’s 1997 study, where 29 percent of all mothers considered full-time employment as the ideal and 71 percent considered staying at home or working only part-time as ideal, the 2007 survey suggests an attitudinal shift among American mothers.

As might be expected, married mothers were more likely, relative to unwed mothers, to consider no or part-time employment as the ideal in 1997 and 2007. Yet consistent with the shifts since 1997, even unmarried mothers were less likely to prefer full-time work in 2007 (26 percent) than in 1997 (49 percent). Moreover, stay-at-home moms are increasingly affirming their status, believing that “not working at all” is best (39 percent in 1997; 48 percent in 2007). Likewise, the percentage of mothers with preschool children that claim that full-time work is ideal dropped from 31 percent in 1997 to 16 percent in 2007.

While the study does not address why employment patterns among mothers do not match their stated preferences, these findings do confirm that American moms know, contrary to feminist ideology, that motherhood cannot be reduced to a part-time hobby that fits around a full-time career.

(Source: Bryce J. Christensen and Robert W. Patterson, New Research, The Family in America 23.3 [Fall 2009]. Study: “From 1997 to 2007: Fewer Mothers Prefer Full-Time Work,” Pew Research Center, A Social and Demographic Trends Report, July 12, 2007.)

This article has been republished with permission from The Family in America, a publication of The Howard Center. The Howard Center is a MercatorNet partner site.

- See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/do-mums-want-to-work-outside-the-home/18032#sthash.rjEMFpCT.dpuf

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