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| Couples Scaling Back on Workplace Commitments for Family Reasons | |
| WASHINGTON, Dec 3,
1999 (Reuters) - Nearly three-fourths of
middle-income working couples surveyed by Cornell
University "resist the demands of a greedy
workplace" by scaling back work commitments
for the sake of their families and to have more
time off. Twice as many women as men polled in a study of 117 families in upstate New York reported putting limits on their work commitments, according to researchers at Cornell University. The result was a "neotraditional" arrangement with the husband's career being the primary one, while the wife worked in a "job," said Cornell sociologists Penny Becker and Phyllis Moen of the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute. They said this trend of "scaling back" had become institutionalized as a private, family-level response among dual-earner professional and managerial couples. Most of these families did not see the time crunch as a public issue and were not working to change the way work and work hours are structured, they found. "The fact that this is strictly a family affair suits business interests because it places the costs of adapting to social change on families instead of employers," Becker said. About 40 percent of the professional couples studied, ranging in age from 21 to 67 years old, said they coped with often conflicting family and work responsibilities by having one spouse -- the man in two-thirds of the cases -- work in a career, while the other partner had a non-career oriented "job." Two-thirds of the couples studied had children. The researchers found that women put the brakes on their careers after their first child, regardless of their career status, men tended to scale back only after they had achieved an "acceptable level of flexibility and autonomy in their careers." But they noted that the trend still represented some progress from the 1970s, while husbands rarely scaled back their careers at all to help out with family responsibilities. Interviews with the families were done in 1997 and 1998. The research was published in the November issue of the Journal of Marriage and the Family, and was released in Washington on Thursday. Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. |
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