How, then, have parents preserved their time with children? A common explanation is that much housework has been mechanized. We will consider this argument in chapter 5. Sufice it to say here is that, despite dramatic improvements in domestic technology, the amount of time spent on household tasks has not actually shown any corresponding dramatic decline. However, there has been a marked shift in the composition of time away from routine domestic work (cooking and cleaning) and toward child care but also shopping and odd jobs. But the total time in unpaid domestic labor of all kinds held constant over the twentieth century.
The major change has come from working women themselves, who reduce their time in unpaid labor at home as they move into the workforce. However, they do not remotely reduce their housework hour-for-hour for time spent in paid labor. And while their male partners increase their own time in housework, this is not nearly as much as working wives reduce theirs. The upshot is that rather less unpaid household labor gets done overall in the dual-earner household—but women’s total combined time in paid and unpaid household labor is substantially greater than is the typical nonemployed woman’s in domestic labor alone. Working mothers’ combined time in paid and unpaid household labor typically exceeds fathers’ by five hours a week and nonemployed mothers’ by nineteen hours a week.22 The working woman is much busier than either her male colleagues or her housewife counterpart.
Moreover, it is also primarily women who adjust their working hours in relation to the number and ages of their children. The decrease in women’s employment comes with the birth of the first child, and they continue to curtail their hours after they have children. Fathers, if anything, tend to increase hours of employment after the birth of a child. Men and women thus make diferent decisions in allocating their time, based in part on choice and in part on institutional forces and cultural pressures. These diferences have diminished in recent years, but mothers continue to adjust their schedules more than fathers do. As a result, there is still a pay penalty associated with motherhood, whereby mothers’ wages lag behind fathers’ in virtually all developed countries.23
Chapter three
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