New Majority of U.S. Moms Prefer Part-Time Work
An article on the front page of the Washington Post this week (www.washingtonpost.com) reports recent findings by the Pew Research Center (www.pewresearch.org) that U.S. mothers would ideally prefer a part-time working environment.
The study attributes changing attitudes about the workforce to those in "Generation X" reaching motherhood and rejecting full time careers during these years. Apparently more time is spent by the current crop of moms than the Boomers in staying home actively participating in child rearing.
The study compared 1997 data to data today, evaluating the last decade of motherhood trends. According to the Pew Research:
"Among working mothers with minor children (ages 17 and under), just one-in-five (21%) say full-time work is the ideal situation for them, down from the 32% who said this back in 1997, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Fully six-in-ten (up from 48% in 1997) of today's working mothers say part-time work would be their ideal, and another one-in-five (19%) say she would prefer not working at all outside the home."
Could it be that having the ability to have it all has enabled young mothers to simply choose not to? Feminists of the 1970s believed in women staying active in full time careers in the workforce, raising a generation of women who felt they not only must be successful in raising children, but also in accomplishing impressive career strides simultaneously.
Possibly this trend is a balancing of the pendulum-- women's way of collective saying they want neither the full time demands of a successful career nor the full time at-home demands of raising children, but rather that they would prefer a compromise.
Hopefully businesses, from small companies to huge corporations will hear this message loud and clear: part-time work allows women to raise children and make money without sacrificing one for the other. Part-time work in and of itself presents challenges in that women may feel they are never participating fully in either world, but this seems preferable to participating not at all in one or the other world of work and home.
The Pew study reports:
"The mothers in the Pew survey who were most inclined to endorse their current situation as representing their ideal are those who work part-time. Among this group, fully eight-in-ten says that part-time work is their preferred option.... A majority of working mothers (52%) say that a mother working part-time is ideal for children. Three-in-ten say a mother who doesn't work outside the home would be ideal for children and about one-in-ten (11%) say that a full-time working mother is ideal for children."
This study adds truly fascinating data to the ever-present working vs. staying home debate for women. Hopefully those in a position to accommodate this reasonable compromise will do so.
For more information see the complete study at www.pewresearch.org.
