JUDITH WARNER: The Full-Time Blues

[kevinmc]

The news from the Pew Research Center this month — that 60 percent of working mothers say they’d prefer to work part time — was barely out before it was sucked up into the fetid air of the mommy wars, with all the usual talk on “opting out” and guilting out, and the usual suspects lining up to slug it out on morning talk TV.

But the conversation we should be having these days really isn’t one about What Mothers Want. (This has been known for years; surveys dating back to the early 1990s have shown that up to 80 percent of mothers — working and at-home alike — consistently say they wish they could work part time.) The interesting question is, rather, why they’re not getting it.

Only 24 percent of working mothers now work part time. The reason so few do isn’t complicated: most women can’t afford to. Part-time work doesn’t pay.

Women on a reduced schedule earn almost 18 percent less than their full-time female peers with equivalent jobs and education levels, according to research by Janet Gornick, a professor of sociology and political science at City University of New York, and the labor economist Elena Bardasi. Part-time jobs rarely come with benefits. They tend to be clustered in low-paying fields like the retail and service industries. And in better-paid professions, a reduced work schedule very often can mean cutting down from 50-plus hours a week to 40-odd — hardly a “privilege” worth paying for with a big pay cut..........

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/07/judith-warner-full-time-blues.html


Judith Warner is the author of “Perfect Madness” and a contributing columnist for TimesSelect. She is a guest Op-Ed columnist.

Bob Herbert is off today.