Levi Johnston Is an Insult to Working-Class Men

Slate: Levi Johnston Is an Insult to Working-Class Men (HT: Travis Greene)

… But it's not true that working-class men are stuck in a patriarchal past that middle- and upper-class men have overcome. Among working-class men who do marry, their behavior as husbands and fathers is surprisingly enlightened, according to many recent surveys. Blue-collar couples are less likely than educated professional ones to endorse the abstract idea of men and women going against gender stereotype and sharing household activities. But overall, working-class husbands actually wind up doing more housework than middle- and upper-class men. Partly this is because there is more work to be done—for men and women alike. Sociologist Scott Coltrane reminds us how much effort it takes to shop, cook, and clean when one must take the bus to hunt for the best deals at grocery stores and bargain outlets, use the laundromat rather than one's own washer, and maintain an old house or apartment without being able to hire other working class and immigrant women to do the work for you. Coltrane's own research with working-class white men and Latino fathers revealed that they did the shopping and transported their kids as often, if not more often, than their middle-class counterparts, and did just as much routine cooking and cleaning.

College-educated men in marriages where both spouses work standard shifts do more child care, on average, than their low-income counterparts. But working-class men and women are far more likely to schedule separate work shifts so that each can watch the child. As a result, a higher proportion of working-class fathers are the primary caretakers while their wives are at work.

In the 1960s and 1970s, highly-educated men whose wives were employed did much more housework than their less-educated counterparts. But that has changed over time. In a forthcoming paper, Oxford researcher Oriel Sullivan finds that during the 1980s and 1990s, husbands who did not graduate from high school and who were married to working women began to catch up. Today they equal or even exceed the housework contributions of their counterparts with higher levels of education. …

Also, this observation:

Finally, let's not forget that high-income men bring their own set of problems to marriage. Many seem especially vulnerable to what researchers Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling call the "career mystique," the idea that a successful work-life requires them to commit all their time and energy to the job and to delegate caretaking responsibilities to someone else. A recent study by Joan Williams and Heather Boushey  found that 38 percent of high-earning professional men and almost one-quarter of middle-income men work more than 50 hours a week.

Two economic observations here. First, two men need to get the kids to a soccer game. One man can earn an extra $20 for another hour worked, and the other can earn $150 for another. At some point, it becomes highly advantageous from a purely economic point of view to, if need be, hire someone to do many of your daily tasks. And the problem is, because you can earn so much more with an extra hour of work, you are motivated to work longer hours, which leads to advancement and higher salaries, making it even more costly not to work.

While a career is something to be incorporated into a life mix for many women, I think many men still see their lives as a career or nothing. In psychic terms and social acceptance terms, it is still far easier for women to drop out of the job market to raise children or do other pursuits. In aggregate, men are still more driven by work than women.

A second observation is that the average man in the workforce works about 10% more hours than the average woman. The much-bemoaned aggregate gender pay equity decreases significantly when average work hours are factored in.