Let's be honest about the "second shift"

What does it mean to sacrifice for your family, and does mom or dad do more?

Jun 19, 2024

People talk about the much more significant tradeoff women face between having a family and optimizing for their career relative to men. This is obviously true in a few ways, most notably because (leaving surrogacy and the potential for artificial wombs aside) women bear the physical burden of pregnancy and childbirth alone. But beyond the much greater physical commitment, they also tend to do the bulk of the childcare and household tasks, even when both people work full time outside of the home (this is the so-called “second shift”).

But while it’s true that women do more household and childcare work, data from the American Time Use Survey indicates that the total amount of time spent working (which includes time spent on paid work, household tasks and childcare) is nearly identical for men and women, with men actually working slightly more than women. Below is the average time spent working for all adults in 2021-2022 by age of youngest child in the household:

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, American Time Use Survey, "Table 8A. Time spent in primary activities and the percent of the civilian population engaging in each activity, averages per day by sex, 2021 and 2022 annual averages." Excel file with charts available here.

And if we look at the average data from 2015-2019 for married parents who both work full time, men still work slightly more in total even though women do significantly more household work and childcare:

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, American Time Use Survey, "Table A-7A. Time spent in primary activities by married mothers and fathers by employment status of self and spouse, average for the combined years 2015-19, own household child under age 18," available here. Excel file with charts available here.

Despite working more hours, men tend to find a few extra hours a week for leisure while women tend to spend more time on personal care:

The only group for which men had less leisure time than women was married parents where the mother is not employed and the father is employed full time:

Overall, it seems that both the data and my anecdotal experience suggest that in functional, two-parent, hetero families both the father and mother contribute more or less equally in terms of time worked. It’s just that the father’s contributions are on average more tilted to bringing in money through external work while the mother’s contributions are on average more tilted to household tasks and childcare.

If we imagine that both mothers and fathers have exactly the same average preferences around the types of work they do, then this differential outcome would imply that someone is typically getting the raw end of the deal. But it seems much more likely that this distribution of working time is driven primarily by the differential desires of the average mother and father. Of course, there might also be pragmatic reasons related to differential earning power or abilities which lead one parent to focus more on childcare while the other focuses on paid work, but so long as both parents earn more for their time than childcare costs per hour this shouldn’t really determine how mothers choose to use their time (at least if they strictly prefer time spent at work to time spent on childcare).

If you’re a woman who has big career aspirations but also wants to have a family, childcare and household expectations can be negotiated with your partner ahead of time. The norms that the typical couple follows have minimal bearing for you because you probably aren’t typical, and the type of man you’ll end up with likely won’t be typical either. The men who are super into girl bosses don’t tend to be the same men who want a trad wife. And if you’re a high earning woman, chances are you’ll end up with a high earning man as well, in which case you two can choose to outsource much of the childcare and housework and split the rest roughly equally. But there’s very little reason to fear that, as a woman, you’ll have to make trade-offs which men don’t have to make unless you want to. And the reality is, a lot of women do want to.

Personally, I wouldn’t be interested in a house husband who would take on the primary role with respect to childcare, allowing me to max out my career… and I don’t think many other women are either (although some are very interested of course!). In fact, the demand for such a husband is likely so low that if you want one I’d bet you can find him! But keep in mind, if you’re a girl boss who would prefer a house husband, you should probably avoid dating high status, ambitious men. My ex didn’t want kids so he suggested that, as a compromise, we’d have one baby, and that he’d be the primary caretaker while I would keep working. Why would that be a compromise? Because, like many people, he was working for money not for passion and he thought staying home with a kid and having a flexible schedule while I made money for the family was overall more appealing than working full time at his corporate job. This seemed like a terrible deal for me! Women sometimes imply that an intelligent stay at home mom has given something up, something her husband didn’t have to give, but I’d encourage them to consider whether they’d actually like to take the father’s side of such an arrangement.

The framing that only women face a unique trade off or that women do far more for their family seems fundamentally confused to me since, for the vast majority of people, a career is not an end in itself but something that serves their and their family’s material needs. It’s important to remind ourselves that many people actively hate their job while the majority simply tolerate it. They do it, of course, because they want (or need) the money. For high income or high prestige jobs there’s also the additional status competition which helps to motivate continual striving, but engaging in pure status competitions hardly seem enviable to me, and if you’re a woman in such an industry you can probably afford a lot of childcare anyways. Again, the reason many women drop out of highly competitive career paths to focus on their family is likely a reflection of their preferences and the fact that they tend to end up with high income men who can financially support such preferences.

I think the feelings of resentment, (or, in the case of childless women like me who are contemplating starting a family, the fear of potential future resentment) come less from a sense that the burden of total work will fall unfairly on the mother, but from a frustration with how status is accorded to individuals within the family. Since mothers tend to do more of the childcare and household tasks, a larger portion of their efforts are spent on things that benefit everyone in the family. Fathers who do relatively more financially rewarded external work typically share the financial gains equally with the whole family but keep the associated status mostly for themselves. Perhaps mothers fear they won’t receive sufficient status for raising their kids into well-adjusted adults (or that too much credit for this will go to their husband), or that they won’t be recognized for the ways in which they’ve made it easier for their husband to succeed at work.

I think this concern is partly founded - I once knew a couple where the husband was the main breadwinner and where he frequently made it clear that he saw his income as “his money” rather than family money. Ideally when there’s a single breadwinner, they should treat the contributions of both partners as equally valuable, at least when the kids are young, but I acknowledge that there are cases where the breadwinner (or homemaker) is doing a lot more actual work than the homemaker (or breadwinner) is and where feigning equality in contributions might not make sense. That said, I also think people generally do give mothers more credit (and blame!) for how the kids turn out even if her contributions to supporting her husband's career are undervalued.

Women might also worry about losing relative power over time since giving up their career to take care of the kids and home can significantly reduce their future earning power (which might be a problem in the event of divorce). If you’re worried about that, you should make sure your partner views your planned unpaid contributions as valuable enough that he won’t see future alimony (should it come to that) as unfair. In addition, I think a woman imagining such a future scenario likely underweights the relative power advantage that comes from being closer to and having better access to the children, something men’s rights activists always point out.

But again, very few women have to stay home or have to be the primary caregiver, so don’t do it if you don’t want to. You really can be a mom who works a lot if that’s the lifestyle you want. But if you do want to focus on your kids when they’re young, the expected benefits of getting to do that likely more than makes up for these risks! Much of this is about who you marry and how aligned you are with him – but there’s no need to stress yourself out by imagining how bad it would be to have kids with some other woman’s husband who doesn’t share your values or goals and you would never have been romantically interested in and who probably would never have been interested in you either.

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