Why are women more likely to reduce working hours to parent than men?

[sunshine75]

That's about it really.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I have lots of friends with kids ranging from babies to uni age. Most are married/cohabiting and both have good qualifications.

However, I would say that in 90% of cases it is the woman who gives up work/goes part time when kids come along. Many never return to full-time work (even when the kids go to school/grow up) and the unwritten rule seems to be that they take on the majority share of housework/washing/shopping etc. Even the wealthy couples who have a cleaner/gardener/nanny, it is still the woman who has given up work and sorts out putting the washing away, organising the hired help etc.

I'm feeling a bit 'ranty feminist' this evening and thinking to myself -it's fucking 2017 so why is this till the norm.

Disclaimer - my dh and I both work full time and he more than does his share of household shite and ferrying kids around. However, even in this case it's me who has the overview of what is happening and organises most things. Will it ever change?

In most cases around me it's because the mother has wanted to be at home with kids more and the fathers usually have better earning potential at that stage for whatever reason. I'm sure lots of fathers would prefer to have more choice in the matter but perhaps they don't feel as strongly about it as the mothers.

Want to be **

Believeitornot
I stand with you on that point too. I do care more than my husband and I would hate to be away from my daughter more. Before I had her we'd actually planned on him going part time and me going full time because I hated my job less than he did his. But once I'd spent the first few months with her I couldn't face going back full time. And we were lucky enough that we both earn roughly the same, and neither of us are particularly ambitious so it wasn't a huge deal.

Thinking about most of my couple friends and in 3 out of 4 partnerships the wife is the higher earner. Only two have children though and both partners work full time.

Amongst my friends it's because the woman has wanted to.

I went PT initially after mat leave as we didn’t want to send DS to childcare FT - and my career had already been compromised by 1.5 years pregnancy / mat leave. I hated working PT but when I made it clear to DP that I needed to go back FT, he stepped in and is now the PT worker.

It’s the obvious next step for the person who has been on parental leave to transfer to the PT work role.

@SonicBoomBoom my dh was plenty involved in night wakings etc. For which I was grateful.

But he doesn’t understand their emotional needs in quite the same way. And he just thinks in practical terms.

@Unihorn I’m glad it’s not just me!

My salary was higher than my DH's but I decided not to return to that job after maternity leave. The various reasons were:

• my job paid well but it gave me very little satisfaction.
• We were financially ok without me returning to work.
• I enjoyed being with my baby. Time with her was of greater priority to me than working for someone else.
• I prioritised quality of family life over high earnings.

I now work on a self employed basis and get to spend time with my children whilst earning an ok amount too.
I think there is a lot to be said in the phrase "no one ever lies on their death bed and wishes they'd spent more time at work".

In our case, we both work part time, but DH works 4 days, I work 1.

DH earns over twice what I do per hour - life would be tighter if we inverted the arrangement.

DH enjoys his job more.

DH works in a field which is predominantly male. He has fought to drop to 4 days a week (he's been part time for over a decade). In each of 3 jobs, he's been the only one in his role that's been part time - some of the support staff (more typically female) are part time, but not those in his team. A friend in a similar role in a different company was turned down for a 4 day week - had it gone to tribunal, I don't think it could possibly have been defended, but said friend needs a job. Neither DH nor the friend have management responsibilities.

DH has turned down jobs that want him full time. He has refused promotions/pay rises to stay part time. He ensures that being part time is in his initial contract, so it's constructive dismissal if the company try to force him full time. He is good at his job in a field where there is demand, so he's applying for jobs from a position of strength. But he's had to be really determined and proactive to do it. Any inertia from him on this, and he'd be full time - how many people (ok, men) are willing to do this?

My experience? Because they want to.

I went PT because DS had a significant delay and I wanted to spend the time getting him the help he needed. I'm happy I worked those reduced hours but I went back to FT as soon as I could. I hated being PT.

DH earns a lot more than me. He has a decade more experience than me and is in a senior management role. He has flexibility in his schedule because he is senior enough that he can work on his phone and he is the one dictating the schedule.

Some of my friends at home see being a SAHM as a status symbol. If you are a SAHM with a cleaner it's an even bigger status symbol. If you are a SAHM with a nanny and a cleaner I think their heads would explode! These are women who have a 'good' education and left careers that would have paid well if they had remained working. Personally I think they are rather silly and have left themselves completely exposed.

Other friends at home don't earn enough to pay for two DC in childcare. Their parents take the DC two days a week and they earn enough for one day a week of nursery. They don't earn enough after taxes to pay for 3 days a week of nursery. I really feel for my friends in this position.

My DH has more flexible working hours than me so if anyone reduced it would be me because teaching is the least flexible to shift around changing commitments.

He is also open to taking 50% of my maternity leave too though (when we finally get a BFP!)

In our case I was the primary earner not DH, we are both teachers but I have been teaching for longer, have a better established career etc. so it would logically make sense for my DH to work part time when my maternity leave is over. We have however decided that I will return part time, reducing my ours by about half, because I do not want to work full time.

It may be because I am with my LO all of the time currently on mat leave so don't want to be away from him too long. It may be that I have been socially conditioned to think like this. Either way it's a conscious decision we have made and for us has nothing to do with who earns the money.

They don't go part time at my work they just do less hours for the same full time salary. The men as well as women do this where I work.

I think a lot of it is social grooming. There's also a perception and belief that the money your employer pays you for maternity leave, to recover from birth and look after your child, is 1950s Housewife Leave and you must assume all the lifework and housework as well as childcare because 'Well, you're at home.' And those who have procreated with men who adhere to this belief the funny thing is when the man is actually left in charge of his own children, FA in the house gets done.

I think it's because the way girls are brought up in our society, they learn to be nurturing and emotionally tuned into others. Boys less so.
So when they become parents themselves, women have been subtly trained to take emotional responsibility for the family. Men less so. I think this is the one of the reasons that women feel like they should be the ones staying at home to look after the kids...
IMO this imbalance is much more difficult to address than that of housework pay gap etc, because it's much less tangible and easily measured.
My husband does more than his share of the housework, yet I definitely take up the emotional slack. I see this all the time with my friends and peers.

Polar it's really interesting what you have said about socialisation factors, I've never really thought about it before - in my family both my parents worked full time and my expectation has always been that I would do the same. Interestingly, even my maternal grandmother always worked full time, despite having 3 children, at a time when it really wasn't the norm for women to do so. I also went to a girls school where the expectation was that girls would have a career and could achieve anything they wanted with hard work (possibly the go-getter ideas that have traditionally been aimed at men?).

Otoh, DH's parents had more "traditional" roles while he was growing up - his DF worked full time and his DM didn't work until the children were at school, then worked part time, then once they were at secondary school went full time.

The socialisation thing is interesting. Both my parents worked FT, my DM sometimes worked 6 days a week, though at times wfh and working late so that she was around in the early evening for us. However she was very clear that she didn’t want me to have to do the same, I think she felt that she missed quite a bit of our childhood. Her expectations were that I would continue to work at least PT as I would have gone crazy as a SAHM (just as she would have). My MIL was a SAHM when DH was young and I think she found that pretty miserable. But my PIL genuinely asked if I was going to go back to work - they didn’t see it as a done deal.

Now that I have DDs I think it’s important for them to see me working as I would like them to work if they become mothers, both for their sanity (if they are like me) and because maintaining a career protects against being left high and dry by a man.

I think it’s totally what society expects. We both work pt but my husband does more school runs than me. I still get all he phone calls from school.
We also get asked about it all the time. People I don’t know well get the answer that I earn way more than him so it made financial sense. People I know better I explain I married a non fuckwit who is quite keen to spend time with his children.

I’m not sure society will ever catch up but hopefully my situation will be less ‘weird’ in the future.

I think socialisation definitely has a huge impact here. I'm aware that I stayed in a lower-paying, flexible job (public sector) even before we started TTC because I could see that it would be family-friendly. I dropped to four days a week when I went back after maternity leave, and while on maternity leave I only met two other mothers who were going to do four days when they went back to work - three was the norm, and there were more women who weren't returning to work than I expected. I have had a couple of comments about it being practically full-time (from other mums).

My DH (also working in the public sector) does compressed hours so has one day at home each fortnight, and I have a couple of male colleagues who do the same, but it's still rare.

DH took shared parental leave, so I went back to work after seven months and he had two months at home with our daughter. This was shortly after the scheme was introduced and no-one else I met on maternity leave was doing it - the usual comments were that they couldn't afford it (higher-earning partners) or they didn't want to give up time with their baby (which I found a bit depressing - didn't they think their husbands deserved time with the baby too?).

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the previous poster who said their husband didn't like spending long periods of time on his own with their children, but it would probably change when they got older. Can you imagine a women saying that and everyone agreeing that was normal?

In our case, I would say it's because it made more financial sense and I'm a control freak and I want to. Though to be fair, when my dd was little, it was because my husband's income was based on how much he worked (he runs his own business, fewer hours means fewer clients which is less money), whereas mine was based on a specific project. I got paid the same whether I worked 40 hours a week or 20 hours. The only difference was that the more I worked more hours per week the project would have finished sooner and I could have moved on to the next one, but I wouldn't have made more money. In terms of childcare costs, it didn't make sense for me to work more as it was no financial benefit to us. But since our daughter was about 3 and I went back to work full-tme (different job, pay related to hours worked), my husband actually has done more than me. He did the school run 3 days a week, plus all the washing, cooking, cleaning on those days while I worked. I did the same on the other days (he worked longer). I do more of the mental labour around the house (remembering things, keeping track of the diary, meal planning), but that's only because he's hopeless at that. He does the washing up every morning and evening, puts clothes away, takes the bins out, does the hoovering, does the school run 3 mornings a week (though I do the others and the pick ups most days), cooks dinner at least one night a week, mows the lawn, household repairs, etc. We both do the food shopping. So housework is shared fairly evenly in terms of work, but I tend to be the control freak so I manage it all.

Our 2nd is due in a few months. I will take off, but it's because I get maternity allowance. I don't think he can get the same. He doesn't get statutory paternity pay as he's self employed, so taking time off with baby is just that, unpaid leave. It's fine for a few weeks, which is what he takes off, but it seems silly for him to take off and stay at home when he wouldn't be getting any maternity pay. Whereas I at least qualify for maternity allowance for 9 months. After that, I'll go back to work part-time, but mostly because I want to. My work involves a long commute (2-3 hours) and lots of travel, which I don't want to do with a baby. So it's sensible (and preserves my sanity) for me to work part-time for a bit and cut my travel, than for him to turn away business. But we have a pretty egalitarian and progressive household.

I suspect in most cases it is just whats socially acceptable and also because traditionally women earn less, so financially it's better for them to cut their hours. I don't think it has to be a big feminist issue though (social stereotypes and unfair labour practices aside). It's not like working yourself to death in long hours and missing out on family life isn't liberating. I'd much rather have a good work life balance and do a bit of both and I think it's personally beneficial for me that it's more socially acceptable for women to have that. I actually feel a bit sorry for my husband that he doesn't have the opportunity, given our finances, to take more time off for family.

For me it was hormones. I fully expected, pre-baby, to go back full time after a year of maternity leave. I had zero thoughts of going part time, DH and I hadn’t even discussed it. 3 month’s post-birth I was sobbing at the thought and starting to think about applying for a reduction in hours. I went a bit mad after a year at home and definitely needed to get back to work but I was still calculating how many hours DS would spend with the childminder versus with me, subtracting naps and so on to be sure he’d see me more.
I didn’t even like babies before I gave birth so this was unexpected.

noble I was the same, the least maternal person ever. People were making jokes up until the birth about whether I knew I'd have to hug the baby when she came. I ended up going back part time because I couldn't bring myself to leave her in the end and totally shocked myself. I'm still not particularly maternal however.

I don't think you can put it purely down to society. I think on a basic level it is biological and the sociological reasons have evolved from there. I don't think you could ever change the "normal" pattern of maternity/paternity for that reason.

Why do I? Because I want to.

It's not strictly true to say I reduced my hours, I did four days a week before having Dc but then used the fifth day to do other projects (writing etc, but often paid work).

Personally I see the value of spending time with my children. And my identity, idea of self and success is much less wrapped in my job than DH. DH does see the value of spending time with them, but feels much more conflicted with work. He did do a four day week for six months when I went back, and loved it, but found getting that agreed with his boss scary and hard. He worried about being perceived as non serious, and damaging his career. He wouldn't have dreamt of making it permanent, didn't have the courage to challenge the stereotypical expectations of male presenteeism in the work place. Think this is much more of an issue for men.

Society defines men by work, and women by motherhood. This is still true no matter what else we do. It's bullshit, buts it's still operating. One aspect of this, under considered in my view, is what it costs men. They feel they can't spend time at home, and are judged negatively if they do. So they don't. Or not much, and they hide it, so attitudes are slow to change. Many regret it when they're older and have distant weak relationships with their children but by then it's too late.

While I object to being defined by motherhood externally, I am grateful that I got the time on maternity leave to build a fab relationship with my dc and that society is accepting of me working part time to continue to parent them as well as I can. Full time is not for me.

Overall I feel I have a better set up and will be happier with my life choices than DH will be in the long term.

Men are oppressed by the patriarchy too, and being socialised away from parenting their children closely tops that list, for me. And the saddest thing of all is how many of them don't even know what they're missing.

Because they usually earn less.

It's sensible that the person earning the lowest income (if that's likely to be permanant) falls on their sword if necessary. Man or woman

I'm not pregnant yet but we are trying and have been thinking about this. If I am lucky enough to get pregnant I am torn of what to do about work. I would love to work part time but my partner is not one for shopping etc. I would not like to put myself in that financial situation where if I want to buy something I have to ask for money. On the flip side my mother worked full time and I hated it. Never getting picked up from school stuff like that. I suppose the best compromise is rather than one person working 3 days, we both work 4