Working Women Play Key Role at Home, Study Finds : Labor: 55% report they contribute half or more of their household income. 18% say they are sole earner.
The notion of what it means to be a family’s provider in the United States got a stark update Wednesday with a new study showing that 55% of working women contribute half or more of their household income.
Women have moved far beyond the debate about whether they belong in the home or the workplace, according to the study, the most comprehensive look in 14 years at women’s views about work, family and society. Rather, they see harmony between their roles as nurturers and providers and are looking not to shed responsibilities, but to better balance them.
Indeed, 48% of women in the survey said they would work even if money were not a concern, the same percentage as in 1981.
The new study, “Women: The New Providers,” was conducted for the Families and Work Institute and the Whirlpool Foundation by Louis Harris and Associates. Besides detailing the economic contributions of women, the study found grave concerns among women about the “mean-spirited” tenor of modern society and the debate over family values.
In the study, 26% of the working women surveyed said they provided about half of their family’s income; 11% said they provided more than half and 18% said they were the household’s sole earner. Two-thirds of the 1,502 women in the survey had jobs outside the home.
“This once again dispels the myth that women are providing supplemental income for the family,” said Colleen Keast, executive director of the Whirlpool Foundation, a philanthropic organization.
The study brought into focus the significance of women’s earnings by looking at their contributions to all households, instead of just comparing women’s and men’s earnings in dual-income families, said Ellen Galinsky, co-president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research center in New York that focuses on policy issues relating to the changing workplace and family life.
Previous studies and government figures have shown that in two-earner households, women on average produce 41% of the family’s income. In only 31% of dual-earner families do women earn more than men, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Overall, women earn less than men, averaging 73 cents for every dollar men make.
In the last two decades, however--as more women have entered the work force and more marriages have ended in divorce--fewer households have looked to a man as the sole provider; instead, more are dependent on either dual-earning couples or single women.
From 1974 to 1994, there was a 38% decline among married-couple families in the number of households in which the man was the sole earner and a 46% increase in two-earner households. During that period, the number of households solely supported by a female earner increased 114%, according to the bureau’s figures.
Galinsky and Keast said the new study pointed to areas where political and employment policies, as well as philanthropic ventures, could be better focused to help women and families deal with the realities of contemporary life.
Women still see themselves as care-givers, but they don’t feel they are faced with an either-or choice between being good nurturers or good employees, the study found. “Women see both these roles as emanating from caring for their families,” Galinsky said.
Employers’ policies, however--such as withholding benefits from part-time workers--do not reflect those dual roles. Women’s greatest worries about the workplace “concern employers providing fewer benefits, and the difficulty of balancing work and family responsibilities,” according to the study.
Women want to work, the study found; a plurality (48%) of those surveyed said they would choose to work full time or part time even if money were not a consideration. Asked if they wanted to give up some of their responsibilities, 56% said no. Rather, they want more flexibility in job structures and work hours, but don’t want to lose benefits.
In the future, these issues will continue to be important, according to the women in the study. Nearly nine out of 10 said young boys and young girls expect the girls will someday have both careers and families. Today’s women believe that younger generations of women will have more opportunities to join the work force, but once there will continue to confront barriers to advancement, the study reported.
As for the on-going debate over family values, women in the study said talk about the breakdown of traditional families missed the point; all individuals, they said, should be valued and all types of families supported.
Throughout the study process--which included focus groups and comparative samples of U.S. men and of men and women in Canada and Mexico--women expressed great worry about the tenor of the times, Galinsky said.
The study was conducted last fall, “even before the Oklahoma City bombing, even before Congress was sworn in,” she said. “And we heard many, many women calling for an end to this mean-spiritedness. . . . So many women were very angry about it.”
Seventy percent of women (and 52% of men) said they “worry a great deal” about people not caring about others.
Ninety percent of the U.S. women in the study defined family values as an internal matter. More than half defined them as “loving, taking care of and supporting each other;” another 38% defined family values as knowing right from wrong and incorporating good values.
Only 2% of U.S. women and 1% of U.S. men said family values are about being a traditional nuclear family.
