What is an example of the second shift as demonstrated in Hochschilds study?

The phrase “the second shift” entered the popular lexicon a quarter century ago, when sociologist Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung published a popular book by that name. Based on in-depth interviews and in-home observations of working couples, the book revealed that, despite entering the labor market and pursuing careers in record numbers, women were still taking care of most of the routine household and childcare responsibilities. The authors documented the toll that balancing career and unpaid domestic labor was taking on families, and women in particular—in stress, marital tension, exhaustion and guilt.

Many others have studied this “double burden” in the years since, and surprisingly little has changed. Wives still report doing about twice as much housework and childcare as their husbands, and this imbalance often poses a barrier to women’s professional advancement. One difference is that today’s couples, even if they unconsciously embrace traditional gender stereotypes and live less-than-egalitarian lives, may publicly proclaim more egalitarian values.

How are these conflicted couples’ kids affected by all of this? Are their own professional and family aspirations shaped by what they see at home, or by what they hear publicly, or by hidden stereotypes—or by all three? University of British Columbia psychological scientist Alyssa Croft and her colleagues decided to explore this important question, and to disentangle these competing influences on kids’ views of gender and work—and their hopes for the future.

To do so, the scientists recruited more than 300 children and at least one of their parents. Fathers of sons and daughters and mothers of sons and daughters were all represented in the sample, so the scientists could explore the various parent-child dynamics. They first asked parents and children who did what at home—dishes, cleaning, cooking, childcare, laundry—and how many hours each partner worked for pay outside the home. They also asked the adults to choose the stereotype—working person or stay-at-home parent—they identified with. In addition to asking them directly, the scientists used a test of automatic, implicit attitudes toward gender and work.

Then the assessed the kids. They asked them which stereotype they most aspired to be like when they grew up. They also asked them specifically what adult occupation they had in mind for the future.

The scientists analyzed all the information from parents and children, with some interesting insights. For example, mothers’ explicit views about gender roles at home—this was a reliable indicator of their kids’ attitudes toward this issue. But for daughters in particular, what mattered in shaping their gender attitudes were what the parents really believed and how they acted. Specifically, girls were more likely to envision themselves in careers when their fathers were more egalitarian in their beliefs about domestic labor—and also when their mothers actually did less household work and were more career-oriented.

Talk is cheap, and when it comes to gender roles, not that influential. Over and above parents’ explicitly stated beliefs, fathers’ actual dishwashing and diaper changing played a key role in shaping daughters’ aspirations for the future. That is, when dad believed in equality at home, and didn’t unconsciously link women and housework, and actually did his share of the drudgery—if all this was true, their daughters aspired to less stereotypic careers. These findings suggest that, even when parents explicitly endorse gender equality at home, their hidden stereotypical beliefs and an actual non-egalitarian division of labor at home—these send the more powerful message to young girls that they should limit their aspirations.

The findings about fathers, reported in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, are particularly interesting and surprising.  Despite being male and despite the mothers often being the primary caregiver and controlling domestic matters, fathers powerfully influence their daughters’ professional aspirations. Why is unclear. They could be modeling future mates, signaling to their daughters that the can and should expect a man’s contribution at home. Or fathers that really pitch in may have more opportunities to influence their daughters, acting in effect as gatekeepers to roles that are not stereotypical.

Perhaps the most compelling explanation is the most obvious: Fathers’ influence on the daughters may result from the beliefs and actions of the mothers in these families. After all, dads who do the laundry and make school lunches may very well marry women who are successful at work and who themselves defy the stereotypes.

Follow Wray Herbert’s writing about psychological science in The Huffington Post and on Twitter at @wrayherbert.

Twenty-five years ago, as a massive influx of women and mothers joined the workforce, Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at Berkeley, wanted to know how families were coping with this revolutionary change. She reviewed time diary data and spent hours interviewing and observing 50 couples. She found what she called a “double day” — that women came home from a full day of paid work to a another round of unpaid housework and childcare. She figured women were working an extra month more than their spouses every year.

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The name of her groundbreaking book, The Second Shift, not only described the exhausting, frustrating everyday reality of the growing number of working families, it became part of everyday language as well, in the United States and around the world.

I  met up with Hochschild recently and asked her to reflect on the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Second Shift —  how far we’ve come — and how far we have yet to go. Time-use research shows that women are still doing, on average, about twice the housework and child care as men, even when they work full time. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

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Schulte: The Second Shift still resonates with people 25 years after it first came out. It makes you wonder — have we made progress?

Hochschild: In the Second Shift, I argued that we are in a stalled revolution — that women have gone into the workforce, that was the revolution, but the workplace they go into and the men they come home to have changed less rapidly, or not at all. Nor has the government that could give them policies that would ease the way, like paid parental leave, paid family medical leave, or subsidized child care – the state of the art child care, that too is stalled. So what you’ve got are three sources of stall. What’s happening to men. What’s happening to the workplace and missing government help.

Today, I think we are in stall number two. There’s good news, there’s old bad news and there’s new bad news. And the good news, is that, the revolution continues and women are now half the labor force and they’ve moved up in it, they’ve earned more. And have gotten into more training, and broken ranks in a number of professions. And men have changed substantially. We’re all beginning to understand that the family has been a shock absorber of larger trends. And we’re finally seeing that these are not individual, private problems, but that they point to a larger cause.

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The old bad news is that the workplace has been hard to change. If we had more flex time, it would be better for families. But we’re holding on to long hours at the professional level, and there’s been virtually no trickle down of work-family reforms to blue collar jobs. We don’t have paid parental leave. Singapore has a week. South Korea does. So it’s not just the Scandinavian countries we think about. We still don’t have subsidized child care. So the government hasn’t stepped up. Even talking about government help seems more like a pipedream now.

But I would say there’s a new bad news. It’s what’s happened to men. Blue collar men. From the early 1970’s, large companies began to automate and offshore to cheap labor pools and stopped sharing their higher and higher productivity. Productivity and profit went up, but wages stayed steady. And so what you had was blue collar workers without blue collar work. You had ghost towns and cities. In the year 2000, blue collar workers were working much shorter hours, there was a high proportion of unemployed. So we can ask, ‘What’s going on?’

Schulte: OK, what’s going on?

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Hochschild: Some will say that these men have lost moral values. I think what they lost is morale. And I think they’re the canary in the coal mine. What’s happening to blue collar men is beginning to happen to white collar men. Their jobs are less certain and there are fewer jobs. And the wider the class gap, and the more people fall into the lower class, the more bad news. We know that – more alcoholism, more mental health problems, more second shift for women.

 Schulte: So do you have hope?

Arlie Hochschild, courtesy of the author

Hochschild: You’re talking to an optimist. I think before we look forward, it’s important to remember how far we have come. It’s been a LONG struggle. But we’ve made huge progress. I mean, when I started at Berkeley, women weren’t allowed to be part of the band. No women were allowed into the male faculty club. I mean, I was there. I remember that! The worlds were so divided. So the change has been huge. And part of what families have had to absorb, is that shock of female upward mobility. But now, we’ve got to look at families absorbing male downward mobility. I think there are more people who see that helping families make sense than there are people who don’t. Because women aren’t going home. They’re not going back. We’re here to stay.

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Schulte: Yet the Pew Research Center found recently that 60 percent of those they surveyed felt it would be better if one parent – read Mom – stayed home with the kids. Do we really want to go back to the 1950s, when many women didn’t have a second shift, they were homemakers and that was their first and often only shift?

Hochschild: It’s like you gotta change the work place and the work place culture. With demanding work hours, if both of you work, you’re talking about farming your kids out to someone else because you can’t be with them. Obviously nobody wants that.

Ellen Galinsky’s surveys at the Families and Work Institute pointed to a desirable norm for many parents for working not full-time, but part-time. And I get that. I mean Norway has a 35-hour work week. That counts as part time for us in the United States, you know. And Norway’s doing well, by the way.

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Schulte: They are actually. When you look at international comparisons of GDP per hours work, they’re number one in hourly poductivity.

Hochschild: Well, no wonder, because they’re getting it all done. Efficiently. So they can all go home. Norway has one of the highest proportions of women working in the world. So there’s something to learn there. If people had full-time, flexible hours, if full-time wasn’t extreme, like it is here, people may have a different view.

But the problem is in our language. Who wants to work part-time? I worked part-time at Berkeley, but I’ve always hated the word, “part-time.” To me, it’s whole, it’s just different.

Schulte: So what would be better language to use?

Hochschild: The New Work Day. I don’t like Modified Hours, because that implies it’s modifying something more standard. Hmm. Let’s see. Innovative Work Day. Effective Work Day.

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