Wednesday, August 15, 2007

"I sure could use a wife/significant other"

No, this is not about the ups-and-downs of dating. This is about the need of working women to have someone helping them at home.

The New York Times hits it on the head here.

“The thing I most want in life is a wife. I’m not kidding,” said Joyce Lustbader, a research scientist at Columbia University, who has been married for 29 years. “I work all day, sometimes seven days a week, and still have to go home and make dinner and have all those things to do around the house.”

It is not just the extra shift at home that is a common complaint. Working women, whether married or single, also see their lack of devoted spousal support as an impediment to getting ahead in their careers, especially when they are competing against men who have wives behind them, whether those wives are working or staying at home. And research supports their argument: it appears that marriage, at least marriage with children, bolsters a man’s career but hinders a woman’s."

The article goes on to say...


"Working women have noticed, correctly, that their male colleagues with wife support — whether or not those wives are themselves working outside the home — get further at work than the women who are fettered by marriage and children. Women occupy 50.6 percent of managerial and professional positions, according to the research organization Catalyst, but make up only 15.6 percent of Fortune 500 corporate officers.

Married men and women, on average, earn more than those who are unmarried, with part of that possibly attributed to career and wage advancement as workers mature (and are more likely to be married). But the gap is significantly larger for men than for women. Married women make an average 17 percent more than unmarried women, according to 2005 B.L.S. data on the median earnings of full-time workers, while married men make 42 percent more than unmarried men."

You can read the rest here.

-Agent Ska-

2 comments:

  1. I wonder what happens when you factor same-sex "wives" into the equation or unmarried partners. Does that impact the level of support?

    I can speak anecdotally that having a domestic partner makes a difference in the day to day career stuff. I would not be able to successfully tackle some of the work "over and above" stuff without her help on the homefront, unless I sacrificed things that give my life meaning -- like my pets, my family, my health, etc. That runs two ways (I hope).

    Even tackling a second job (which we share) would be impossible. It doesn't advance our careers, but helps us survive.

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  2. I think we need robots. I think that's what the Japanese are doing for their elderly...I would like my robot to look like Bjork and be anatomically correct, but I'm a deviant robosexual soooo....

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