Free Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter Page A

hit traditionally male factory jobs much harder than the traditionally female sectors of education and medicine.The resulting shift in economic power from men to women has prompted books like
The Richer Sex
and
The End of Men
. One simple statistic says it all: 40 percent of American women are the primary breadwinners in their families. That number includes single mothers, but it still tracks a major trend.
    The even bigger story is the way in which economic trends in the United States since the 1980s have been hard on everyone outside of the educated elite. Most families with two adults have responded by sending Mom to work.Senator Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi dubbed this development the “two-income trap.” When their book of the same name came out in 2003—more than a decade ago—average mortgage expenses had risen seventy times faster than the average father’s income.In the intervening years, fixed costs have risen further; wages have continued to stagnate or even decline; and in the post-recession universe, jobs are even more precarious, particularly forpeople without a college education. For all these families, it is equally the woman’s job to provide, even if she does not necessarily frame it in those terms.
    And despite the resistance to the idea of stay-at-home dads, a growing number of men say that they are committed to caregiving.Nearly 50 percent of millennial men say that being a good parent is one of the most important things in their lives, compared with 39 percent of Gen X men. In her book
The Richer Sex
, journalist Liza Mundy talks to many happy stay-at-home dads, like Danny Hawkins. His wife, Susan, is a senior VP with the Henry Ford Health System. Danny used to be in financial services, but he hated the long hours, so he stepped back to take care of the couple’s two daughters. “I have told Susie several times that my job is to make her life easier….And I like doing it,” Hawkins said to Mundy. Though fewer companies are offering paternity leave, more men are taking advantage of whatever leave is available.According to Mundy in an article in
The Atlantic
, in the decade since the state of California started offering paid paternity leave, “the percentage of ‘bonding leaves’ claimed by men has risen from 18.7 in 2005 and 2006 to 31.3 in 2012 and 2013.”
    I would not counsel my teenage sons to make it their life plan to marry a successful woman any more than I would counsel a daughter to marry a successful man as her meal ticket. If things go sour—a lost job, a divorce—a person of either gender who leaves the labor force for a prolonged period of time is vulnerable. But neither would I tell them that it is their job to provide for their families in the sense of bringing in income. I tell them that it is a man’s job to provide, and a woman’s too. Both are responsible for providing the combination of income and nurture that allows those who depend on them to flourish.

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HALF-TRUTHS IN THE WORKPLACE
    Advice on how to achieve a sane work-life balance has become a cottage industry.Numerous books on the subject have been published within the past few years alone, many of which I’ve read with pleasure. But they are all aimed at workers, overwhelmingly women, who are presumed to have the responsibility of stretching the twenty-four hours in a day to cover an impossible and never-ending list of things to get done. Why not tackle this issue from a different angle? Perhaps the problem is not with women, but with
work
.
    American workers all over the socioeconomic spectrum, from hotel housekeepers to surgeons, have stories about working twelve- to sixteen-hour days (often without overtime pay), experiencing anxiety attacks and constant exhaustion.Public health experts have begun talking about stress as an epidemic.Indeed, the United States is one of the only industrialized countries that does not require paid sick leave, time off during the week, or vacation