I have been thinking lately how working moms really get a rough deal. I used to think it would be easier in a lot of ways to be a working mom. I had a tough transition from being a wage earner with tasks, responsibilities, and social status similar to my husband's, to being an unpaid member of society, with tasks and responsibilities divided along gender/role lines, losing social status and the surety of knowing I was doing a good job through annual reviews and pay raises. I thought it was rough to suddenly be stuck with all the housework, instead of splitting it 50/50, and to deal with the intensity of caring for children all day with no back up and little adult interaction. I knew that I didn't want to work, that I desperately wanted to be with my babies all day, but I thought that if I could have dealt with the emotional and psychological element of them spending more than half of their waking hours with someone else, then working would have been easier than staying home.

However, now I know I was wrong.

I recently saw some data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics about people's use of time (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.toc.htm). They surveyed 13,000 people about how they used their time in a day. Then they made tables of all of it, divided by households with children under 6, with children over 6, or with no children; and further divided by sex of the surveyed person and by employed/unemployed. According to the data, unemployed women with children under age 6 average 7.53 hours of housework and child care each day (only counting child care when it is the primary task, not concurrent with another task). Employed women with children under age 6 average 5.34 hours of housework and child care per day and 4.41 hours of paid labor each day. Employed men with children under age 6 average 3.24 hours of housework and child care each day (this includes outside upkeep and repairs) and 6.12 hours per day of paid labor.

Now, I know it is hard to interpret this data, because it is averaged out over the entire group surveyed - it doesn't represent what each individual did in a certain day, but more what the group of people with children under age 6 accomplished as a whole. (For instance, since some people had their day off work on the survey day, it lowered everyone's daily average for hours worked.) I like to think that the employed men's average hours of childcare and housework is thrown off by the fact that some employed men have stay-at-home wives. So, maybe those men with stay-at-home wives (40%) do just 2 hours of housework and childcare per day and are able to do 6.73 hours of paid work, while those with employed wives (60%) do 4 hours per day of housework and 5.71 hours of paid work. That would even up the distribution of labor between the sexes in two-income families - about 68 hours for each parent. That's how it would play out in a fair world, anyway.

But I know for most employed women, the husbands do not cut work hours to do more housework, and they don't share in the housework as much as they could. So the conclusion is still the same - for the group of people with children under age 6, employed women as a whole have the heaviest workload, equalled only by their husbands if those husbands decide to share in the housework. Unemployed women, and probably their husbands as well, have less work overall. Sigh. I feel very blessed to be home, and I hope I bless my husband through it, too, by taking care of most of the indoor housework and leaving just the outdoor and handyman work - which he mostly enjoys - to him. I still contend that my hours of work are especially intense because the children are always here, always needing me, even when I am doing other tasks, and I have no one to take over while I take a bathroom or coffee break. But I realize now that me working would not have made our lives less stressful, because while the hours may have been less intense, they would have been longer.