AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
Why we can't find balance in work/life.
Life balance is a goal for most people, so why is it so hard to find? For answers, read the new book by Dr. Robert W. Drago, Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life (Dollars & Sense 2007, paperback $18.95). He relates lack of balance to gaps in our social fabric, which result from deep-rooted and damaging norms. Band-Aid solutions to imbalance backfire when they leave the norms intact.
When his college daughter had to choose between her part-time jobs, she quit work in a childcare center because her other job--walking a dog--paid $2/hour more. Her predicament highlights three critical social gaps:
* Care gap. As of 2002, only 21% of American children lived with a homemaker mother and a breadwinner father. Childcare was an issue for most of the rest: 23% lived with single mothers, 5% with single fathers and 43% with two parents who both worked for pay. Childcare costs so much that many children are left to tend themselves, but childcare workers earn less than a dog-walker.
Factoring in adults with serious disabilities and the elderly disabled, Drago estimates 35% of all Americans need care, nearly half of them living in poverty. Closing facilities and slashing Medicaid increases the gap between those getting quality care and those who need but don't get it.
* Gender gap. This used to refer to the difference between women's and men's hourly pay. While that gap has narrowed a bit, the gap between high-income and low-income women has widened. Some have moved into demanding careers once reserved for men, earning more than their grandmothers could dream of and paying others to walk the dog and care for the children.
For the majority not in a profession or management, women's work typically consists of providing low-paid or unpaid care: parenting, eldercare, or caring for others' children or disabled adults. Regardless of income, women do the majority of unpaid family care.
Mothers pay a wage penalty, earning less per hour than women who do not have children. In fact, the wage gap between mothers and women without children is now larger than that between women and men.
- Industrial relations significance of unpaid work.
- Magazine article from: Labour/Le Travail Forest, Anne September 22, 1998 700+ words
...interested in the subject of women and work, most obviously because women perform many hours of unpaid work in the household every day even...pay, (7) but also because women routinely perform unpaid work on the job. Cleaning, caring...
- Gender, time and inequality: trends in women's and men's paid work, unpaid work...
- Magazine article from: Social Forces Sayer, Liana C. September 1, 2005 700+ words
...contentions that men's and women's paid and unpaid work time is converging because...doing less paid and more unpaid work and women are doing less unpaid...that men have increased unpaid work time only slightly while women have increased paid work...
- Women bond in unpaid work protest.
- News wire article from: Australasian Business Intelligence July 26, 2001 700+ words
...2001 was devaluing women's unpaid work by ignoring it...been mounted by the Women's Action Alliance...sticker saying "unpaid work should count" to...particularly galling that unpaid work by men and women had been ignored...
- U.N. Says Women Owed Trillions for Unpaid Work
- Transcript from: NPR All Things Considered September 12, 1995 700+ words
...performed mostly by women raising children...tending fields. Unpaid work is one of the...United Nations Women's Conference...average Ethiopian woman trying to eek...responsibility of the woman to do everything...Organization says women do about 2/3...put a value to ...
- The Sociology of Work: Continuity and Change in Paid and Unpaid Work.(Book...
- Magazine article from: Labour & Industry Sappey, Jennifer December 1, 2007 700+ words
...AND CHANGE IN PAID AND UNPAID WORK S Edgell, London, Sage...unpaid housework done by women, the work of the self...work of people who did unpaid work in their communities...standard paid work and unpaid work and the role of globalisation...
- Recognising the true worth of unpaid work
- Newspaper article from: Sunday Star-Times SHARP, Iain August 18, 1996 700+ words
...of paid work was unpaid work. It still is...to writing about women's issues. Her...almost all New Zealand women, Else has experienced...between paid and unpaid work first hand. Married...As a young married woman in the 1960s...
- pounds 17,400 for unpaid work by women.(News)
- Newspaper article from: The Birmingham Post (England) November 7, 2005 700+ words
Women do more than pounds 17,400 worth of unpaid work around the home each year...has fallen since 1961 when women carried out about 303 minutes of unpaid work each day, as the amount of paid work women do has risen. David Pickett...
- Women do pounds 17,000 of unpaid work around home.(News)
- Newspaper article from: Liverpool Echo (Liverpool, England) November 7, 2005 700+ words
WOMEN do more than pounds 17,400 worth of unpaid work around the home each year...has fallen since 1961 when women carried out around 303 minutes of unpaid work each day, as the amount of paid work women do has risen. David Pickett...
