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Men are more likely to work remotely than women. That said, at least one recent survey found that 97% of professionals had some flexibility in their jobs. Hochschild wrote of the assumptions that a man had “backstage support” for his job when school is canceled for snow, someone else will deal with coverage. To be sure, there is much to be done, not just at home, but in the workplace, too. In life, it’s easy to let a few bad nights form a narrative, but the facts don’t point toward widespread sleep deprivation (now or in the past). I tracked down time-diary studies from 1965, 1975, 1985, and 2014, and found that over these decades, employed women have always slept about eight hours per day, and always slightly more than employed men. Not only is this not a starvation-level ration, it’s slightly more than their husbands.

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It turns out that moms in couples where both partners work full time sleep 8.15 hours on an average day. In 2008, the BLS published an analysis of married parents’ time. Consequently, researchers tend to view its results as more accurate than quick-response telephone surveys. This survey has people talk through the previous day, hour by hour, rather than simply answer questions about how they think they spend time. Every year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) conducts a time diary project called the American Time Use Survey. How Parents Spend Their Timeįirst, let’s look at that famous quote about sleep. Then, as now, gender roles are still in transition, though much has changed. People have impressions of their lives that may be based on feelings, not data. Was she just lucky? The truth, then as now, is that families differ. Indeed, “among our close friends, fathers do the same.” Hochschild managed to build a thriving career as a tenured academic and not get stuck with the whole second shift. This could be accepted as the way of the world–no one can have it all!–if Hochschild didn’t mention, in the preface, that she and her husband cared for their two boys equally. No one in the original version of The Second Shift happily built an on-fire career while raising normal children in a happy home.

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In these cases, though, they dialed down their professional ambitions to do so, as many of the mothers did in the other scenarios. Hochschild profiled a small number of families where the male partners shared equally in the home duties. Of course, not all families had this dynamic.

The husband managed to convince himself– and her–that “only one in a hundred men could take this.” In other words, he was giving so much to the relationship by accepting her assault on his fragile manhood that she needed to do most of the housework and child care to even things up. Or, my particular favorite was a family where the wife out-earned the husband. The husband simply “forgot” to cook on his day, again and again. Some of the more cringe-inducing examples included a family where the wife attempted to create an alternating day schedule for cooking. Hochschild’s subjects managed to fight about work, housework, and child-rearing on a dizzying variety of fronts. Unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways. As the Tolstoy quote goes, happy families are all alike. A Diversity Of Dysfunctionsįirst, what made her book so influential: Skipping the usual dry academic prose, Hochschild devoted the bulk of The Second Shift to deep case studies of a handful of families and their dysfunctions. The answer is that it depends, though more has changed than headlines about whether it’s possible to “have it all” often convey. Since it takes its name from Hochschild’s book, we wanted to take a look back at the original version of this famous tome (it’s been reissued twice since), and whether the issues parents face now are the same or not. This section of Fast Company’s website is devoted to how working parents–men and women–juggle their dual roles.

Second shift