FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDERA Comparison of Physicians and.docx

FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER
A Comparison of Physicians and Emergency
Medical Technicians
CARLA SHOWS
Daytona State College
NAOMI GERSTEL
University of Massachusetts
Using a multimethod approach (including a survey, interviews,
and observations), this
article examines the link between class and masculinities by
comparing the way two
groups—professional men (physicians) and working-class men
(emergency medical tech-
nicians, or EMTs)—practice fatherhood. First, the authors show
that these two groups
practice different types of masculinity as they engage in
different kinds of fatherhood.
Physicians emphasize “public fatherhood,” which entails
attendance at public events but
little involvement in the daily care of their children. In contrast,
EMTs are not only
involved in their children’s public events but also emphasize
“private fatherhood,” which
entails involvement in their daily care. Second, the authors
suggest that these differing
types of involvement can be explained by the contrasting
employment conditions of each
group as well the gender order of their families, especially the
divergent labor market

positions of spouses and the division of parenting. The authors
conclude by arguing that
these working-class fathers are “undoing gender” while
professional fathers reproduce
the conventional gender order.
Keywords: class; gender; masculinities; work; family;
parenting; fathers
AUTHORS’ NOTE: We gratefully acknowledge support from
NSF (No. SES-0549817), the
National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians
(NAEMT), and the Political
Economy Research Institute (PERI); we would like to thank
Irene Boeckmann, Dana
Britton, Michelle Budig, Dan Clawson, Jill Crocker, Dustin
Avent-Holt, Donald Tomaskovic-
Devey, Robert Zussman, and the anonymous reviewers at
Gender & Society. Address all
correspondence to Carla Shows, Daytona State College, 1200
West International
Speedway Boulevard, PO Box 2811, Daytona Beach, FL, 32120-
2811; e-mail: [email protected]
daytonastate.edu.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 23 No. 2, April 2009 161-187
DOI: 10.1177/0891243209333872
© 2009 Sociologists for Women in Society
161
162 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009
A large and growing literature documents recent changes and

growing variation in the relationship of gender, paid work, and
parenting.
Although most of this research focuses on the range of women’s
experi-
ences, some suggests that most men still emphasize employment
as cen-
tral to their practice of fatherhood (Lamb 1995; Orloff and
Monson 2002;
Townsend 2002), leaving far more of the parenting and daily
caregiving
to mothers (Casper and Bianchi 2002; Craig 2006). Few studies,
however,
focus on the varied experiences of men to examine how
employment
shapes fatherhood (Astone et al. forthcoming), fewer explore
how parent-
ing shapes men’s employment (Lundberg and Rose 2000), and
almost
none compare fathers in different class positions.
This article examines the relationship between class and
fatherhood. We
compare two groups of fathers, one in a professional occupation
and the
other in a nonprofessional occupation; we argue that these map
broadly
onto two class locations—one upper middle class (physicians)
and the
other working class (emergency medical technicians, or EMTs).
We first
compare these men’s class-linked practices of fatherhood and,
second,
argue that their ways of doing fatherhood entail enactments of
distinctive
masculinities, based in the dynamics of their occupational and
familial

relations, which have consequences for doing (or undoing)
gender.
To address the first issue, we argue that these two groups of
men practice
different types of fathering—with physicians emphasizing
“public father-
hood” and EMTs performing not only public fatherhood but also
participat-
ing in the daily routines of “private fatherhood.” Second, we
suggest these
different fathering practices can be explained by the contrasting
employ-
ment conditions of each group and the gendered character of
their families,
especially their wives’ involvement in the labor market and
parenting.
Three sets of literature frame our analysis. First is the limited
literature
that directly examines fatherhood, masculinity, and class. The
second is a
growing literature on paid work hours, schedules, and families.
The third
set of literature roots fatherhood in gender relations by
addressing the con-
nection of fathering to mothering.
FATHERHOOD, MASCULINITY, AND CLASS
Much recent work on the relationship of masculinity to the
practice of
paid work and domestic life (Coltrane and Adams 2001; Cooper
2000;
Townsend 2002) draws on the now classic theoretical
formulation of

Connell (1992, 1995). Developing the concept of “hegemonic
masculinity,”
she argues that much older literature used a categorical model
of gender
Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 163
that treated men as an undifferentiated group, but contemporary
research
documents a considerable range of masculinities. While prior
scholarship
tended to conflate sex and gender, Connell offers a
counterview; she sug-
gests diverse masculinities can be traced to the “social
dynamics generated
within gender relations” (1992, 735) and through other
structures that vary
across social locations. In fact, class is a social location Connell
empha-
sizes, although she criticizes work on masculinity for being
“class-bound”
(1992, 735). Further, Connell and others (e.g., Brines 1994;
Griswold
1993; Kimmel 2000, 2006) suggest that men’s involvement in
gender rela-
tions at home, especially parenting, provide an important locus
of institu-
tionalized inequality and significant site for the (re)construction
and
expression of various masculinities.
Researchers suggest that the way men combine family and paid
work
now entails two models of masculinity: (1) the still dominant

“neotradi-
tional model of masculinity” (Gerson 2007) in which men put
their job
prospects (or breadwinning) first but rely on their partners for
daily care
of children; and (2) an alternate, more egalitarian, model of a
“newly con-
stituted masculinity” (Cooper 2002), which entails substantial
sharing in
the daily care of children in addition to market work (see also
Dowd 2000;
Townsend 2002).
Some research looks at the relationship of social class to the
two mod-
els of masculinity. Much quantitative research, especially time-
use stud-
ies, examines the number of hours men spend with their
children;
summarizing this literature, Pleck and Masciadrelli (2004, 238)
conclude
there is “no consistent relationship between paternal
involvement and
socioeconomic variables.” Recent qualitative work on fathering,
however,
finds some differences by class.
For working-class men, some studies suggest the priority of the
bread-
winner model, showing that working-class men feel that their
masculinity
is threatened when they cannot enact the primary breadwinner
model
of fatherhood (Gerson 1993). Williams (2000), however,
indicates that a
disjuncture exists between this ideology and the practice of

fatherhood,
especially for working-class men whose ability to fulfill the
primary
breadwinner role is waning. Indeed, Pyke (1996) finds that
some working-
class men emphasize a hypermasculine provider role while
sharing in
family work. Using longitudinal English data, Sullivan (2006)
shows that
men assumed more responsibility for family work if they were
employed
in working-class (manual or clerical) jobs. Deutsch (1999)
similarly finds
that, among the alternative-shift working-class couples she
studied, men
did much of the work of parenting even while insisting that
their wives
were the primary parents.
Research on middle-class fathers finds a contrasting pattern. A
number
of qualitative studies suggest that such fathers, especially
professionals or
the “educational elite,” espouse some version of egalitarian
parenthood
(Cooper 2000; Deutsch 1999; LaRossa 1997; Risman 1998). Yet
research-
ers suggest that middle-class fathers do not enact these ideals
(Griswold
1993; LaRossa 1997) due to employment constraints as well as
the culture
of masculinity in which they believe (Coltrane 2004; Cooper

2000; Pyke
1996). Coltrane (2004) argues that whereas managerial and
professional
couples were the most likely to share family work in the 1970s
and 1980s,
by the 1990s and 2000s most sharing occurred in the working-
class.
Not only does the level of paternal involvement vary by class,
but the
type of engagement varies as well. Coltrane and Adams (2001)
find that if
men participate in “enrichment” or leisure activities with
children, they
are less likely to do daily chores such as cooking and cleaning.
Lareau
(2002, 749) ties this variation in type of engagement to class.
She shows
that middle-class parents were much more likely to participate
in orga-
nized leisure activities with their children than working-class
families,
who tend to have “more free time and deeper, richer ties with
their
extended families.” As this quotation suggests, one important
aspect of
Lareau’s (2003) work is that she does not simply focus on the
nuclear
family but widens her lens to include extended kin. Her work
suggests that
there is class variation in these ties—with working-class parents
signifi-
cantly more likely than those in the middle-class to rely on
relatives for
help with children (for review, see Gerstel and Sarkisian 2008).
These ties

shape the demands on both fathers and mothers. Although these
studies
provide important leads for comparing working-class to middle-
class
fathers, few have made these explicit comparisons.
WORK HOURS, SCHEDULES, AND FAMILIES
The total hours of household employment have climbed because
of
women’s increased work hours (Jacobs and Gerson 2004). This
is particu-
larly true for parents: Paid working time has increased
dramatically for
mothers since 1970 (Bluestone and Rose 2000), and the sum of
estimated
annual hours worked by U.S. mothers and fathers is higher than
those of
parents in any other country (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie
2006). Gender
is essential to understanding these hours. On one hand, some
research sug-
gests that men do more routine child care when they are
employed fewer
hours (Coltrane 2000). On the other, while mothers tend to cut
back their
hours of employment, research suggests that fathers increase
their work
hours after the birth of a child (e.g., Jacobs and Gerson 2004;
for excep-
tion, see Astone et al. forthcoming). Importantly, class

influences hours
and schedules, with professionals working longer workweeks
than other
occupational groups (Jacobs and Gerson 2004) and the working-
class more
likely to alternate shifts (Presser 2003). Although longer
workweeks
decrease fathers’ participation in family work, alternative
schedules
increase it (Barnett and Gareis 2002; Deutsch 1999; Presser
2003). This
suggests a bifurcation of job hours and schedules by class.
GENDER WITHIN FAMILIES: FATHERING AND
MOTHERING
As Connell (1992, 1995) argues, the organization of gender
relations is
central to the practice of masculinity. When employed, wives
challenge
the neotraditional model of masculinity, or as Griswold (1993,
220) puts
it, “Women’s [paid] work, in short, has destroyed the old
assumptions
about fatherhood and required new negotiations of gender
relations.”
Research has shown that fathers are likely to be somewhat more
involved
in parenting when their wives are employed. Moreover, fathers’
child care
and work time correlates with the employment schedules of
mothers
(Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Brayfield 1995). Coltrane
(2000)
argues that the employment schedules of wives and husbands
are perhaps

the most consistent and important predictors of domestic
sharing that
researchers have documented. Furthermore, researchers find that
when
wives have higher relative earnings, or when the gap between
husbands’
and wives’ earnings is lower, the gendered gap in the division
of domestic
labor is reduced (Cooke 2007).
Although we might expect the influence of mothers on fathers to
vary by
class, little literature examines this connection. In one
important study of
equal parenting, Deutsch (1999) finds that mothers influence
fathers’ par-
ticipation by either fighting for more equal participation
(especially in the
middle class) or by using alternate schedules (especially in the
working
class). Other research shows that among the affluent, wives not
only develop
an ideology of intensive mothering but also sometimes make the
decision to
withdraw from the labor force to concentrate on mothering; this
frees fathers
to focus on breadwinning (e.g., see Blair-Loy 2003). For
working-class
wives, it is much more difficult to “opt out” (Boushey 2005;
Kuperberg and
Stone 2008). Indeed, as Stone (2007) argues, opting out is often
dependent
on the earnings of highly paid husbands. Extending these
findings, one of
the arguments we make in this article is that wives influence
fathers’ involve-

ment in parenting but do so in ways that vary dramatically by
class.
METHOD
This article uses data collected in the Northeast as part of the
Study of
Work Hours and Schedules. The four occupations in the larger
study—
EMTs, physicians, nurse’s assistants, and nurses—were selected
to vary
by class and gender (for a more detailed discussion of the
research meth-
odology of the larger study, see Clawson, Gerstel, and Crocker
2008;
Gerstel, Clawson, and Huyser 2007). This article focuses on the
two male-
dominated occupations in the study—EMTs and physicians—
selected
due to variation in characteristics that research suggests are tied
to class.
Class is a concept that is much contested with little consensus
about
how to conceptualize or operationalize it (Wright 1997). Acker
(2006)
defines class in terms of differential access to resources,
including wages,
intrinsic to employment and organizations; while Hout (2008)
suggests
that objective criteria of class (which are correlated with
subjective class

identification) include what people do for a living, their income,
and their
education. Still others emphasize lifestyle or consumption in
their discus-
sions of class (see Lamont 2000; Weinenger 2005). Some
minimize the
importance of class, arguing against the possibility of
aggregating dispa-
rate groups, suggesting that the key factor influencing economic
differen-
tiation and inequality is organization (Baron 1994) or
occupation (Grusky
and Sorensen 1998).
Rather than examine a heterogeneous collection of scattered
individu-
als, our study examines people situated in particular
occupations. A vari-
ety of indicators of class—used in the general theoretical and
empirical
literature on class cited above—are distinctive among our
groups.
Physicians and EMTs differ not only by occupation, income,
and educa-
tion but also with regard to their lifestyles as well as workplace
con-
straints. According to the U.S. Department of Labor (2003),
EMTs earn
an average of $26,930 (a figure including both basic-level
EMTs, who
earn less, and paramedics, who earn more), while physicians
earn
$139,640 (a figure for family practitioners, the lowest-paid set
of physi-
cians). In our study, both groups earned more than the national
average for

their occupation: The physicians earned a mean of $206,000
(probably
because the sample included both specialists and a smaller
number of
family practitioners); the EMTs, with a starting wage of only
$8.50 per
hour, earn a mean of $50,000 (our research included more EMTs
who
were paramedics than basic level). The minimum training
required for
each occupation differs dramatically: Although physicians must
attend
medical school for at least four years after college, EMTs can
be certified
with as little as three weeks of instruction. Thirty-nine percent
of the
EMTs in our study had a high school diploma or equivalent, and
33 per-
cent had an associate’s degree. The percentage of each
occupation paid on
an hourly basis (i.e., with their hours monitored by the
organization) is
67.4 percent of EMTs but only 2.0 percent of physicians.
We are using an individual definition of class but should note
that many
have made important arguments about the class position of
families and
the contribution of wives and husbands to a family’s class
position. As we
discuss in more detail below, the employment and earnings of

each
group’s wives in our study were tied to the different positions
of their
husbands: The doctor’s wives were significantly less likely to
be employed
and, if employed, more likely to work part-time. They also
contributed a
significantly smaller share of the family’s income than did the
EMTs’
wives. These differences contribute to variation in the ways the
EMT and
physician men practice fatherhood.
We chose EMTs and doctors because these occupations operate
in the
same sector of the economy and we could obtain a random
sample of both
occupations from state certification lists. Certification is a
required process
generating regularly updated and publicly available lists that
made it pos-
sible to generate a true random sample. We chose health care as
our
research site because it accounts for more than one-seventh of
total GDP
(U.S. Census Bureau 2006) and is part of the growing service
sector rather
than the diminishing manufacturing sector. Like an escalating
number of
workplaces, many health care organizations operate 24/7 with
alternative
schedules. The characteristics of these occupations closely
approximate
those of the United States as a whole (Gerstel, Clawson, and
Huyser
2007).

For each occupation, we collected three kinds of data: (1)
mailed sur-
veys, (2) observations, and (3) intensive interviews. First,
surveys on
hours, schedules, family characteristics, and demographics were
mailed to
a random sample of 200 physicians and 200 EMTs. The
response rate for
the surveys was 57.6 percent for physicians and 64.7 percent for
EMTs.
In the survey, 78 percent of the EMTs and 71 percent of the
physicians
were men. For this article, we focused on the married fathers
with children
younger than 18 years old still living at home, which included
55 physi-
cian and 41 EMT fathers. Moreover, only a small proportion of
our survey
respondents were nonwhite: 16 percent of the physicians (most
of whom
were Asian) and only 5 percent of the EMTs (primarily African
American
and Hispanic). Although we could find no national data on
EMTs, the
proportion of white physicians in our sample was only slighter
higher than
in the nation (American Medical Association 2008).
Consequently, we
cannot do a fully intersectional analysis including comparisons
with race

as well as class and gender.
In addition to demographic items, the survey’s closed-ended
items
included hours usually worked at main job, number of jobs held,
hours
worked at all jobs, number of weekends worked in the past 30
days, per-
sonal income, and satisfaction with hours and schedules. Family
variables
included marital status, spousal employment status and number
of hours
worked, family income, and an item indicating whether the
respondent
had a family member who would like him or her to reduce hours
at work.
For a measure of spousal income, we subtracted respondent
income from
family income; because family income included investments,
the spousal
income is likely an overestimate (especially for doctors, who
are likely to
have more investment income than EMTs).
Second, observations were conducted at nine work sites
(representing
four different types of organizations), including three hospitals
(with two
floors in two hospitals and the emergency room in the third),
two EMT
sites, two nursing homes, and two physician’s private practices.
These
sites differed in terms of the public/private status and size. One
hospital
was large and located just outside of a major city, while the
others were

small community-based hospitals. One EMT site was a fire
department
staffed by 30 firefighters while the other was a private service
with
approximately 50 employees. The two private physician
practices included
a specialist’s office and a family practitioner’s office. The
frequency of
observations ranged from once to thrice a week, covering
various day,
evening, and night shifts. During each visit, researchers spent
anywhere
from three to ten hours observing the work site, shadowing
individual
workers, and talking to individuals and groups at the workplace.
Time
spent in these sites ranged from six months in two hospitals to
two days
in the third and two months in each of the EMT sites, doctor’s
offices, and
nursing home. Field notes for each visit were recorded,
transcribed, and
coded using Nvivo8.
Third, intensive interviews were conducted with 200
respondents,
including the 31 fathers we focus on here (EMTs, n = 13;
physicians, n =
18) who were contacted through the survey sample as well as
observation
sites. This subset was generally representative of the larger
survey sample.
Interviewers included five women and two men, but we
identified no
observable differences related to the interviewer’s gender. We
offered

respondents $35 for their interviews, which were open-ended
and lasted
one to two hours. Open-ended questions covered work schedules
and
hours, preferences for and perceptions of hours and schedules,
time off,
decisions relating to time and money, and time and relations
with spouse
and children. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. We
developed
codes from the literature and interview text and revised after
one round of
coding was completed. We used multiple rounds of coding using
Nvivo8
to ensure consistency.
In the following sections, we first look at the physicians’
fathering and
then turn to the EMTs. Comparing them, we distinguish between
“public”
fathering, which entails primary involvement with children in
leisure
activities and events outside of the home that are visible to
some larger
public; and “private” fathering, which entails a primary focus
on the quo-
tidian tasks of families, typically less visible to a larger public
because
much occurs at home.
PHYSICIANS AND PUBLIC FATHERING: “BEING THERE”

Physicians tended to highlight participation in or presence at
their chil-
dren’s public events as the way they were involved in their
children’s lives.
Even with their long hours or hectic schedules, physicians
emphasized
their concerted attempts to attend those activities. Sometimes
this kind of
paternal involvement required creativity in scheduling:
I coached [my son’s] soccer, and the way I coached his soccer
was I would
book two hours in my afternoon and I would not have patients
there, and I
would go to [town] and coach his practice and do the work,
bring him home
and then go back to work, and then work ’til 9:00.
As this father’s comment suggests, doctors let their children
influence
their schedules because they can; when they choose to do so,
they exert
significant control over their schedules. Physicians engage in
other public
activities with their children as well. When we were observing
in his
office, a surgeon showed us—with pride—his phone’s screen
with a
photo of his daughter dressed for Halloween, saying she was
going trick-
or-treating with him. But during our interview with this
physician, he
barely mentioned his daughter, suggesting her daily care was
his wife’s
domain.

“Being there” for public events was important to these
physicians. Yet
even when they were able to leave the office to attend their
children’s
events, work sometimes followed. One physician had a $3,000
car phone
installed so that he could return phone calls while watching his
children:
[I would] sit at a parking lot by my kids’ soccer games and
answer my calls
that I had to do, and still be able to see their games. [Before the
phone] I
would go to their shows at night with a pocketful of dimes, and
sometimes
not see any of the shows that they had because I was back at the
pay phone
making calls. So the phone set me free as far as that was
concerned, so it
got me so that I could sit and watch them.
Though able to be physically present at the game, his attention
was divided
between his family and his work. Yet to him, being at the game
was what
mattered. He is demonstrating, possibly to himself, his child,
and the com-
munity, that he cares as a father. In some sense, the very
difficulty of his
being there makes this demonstration all the more dramatic.

Through their participation in these activities, the doctors are
publicly
“doing fatherhood.” This performance of gender and fatherhood
entails
signs of “paternal visibility” (Coltrane 1996; West and
Zimmerman 1987)
to their children and the wider community. Moreover, like the
men
Townsend (2002) studied, a large part of what it means to them
to be a
father is to be a provider. Many of these physicians adopted a
neotradi-
tional model of masculinity (Gerson 2007)–one suggesting that
what it
means to be a good father is to be a good breadwinner and
provide finan-
cially. This is reinforced by the income associated with class
position:
Participation in public activities often requires a significant
financial out-
lay. How do we explain such public fathering? To answer that
question,
we first look at the physicians’ jobs and then turn to their
family lives.
THE DEMANDS OF PHYSICIANS’ PAID WORK
In the survey, physicians reported working an average of 50
hours per
week. However, these hours are underestimates. As became
clear in the
intensive interviews, many physicians did not include nondirect
patient care
or off-hours work in response to survey questions asking how
many hours
they work. They did not report activities such as checking work-

related
e-mail, participating in hospital committees, staying current in
medical lit-
erature (often required for recertification), or being on-call;
including these
activities often led to estimates of 60 or more hours per week.
While much work entailed direct patient care, paperwork—
documenting
patients’ visits and illnesses, preparing material for insurance
companies,
making referrals—kept physicians at their desks in the
evenings, well after
their patients went home. Most said that paperwork could easily
take an
extra two or three hours per day. We observed a number of them
eating
lunch on the run, coming in early and staying until 7:00 or 8:00
p.m., even
if they finished patient care by 5:00. Sitting at their desks, they
completed
necessary documentation for patient records, referrals, and
“most of all for
insurance companies.” Several said that since their office had
“gone elec-
tronic,” they would often go to their home computers in the
evening to enter
patient data they “just had not gotten to during the day.” These
were hours
when their families were likely available or in need of routine
care.

Being available to patients was important to many physicians
and often
meant being on-call. While physicians could sometimes rotate
their on-call
status with their colleagues, their turn often interrupted their
home lives.
One hospital physician described being on-call in this way: “I
mean, you
can’t do anything; you’re basically . . . it’s like a full day of
work.” Or as
another doctor put it, “You’re always aware your beeper is there
and could
go off at any time; you can’t just relax.” Importantly, much of
this work
occurred before or after shifts or during weekends—that is, at
key moments
when family members are likely to be home.
To explain their long hours, physicians talked about a number
of causes.
They emphasized the hours and schedules of medical school and
residency
that helped socialize them to their current long hours. A number
of physi-
cians said they quickly learned the long hours “demanded” of
their occupa-
tion and internalized these beliefs. Much of this dedication and
willingness
to work long hours was influenced by the commitment built into
the pro-
cess of becoming a physician (Becker 1960) or what Blair-Loy
(2003)
terms more broadly a “work-devotion schema.” Many years in
school, long
hours studying and in residency, and hundreds of thousands of

dollars for
training push physicians toward intense career commitment. As
one physi-
cian succinctly said, “There was just no time for anything else.”
Another
talked at some length about the process and distinguished the
experience
of physicians who are fathers from those who are mothers:
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One week into her new job, Letitia Camire learned she was
pregnant. It was 2011, and
she’d just been hired as the office manager for United Tool &
Machine, a small, family-
owned tool and die company outside Boston. Her salary was
$30,000 a year. Camire
clicked with her co-workers immediately. Her boss, the owner
and president, started
asking her about long-term career goals. “They seemed so
family-oriented,” says
Camire, now 32. So when her morning sickness became
noticeable (“I just sat at my
desk looking like death warmed over”), she felt she owed her
new work family an
explanation. She was only a few weeks along when she walked
into the president’s
office one morning, shut the door, and told him she was
pregnant.

“His face immediately changed,” she says. “The first words out
of his mouth were,
‘You know you’re still on your 90-day probation period.’ So I
pretty much knew what
that meant.” A few weeks later, she was let go. The company
told her it was a
reorganization move, but she didn’t buy it. She knew that
according to the 1978
Pregnancy Discrimination Act, firing or demoting an employee
because she’s pregnant
is illegal, but she also knew discrimination can be hard to
prove. The U.S. Supreme
Court recently considered the case of Peg�y Young, a United
Parcel Service employee
who was forced into unpaid leave when she told her company
she was pregnant and
couldn’t carry packages heavier than 20 pounds. Young has lost
in lower courts because
UPS’s accommodation of disabilities not caused by workplace
injuries is gender-neutral.
The court will issue its decision later this year. “I didn’t have
the financial resources to
fight,” Camire says. United Tool & Machine says Camire was
let go because her job was
eliminated, and that the president was unaware she was pregnant
at the time.
Camire soon found herself in the awkward position of
interviewing for jobs while
pregnant. She wasn’t showing yet, but she told recruiters
anyway. “I just didn’t want to
waste anyone’s time,” she says. Luckily, the Israel-based
electronics company Orbotech
had no qualms about hiring her. Camire was a new employee,
though, so she didn’t
qualify for the short-term disability insurance that it, like many

companies, uses as a
workaround to give maternity leave. Instead, she ran through
her sick days and
vacation time and relied on her husband’s salary to allow her to
take nine weeks off,
unpaid. “We put a lot of things on credit cards,” she says. They
stopped going out to
dinner. They streamlined their grocery budget, drove their cars
as little as possible, and
gave up—for a while, anyway—the idea of saving for
retirement. “Financially, I probably
should’ve been back even sooner than that,” Camire says. But
she couldn’t find a local
day care center that would take such a young baby.
Her story isn’t unusual. Unless you work for a company that
voluntarily offers it, or
in one of three states, paid maternity leave doesn’t exist in the
U.S. A law called the
By Claire Suddath
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Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) grants up to 12 weeks
of unpaid leave every year,
but it applies only to full-time workers at companies with 50 or
more employees. About
half of all working Americans are covered by FMLA. The other
half—freelancers,
contract workers, entrepreneurs, people who work at small
businesses—are on their
own. Paid leave is even rarer: Only 12 percent of American
workers have access to it in
the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This comes as a shock to a lot of young women. “Wait, what?”
Kathryn, 33, says
about the moment she realized the New York media startup
she’d recently joined didn’t
offer maternity leave. “I thought we had laws about this.”
(Kathryn asked to have her

last name withheld because of a nondisclosure agreement with
her former company.)
Most new mothers are in their 20s or 30s, which means they
grew up in a world of
female Supreme Court justices, politicians, and astronauts. They
have more college
degrees than men, they entered the workforce in near-equal
numbers, and they chose
their careers assuming that having children wouldn’t mean
losing money. Almost two-
thirds of women with children under 6 work, about twice the
rate of the previous
generation. “I went to college and found something I loved. I
got a job. I married and
had babies and just assumed maternity leave was something that
existed,” says Annalisa
Spencer, 31, an electrical engineer in Salt Lake City who has
three children, and got no
leave for the third. “Nobody told me it would be like this.”
In 2013, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D�N.Y.) introduced
legislation that would make
employers offer new parents three months of paid leave at 66
percent of their salary,
but the bill, the Family Act, has been stalled in Congress for
more than a year. Even if it
passes, it won’t fix a system that paints a huge segment of the
workforce into a corner.
In a country where the median household income is $53,000, 66
percent of a salary
might not be enough to support a family. But the Family Act
would drastically change
the lives of many American workers. One of the reasons women
make less than men—
16¢ per dollar less, according to the Pew Research Center—is

that they’re clustered in
lower-paying fields, or in positions where they work fewer
hours. Yet young women
right out of college experience almost no gap at all. The
discrepancy grows as they get
older and advance—or fail to advance—in their careers. And the
first bump in the road
seems to happen right as they start to have children.
“We have these policies set up
from the Mad Men era when
dads worked and moms stayed
at home. But that doesn’t
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reflect the American workforce
anymore.”
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PHOTOGRAPHER: STEVEN BRAHMS FOR BLOOMBERG
BUSINESSWEEK. SET DESIGN: JASON SINGLETON.
GROOMING: ANGELA DI CARLO
According to the United Nations’ International Labour
Organization, there are only
two countries in the world that don’t have some form of legally
protected, partially paid
time off for working women who’ve just had a baby: Papua New
Guinea and the U.S.
The U.S. is also way behind the 78 countries that also offer
leave to fathers. Forcing
mothers back to work early can have consequences for children.
When they’re on
maternity leave, their children are more likely to be breast-fed
and taken to the doctor
for checkups. Studies have found that a year after having a
baby, women who took at
least a month of leave reported higher salary increases.
With no federal action, some states have stepped in. Five states
pay new mothers
through their disability insurance programs. In 2004, California
passed the country’s

first paid parental leave law, open to both mothers and fathers.
There, new parents get
up to six weeks off at 55 percent of their current paycheck, up
to about $1,000 a week.
Since then, New Jersey and Rhode Island have followed.
The policies vary widely across industries and pay grades. A
BLS survey of
“business, management, and finance” workers—basically, those
in white-collar jobs—
found that 26 percent of them get paid leave. At many Silicon
Valley companies, which
compete for talent, new parents have it made. Facebook offers a
little more than four
months to everyone. Google offers five for mothers and three
for fathers or new
adoptive parents. The company developed its policy a few years
ago when it noticed
that many new mothers were quitting their jobs. After it added
two more months and
offering full pay, the number of new mothers who left the
company dropped by half.
Some older companies also have generous policies. Goldman
Sachs offers four paid
months, and General Electric offers two months to moms and
two weeks to dads or
other parents. Waitresses and sales clerks are often out of luck;
only 6 percent of
service workers get anything at all. That means the ability to
adjust to parenthood,
learn to breast-feed, and manage a newborn becomes a luxury
only certain people can
afford. “We have these policies set up from the Mad Men era
when dads worked and
moms stayed at home. But that doesn’t reflect the American

workforce anymore,” says
Gillibrand, who as partner at the Manhattan law firm Boies,
Schiller & Flexner wrote
the firm’s maternity leave policy in 2002.
Recently, some companies have started to offer leave to fathers.
This decreases the
likelihood that an employer will shy away from hiring young
women, and it de-
stigmatizes the idea that new dads need time off, too. In the 10
years since California
adopted its policy, the number of requests submitted by men has
gone up each year
and stands at 26 percent. In general, the amount of time they
take off is much shorter,
typically no more than a week or two. And as children age, the
cost of day care and
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nannies starts to squeeze families’ income, sometimes
prompting one of the parents to
go part-time or decide to stay home. Even today, that person is
usually the mother.
In most places, the only parent offered time off is the mother;
she qualifies for short-
term disability insurance after she physically gives birth. That’s
what Spencer, the
electrical engineer in Utah, used when she got six weeks at half
pay after she had her
first child. (She skipped payments on her 401(k) to take another
six unpaid.) By the time
her third child came along, she had dropped down to part-time
so she wouldn’t have to
pay so much for rising day care costs, which meant she didn’t
get any maternity leave at
all. “I’m hourly now, so it’s not like I’m getting paid for time
I’m not working,” she says.
She spent her last maternity leave working from home.
Even women in high-income positions have trouble figuring out

how the patchwork
of policies applies to them. “I have three months of paid leave,
46 days of unused
vacation time that I saved up, and then the six weeks that
California offers, but I don’t
know if it runs concurrently with my vacation time. It was very
confusing. For a while I
didn’t even know what day my leave officially ended,” Jeanette
Barzelay, a civil litigation
attorney in San Francisco, told me. Because Barzelay lives in
California, she’s covered
under the state’s paid-leave law.
Despite the confusing system, Barzelay did take a lot of time
off—six months,
partially paid. But most people, even in California, aren’t that
lucky. Colleen, a fast-
talking 44-year-old television director in Los Angeles, didn’t
use California’s paid leave
when she had her second child in 2008 because it doesn’t
include job protection. For
years, she has worked 65- to 70-hour weeks with studios such as
Walt Disney and
Nickelodeon. (Colleen asked to have her last name withheld
because she doesn’t want
to jeopardize her relationship with the studios.) She’s highly
paid, but as with most
production workers in Hollywood, her contracts for TV shows
run from week to week.
Because she’s a contract employee, FMLA doesn’t cover her,
and California’s law, which
does, doesn’t require studios to let her keep her job. “There’s
this kind of unwritten,
unspoken thought that you could be replaced at any moment,”
she says. So when a TV
studio asked her to return to work three weeks after having a C-

section, she had to
show up. “I told them I needed to recover from major surgery
before I go back to
running around on set all day. They were like, ‘Umm, we really
need you back,’ ” she
says. “I wasn’t in a position to argue with them.”
Gillibrand’s bill would apply to every company, no matter what
size, and would keep
people like Camire from having to rely on credit cards or people
like Colleen from
working right after a C-section. It includes fathers, adoptive
parents, and same-sex
parents and would be paid through a new payroll tax of two-
tenths of 1 percent. It’s
endorsed by groups such as the National Partnership for Women
and Families and the
Small Business Majority. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and
the National Restaurant
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Association, which have historically opposed paid leave,
haven’t come out against it.
Furthermore, polls suggest that paid family leave is
overwhelmingly supported by men
and women across the political spectrum.
So why is the Family Act at a standstill? Gillibrand says
Congress doesn’t think it’s
important enough. “The issue isn’t being raised because too
many of the members of
Congress were never affected by it,” she says, pointing out that
80 percent of Congress
is older and male. “They’re not primary caregivers. Most
members of Congress are
affluent and are able to afford help or able to support their
[wives]. It’s not a problem
for most of them.” Hillary Clinton has also admitted that while
she supports paid leave,
it’s a political battle the U.S. isn’t ready to fight. “I don’t think,
politically, we could get it

[passed] now,” she said in a CNN town hall meeting last June.
Washington won’t be able to ignore this forever. “You’re
finally starting to see
momentum on this issue,” says Debra Ness, president of the
National Partnership for
Women and Families. Over the past decade, Ness has noticed
that young parents are
becoming increasingly angry at the lack of employer support
when they start to have
children. “This will be part of the conversation during the next
election,” she says. “The
sleeping giant is waking up.”
Before it was passed, California’s law was vehemently opposed
by manufacturing
and small-business associations, which argued that it would be
too hard for companies
with just a few employees to handle someone’s six-week
absence. The California
Chamber of Commerce called it a “job killer.” To get it passed,
lawmakers agreed to
fund the law by taxing people’s paychecks, not businesses. As a
result, a 2011 survey
found that 91 percent of California business owners said the law
either helped or had no
effect on their profitability. The National Bureau of Economic
Research found that
California women in low-wage jobs were more than three times
as likely to take some
sort of maternity leave under the law, and returned to their old
jobs in higher numbers.
Over time their wages were higher, too. “Businesses in
California don’t seem to be
reporting a strong negative effect. I haven’t seen evidence of a
significant downside,”

says Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and
economics at the University of
Virginia.
Gillibrand’s bill is a sweeping piece of legislation that would,
as Carrie Lukas, the
managing director of the conservative Independent Women’s
Forum, puts it, “rewrite
employment contracts for every working American.” Lukas is
against the act because
she’s “worried about the way it’ll change women’s employment
prospects. It’s written
in gender-neutral language, but every employer in their right
mind knows who’s going
to take advantage of these benefits.” As hard as it might be for
paid-leave advocates to
accept, she has a point. That’s exactly what happened in
Sweden.
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In any discussion of parental leave, Sweden is the promised
land. Parents are given
16 months of paid leave, two of which are reserved just for
fathers, and they can divide
the rest however they like until their child is 8 years old. While
on leave, the
government pays 80 percent of the parent’s income, even if
she’s self-employed.
“We’ve got it so good here,” says Christine Demsteader, a
single mother living in
Stockholm. She runs her own communications company but still
took 16 months off
when her only child was born a few years ago. “The thing is, we
have only one system
for doing things: Women take a year off, then they go back to
work and the kid goes into
day care,” she says. “You don’t have another option.”
“And it’s understood that a woman who becomes a mother
cannot have the same

career as a man,” adds her friend Lisa Rydberg, who’d run over
to Demsteader’s house
when she heard that an American journalist was calling.
For all Sweden’s efforts at gender equality, men still make
about 35 percent more
than women, according to a 2012 Swedish government report.
And although the top five
spots on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index
are all held by Nordic
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countries, their percentage of female chief executive officers is
no higher than the 5
percent achieved by Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. “I just
know I’d get a promotion
three years later than a colleague who is a man,” says Rydberg.
“That’s how it is.”
Intentionally or not, Sweden seems to have routed women onto
the “mommy track,”
a slower, less demanding career path for women with children.
In the U.S. it often
comes under the guise of the purposefully vague term
“caregiver status,” which
companies use when offering reduced hours and a lower salary
to parents who need
flexibility. In academia, universities will often pause the so-
called tenure clock for
female professors who take time off to have children. Some of
these policies can be
helpful. But they also have the side effect of segregating those
who use them into
positions where they’re just not expected to advance.
Most women try to get around this by gaming the system. A
biolo�y professor at the
University of Pittsburgh planned her pregnancy so that she’d
give birth during the
summer, when she already had time off. (Unpaid, of course.)
Colleen the TV director

tried to have her kids between TV seasons; she succeeded two
out of three times. Of
course, this method assumes a woman gets pregnant only when
she wants to, she has a
healthy pregnancy and delivery, and her baby doesn’t need
special care. “I had this one
window when I had to have the baby,” Kate Lytton, a ballet
teacher in Akron, told me.
Lytton had her daughter in July and took six weeks off unpaid,
but could do that only
because classes weren’t in session. “When she was a week late,
I worried she’d cut into
my leave time.”
In fields without a seasonal break, women put off having
children until they’re in a
senior position, then cross their fingers and hope it’s not too
late. “The standard
practice for women in law is to make partner first and then start
a family,” says Chelsea
Petersen, a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie in Seattle. Nine
years ago she was 34
and a midlevel associate at the firm, which is exactly the wrong
time—professionally—to
have kids. “That’s when you’re really working hard, trying to
prove yourself. But with
my age, I couldn’t wait another seven years,” she says. A year
after having her first and
only child, Petersen found herself crying in a fetal position on
the floor of her office,
suffering from exhaustion. “Days would go by where I wouldn’t
have eaten a real meal
or taken care of myself for five minutes,” she says. Over the
years, Perkins Coie has
extended its leave policy to cover fathers and created a support
group for working

parents. Still, Petersen can count at least 10 women in her
department who’ve left,
many because the demands on their time were too much. As far
as she knows, she’s the
only one who had a baby, made partner, and stayed full-time.
Not everyone can work as hard as Petersen. Or even wants to.
“Listen, I know Sheryl
Sandberg wants me to lean in,” Colleen told me. In her book
Lean In and her 2010 TED
Talk, the Facebook COO urged women to accept promotions or
go for new jobs even
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