Question

Negotiating Work and Family in America DIANNA SHANDY AND KARINE MOE
Summary In this article, Dianna Shandy and Karine Moe explore the complexities of the latest research on how generations of women have handled the challenges of negotiating work and family in America. By combining labor statistics, interviews with more than 100 women, focus groups, and surveys of nearly 1000 college graduates, the authors explore the advances of women in the workforce, their experiences juggling families and careers outside of the home, and the subsequent choices new generations of women are making in this area.
Anthropologists used to view the gender relationship between men and women as one of inherent male domination. Ernestine Friedl, however, argued that control of publicly distributed resources was key to women's power. Among the Hadza of Tanzania for example, men and women gather food equally, and subsequently relate to one another with relative gender equality. In contrast, when men supply virtually all of the food, such as among the Inuit of the Arctic, there is significant gender inequality.
Similar cultural ranking exists in the United States. In the United States one's occupation determines relative rank. Today, women hold positions previously reserved for men onlypositions that include leadership, management, and business ownership. Women make up half of the workforce on all U.S. payrolls, and own one third of the businesses in the United States. Additionally, women now account for more than 50 percent of all college students and are the majority of those enrolled in graduate or professional schools. Women have made great strides toward gender equality in the workplace over the last few decades, but many are still opting out when they have children.
Many gender-related factors both push women out of the workforce and pull them toward family and home, such as a woman's "second shift" or experiencing a "glass ceiling" (the proverbial barrier preventing advancement to a higher position). Unlike other industrialized nations, women in the United States of at least three generations have experienced and continue to experience significant structural barriers to flexible and affordable childcare.
Given the low cultural ranking given of the occupation of "full-time motherhood," women often struggle to maintain a sense of gender equality, prestige, and power while at home. Some do so by forming strong social groups. Still others describe themselves as career women taking time off to stay home with kids.
According to research by Shandy and Moe, there is currently a surplus of well-educated professional men in relationship to women.

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