A recent article noted that the percentage of “stay-at-home” fathers has increased over the past few years. Among families that have one parent in a “stay-at-home” status, men now represent 18% of those families versus 11% in 1989. Consistent with this, there has been an increase in the percentage of fathers not working for pay, and a small increase in mothers working for pay over the past decades. Higher proportions of stay-at-home fathers say that they are staying home to care for children than was true in earlier times (compared to inability to work because of some impairment, for example). Compared to fathers working for pay, stay-at-home dads are less likely to have a college degree, be less wealthy, somewhat older, and less likely to be married. This finding is compatible with growing gender differences in educational attainment, but from one perspective even the 18% figure seems unusually low.
For example, beginning in the late 1970’s women’s enrollments in colleges and universities exceeded that of males’. Since that time, each decade has seen higher and higher percentages of women attending and completing undergraduate degrees compared to men. For example, recent entering cohorts of first-year students at Georgetown are about 60% women. This is a long-term trend and shows no signs of changing. One might imagine that social norms surrounding gender roles would follow these continuing trends. If this trend started over forty years ago, why aren’t there more stay-at-home dads by now? It looks like there are several counteracting influences, some economic, some social.
First, the sorting of men and women into marriages does not match the higher percentages of women with college degrees. Consider the percentage of marriages in which the husband has less education than the wife compared to the percentage in which the husband has more education than the wife. Only in 2015 was parity attained in those two percentages. That’s the direction one would hypothesize from the enrollment data by gender, but one would have expected this earlier than 2015. This phenomenon is compatible with another—men with a college degree have higher marriage rates, probably having been disproportionately chosen by the college-educated women. So, in short, while the overall trend is for women to invest more in their postsecondary education, it has led much more slowly to the trend that women have more educational attainment than their spouses. This probably slowed the growth in stay-at-home fathers.
Another relevant potential influence on the proportion of stay-at-home dads may be income potentials of the two spouses. There are strong data showing that the investment in college portends higher lifetime earnings, in general, but more fine-grained analysis shows that choice of major greatly affects the college advantage. College majors traditionally chosen by women (e.g., nursing, education, fine arts, psychology) tend to offer lower incomes than those traditionally chosen by men (e.g., business, engineering, physical sciences). These traditions are self-reinforcing, as women may feel unwelcomed in majors dominated by men. But these traditions are too are changing but very gradually (e.g., the percentage of women majoring in biology has greatly increased).
But even finer-grain analysis shows other gender differences. Within a given college major, it appears that women graduates sort into occupations with lower incomes than those of men who pursued the same major. So the economic payoff of a given major varies by gender. Finally, some skilled trades not requiring a college degree garner incomes higher than those typical of some majors of college degree programs. Thus, college educated women do not necessarily have higher incomes than their husbands without a college degree.
Note that there is broad evidence that even within the same occupation, women tend to be paid less than men. Research that tried to “explain away” gender differences in salaries within occupations controlling on other attributes have failed. (The common finding is that women make roughly 80% of the income of men with common work attributes.) Thus, this fact, too, increases the likelihood that a college-educated wife may be less likely to have higher income prospects than her non-college-educated husband. In such cases, if one spouse chooses to stay-at-home, it might tend to be the wife.
Finally, sociologists and anthropologists teach us well that norms affecting roles in the family change very, very slowly in reaction to external influences. While stay-at-home fathering is growing more prevalent (i.e., the rise from 11% to 18% of stay-at-home parents are fathers), there probably remain stigmas perceived by stay-at-home fathers and their spouses.
In short, while the higher rates of educational investments by women are notable, their effects on the lives of graduates are dampened by all these other factors. But, after the more than 40 years of women’s educational achievements exceeding those of men, one still might have speculated that more social change would have occurred. The very slow increases in the rate of stay-at-home fathering is just one outcome of this inertia.
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One might also think that mothers are better equipped to nurse and nurture their young children than are the fathers whereas the fathers are better suited to invite more mature children into outside adventures. Think of Tribal Americans mentoring the boys into manhood (although it often would be the uncles rather than the fathers doing the mentoring, perhaps more objectively than would the fathers).
In our current culture in the USA, educated women who quickly choose a mothering role might lose as much as a decade of working before returning (or turning for the first time) to out-of-home work. That would apply braking to the expected “progress” accompanying increased education for women. That would be an interesting hypothesis to test.
Thinking from the perspective of attachment theory, the braking on progress could be a reason for less cases of insecure attachment than would otherwise be the case (given that mothering is more likely to result in secure attachment than would a lack of mothering even though some types of mothering wouldn’t be helpful, with helpful mothering not even being possible without there being some mothering).
Still, even with secure attachment established through helpful motherly attention during the child’s younger years, braking on the journey into adulthood might be expected if the fathering role gets neglected. Wild at Heart, by John Eldredge, is a good book for getting a sense of what the fathering role should be accomplishing.
It also might be interesting to examine the differences in childhood outcomes under various mixtures of mothering and fathering:
1. mothering of younger child + fathering of older child
2. mothering of younger child + no fathering of older child
3. no mothering of younger child + fathering of older child
4. no mothering of younger child + no fathering of older child
5. fathering of younger child + mothering of older child
6. fathering of younger child + no mothering of older child
7. no fathering of younger child + mothering of older child
(Note that #4 eliminates the need to test the logical situation for a #8)
Of course, a joint mothering/fathering set of situations could also be tested (with both parents working from home during a child’s younger years and/or earlier years). Teleworkng and hybrid working arrangement for both parents could create situations resembling farm family life (possibly with better outcomes for everyone). Increasing education of males and females in the field of farm management or increasing education in other “home based” fields of work could be beneficial, in addition to increasing education leading to work in teleworking and hybrid working environments.
Fascinating discussion!