Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (review)

Work-family scholars hail from at least a half a dozen different disciplines, and examine the work-family nexus on several fronts. The field needs a systematic review of findings to determine future research directions, and to outline policy initiatives to better align work and family obligations. Families That Work is more concerned with public policy options, but it relies heavily on research findings in evaluating alternatives. Comprehensive and scholarly, yet readable and lively, this book is an invaluable reference for researchers and students alike.

For the authors, the primary problem is that European countries recognize that children are a "public good," while America privatizes the integration of worker and parent roles. That is, employers and the welfare state offer little or no assistance to parents who need childcare, and reduce or eliminate most benefits for part-time workers. Against this backdrop, parents are working longer hours, and gender inequality is still prevalent in the home (in caring responsibilities) and in the workplace (in pay and promotion opportunities). Thus, gender traditionalism still typifies dual-earner families, who privately decide that men should largely be "earners," while women are largely "carers."

The consequences of these private decisions are familiar to work-family scholars, and include women interrupting their careers and/or taking part-time jobs with nonstandard hours, and children spending much of their formative years in the care of substandard providers rather than in the company of their parents. Further, stay-at-home women suffer a devalued status in a society that values market-based work. This situation has divided feminist scholars who aspire to the same goal of gender parity, but differ in the route to get there. One camp is focused on achieving economic equality in the labor market (and often devalues care work), while the other camp favors greater societal rewards for care work (and risks reinforcing gendered divisions of labor). Another less-recognized problem with current arrangements is that work-family conflict is often defined as a "woman's problem," which prevents us from considering policies that foster greater father involvement in family life.

The authors contend that America should move toward a "dual-earner/dual-carer" society, modeled on European solutions to reconciling work and family obligations. In such a society, men and women equally share the provider and nurturer roles within the family, cutting back (or ceasing) work when children are young, and resuming their careers (without penalty) when their children reach school-age. Such a society also places responsibility for the care of very young children in the home, rather than outside the home. Finally, such a society promotes gender parity in a way that bridges the divide between the "employment" and "care" feminists mentioned above.

The heart of the book examines European family and labor market policies in successive chapters devoted to family leave time when children are young, regulation of work hours in the labor market, and the provision of age-appropriate public care to children. In contrast to the failings of America, European (especially Nordic) countries more successfully reconcile parenthood and employment by: (1) offering paid leave (at high income replacement) to both parents in the six to eight months following a birth, (2) mandating shorter work weeks and longer vacations in America, and (3) providing high-quality and low-cost child care and after-school programs that are congruent with parents' work schedules. Space constraints preclude a detailed discussion of the full array of factors on which work-family policies are assessed. The authors provide numerous tables summarizing cross-national variation in work-family policies, and carefully defend their analyses in ample footnotes. A following chapter draws on European surveys to establish the positive effects of these polices on gender equality and children's development. These chapters provide a good example of how to craft sophisticated arguments for an expert audience, without losing one's students in the process.

The over-arching theme...