 Good afternoon. I'm David Gray. Welcome to the New America Foundation for our discussion on the future of work and family. I have to admit I've been looking forward to this event all spring as we have some of what I think are some of the most interesting thinkers and writers on demographic, workforce and gender trends in the country here today. Lisa Guernsey, another interesting thinker, was to join us but it was called away at the last minute. As we know the relationships between men and women, families and work, and children are changing in all sorts of ways that should cause us to rethink our assumptions about what the future will look like. And indeed many of the structures of our society have and will have to change to keep pace. And today we're going to look at some of how those structures and assumptions have changed, are changing and what the future will look like as assumptions about gender roles, work, family, fertility, immigration and life starts to shift. To help us do that we have three innovative thinkers here today and I'm just thrilled to present them to you. Eliza Mundy, Bridget Schulte and Phil Longman to speak and then we'll open it up to your questions. Eliza Mundy is a Schwartz fellow, she'll speak first here at the New America Foundation and gender and work family expert. She's the author of The Richer Sex. You know in college I was actually voted most likely to be on the cover of Time Magazine in my college but the closest I've come is buying one of the magazines that featured Eliza on the cover with her new book is in March Time featured her book about how the new majority of female breadwinners is transforming our family's sex and love. Then Bridget Schulte will speak. She's a Schwartz fellow here at New America an expert on family work life balance and conflict and her book, Overwhelmed, will be another groundbreaking book here that we look forward to and I understand she's recently come back from Europe on a fact-finding trip and we'll share her thoughts on that with us. And Phil Longman one of my favorite thinkers and writers about demography and family for a long time and also a senior research fellow here at New America and author of The Empty Cradle. So I'll invite Eliza and Bridget and Phil to come forward and sit here and please join me in welcoming them and we'll begin with Eliza please. So you're gonna start the clock? The clock. Okay. Yeah so thank you so much for coming. I'm Eliza Mundy and I I'm really happy to be here and happy to be a fellow at New America. I am a longtime reporter for The Washington Post. I'm the mother of two teenage children, a boy and a girl. I have certainly experienced the overwhelmed feeling that Bridget will talk about and have worked part-time at various times and full-time at various times and of course it always feels like overtime. And so I have well I'll just call your attention to sort of two recent interesting little items. The cover of The New Yorker that I just got has a young woman with a stroller entering a park full of what I assume are part-time working or stay-at-home fathers. So a young woman with a stroller confronting this apparent new world of engaged hands-on dads pushing strollers. And I thought that was interesting just to sort of remind us that that is very much in the in the air. And then about a week ago the Pew Research Center which just keeps producing incredibly interesting reports about family reported that in a reversal of traditional gender roles young women now surpass young men in the importance they place on having a high-paying career or profession. Which is a really interesting change and both of these relate to the research that I did from my book The Richer Sex. And I guess I'll just talk a little bit about how I became interested in this topic. I had been interested for about six or seven years in these incremental news reports about the fact that women now outnumber men on college campuses. Women are taking well between 55 and 60% of college degrees now and and they are also taking the majority of associates degrees, masters and PhDs. And while there's still a gender wage gap for sure and women with a college degree still don't make as much as men that gap is closing. And there was a report out about two years ago that showed that young women in most American cities now who are single and childless make more than their male peers. So there is a really interesting shift going on and I guess thinking back to my own college experience I was on a college campus in the 80s where the proportions I think were about three to one male to female. So women were very much a minority when I was in college and the fact that women are in a majority now on university campuses is a really interesting switch and it's a switch that's taking place all over the world in most countries now. Women are outnumbering men in universities. So how is this going to play out for this generation of young women who are better educated on average than their male peers and may have a higher earning potential than their male peers do. And I was talking to my editor at Simon and Schuster who is a former editor at Time and very acutely attuned to trends and she was noticing in her own professional and personal circles more and more women who were out earning their partners and having a lot of conversations about the impact that this was or was not having on their relationships. And we started talking about this and when I started looking into the government statistics I was well I was really interested to see first of all that there is a Bureau of Labor Statistics table that tracks wives who out earn husbands. There's not a table for husbands who out earn wives because presumably that was considered the norm in the late 1980s when they started the table and what you see when you look at it is that you know back in 1987 when they started the percentage of working wives who out earn their husband was about 23 percent and it's now close to 40 percent and when you look at it you can see a steady rise and interestingly you can see kind of a stagnation in the 1990s but beginning in about 2000 2001 well before the recession you can see an acceleration you can see it jumping about a percentage point every year and then you know in 2009 reflecting really sort of the the depths of the recession and male job loss during the recession you it jumps a couple percentage points so it could slide back a little bit but but what you see as a steady rise and with the help of actually people here in New America I just I mean it's not that hard to do I just you know plotted it out and you can see that if it continues to rise at this pace by about 2030 the percentage of working wives who out earn their husbands would rise above 50 percent and so so we could have that benchmark and we also know that there is a growing percentage of women who are the breadwinners in their households because they're single moms I mean we know that 40% of children now are born to unmarried mothers so you have this this this large and and I think growing group of women who are breadwinners by dint of being the sole earner in their household so you know we're looking at I think a really interesting future in terms of work-family balance and and and women's increasing economic power and you know the opportunities and the burdens and responsibilities that come with that so I tried to do a lot of I tried to spread the net really widely in terms of doing personal interviews with women who are living this situation and it you know included women in their 40s and 50s who had just kind of emerged as the more successful partner in their marriage and we're sort of surprised by the turn of events because they hadn't necessarily expected it I interviewed African-American women who have been living the situation for a long time in large part because the you know the the changes in our economy that have affected all men that have led to the decline in high-wage jobs for high school graduates have impacted African-American men even more so African-American women have been breadwinners for a longer period of time and so I try to talk to a lot of women about that I also spent a lot of time with Latina women in deep south Texas who were also out achieving men at a at an even higher rate than women are nationally so in their community men would often leave leave after high school and and try to join the workforce get any job really that they could find women are staying in college they're getting degrees as psychology you know psychology degrees social workers teachers lawyers and they're emerging as better educated and better equipped to provide in what is really a still very macho community and so talking to women about how this affected their dating life and their you know in their marriages or their lives of single women because a lot of the women that I interviewed are spending a lot of time together going out together a lot as single women they go out dancing one of them said you know we don't even expect men to come up to us on the dance floor and these women are in an interesting situation from a work family balance point of view because they want to stay in that region they often have parents and grandparents who are living there they often have childcare that's provided by their mother or their grandmother so they don't actually have a child care problem the women I talked to were very motivated to work they were very proud of their careers and their and their degrees and they a lot of them were single moms and they they actually could get along in terms of childcare and work pretty well because they have this extended family of women who are you know all too happy to watch their children during the day and I spent a lot of time interviewing you sort of young college age women who are part of this generation of kind of supercharged well educated you know women with with really unprecedented prospects for earning and what I found I mean in all these interviews what what really one of the many things that struck me is is I think I would be in the category of women who for the past 30 or 40 years really expected and have worked for you know parity and an equality and you think of that as meaning okay in an ideal world if I'm married I'll earn as much as my husband does because I should you know and and and I'll work the same number of hours but also when we come home we'll we'll work the same number of hours at home and everything will be the same and that will be the ideal world and so I find that women and men can be taken aback when when the woman when it's actually you don't it's not a quality in parity it's actually you find yourself working longer or earning more or becoming the breadwinner in a way that you hadn't necessarily expected and I found you know that men can have a problem with this but but women can also have a problem with this and and and are forced I think to ask themselves a set of new questions I interviewed one young woman in the San Francisco Bay Area who is a mechanical engineer working in the aerospace community and and her husband went back to well he was a boyfriend at the time and he went back to work to get went back to school to get his masters and when he graduated he was unable to find a job because it was the depths of the recession and so she really found herself becoming the breadwinner unexpectedly they were obliged to get married sooner than they had expected because he needed to get on health insurance so they had hoped that they would be able to have this big wedding invite all their friends and they found that they couldn't they had to they quietly got married so that they would later be able to have a wedding and invite all their friends and she found that she was you know very aware of the responsibility of having to support a household not just herself she had always expected to support herself but she had not expected to support a husband and a household and and she did it and and she found that the responsibility of being the breadwinner actually led her to work much harder at work she was already working hard but she wasn't liking her job that much in an ideal world she might have changed jobs but she felt it was so important to keep this job that she started traveling more she started working longer hours she found that her performance evaluations were improving she felt better about her job because she was getting these great performance evaluations but she was having to ask questions like her husband was doing all the work at home he was doing all the cooking all the cleaning he was taking their animals to the vet and she had to ask herself well is that fair I mean we've said for 20 or 30 years that if the man is the breadwinner he's not entitled to sit around when he gets home you know he has to pitch in he has to change the diapers and the and and she found herself asking well you know when I come home at the end of a long hard day couldn't I just sit around a little bit and and she didn't ask this was a woman who had belonged to the freedom from gender society in college I mean she had been a progressive feminist all her life and she found herself wrestling with what she thought were questions that had been answered long time ago and even when he went back and got here he went back he found a job but he was making only half of what she did and she found that he was still doing the majority of the work at home and she was still asking herself well you know maybe that's okay he's better at these tasks than I am and so she found herself offering the same justifications that men have you know you're better at loading the dishwasher right and so you should continue doing it so she was really wrestling with questions as the breadwinner that she had not anticipated asking and she also was asking questions like well if I volunteer to take a travel assignment because I'm the breadwinner do I need to call home and run that by him do I need to see if it's okay or am I entitled just to to go and she found that she sometimes would just go I mean that she would sign up without without checking she also had to admit and this is interesting when women become breadwinners studies show that they're more likely to hang on to control over their earnings than men are that traditionally male breadwinners have handed over their pay packet or most of their pay packet to their spouse and treated this as the households earnings women are still more likely to retain control and so she she found herself she admitted that that when he was staying at home and took one of their animals to the vet and okayed an expensive procedure without clearing it with her she said you know he had been earning I think that would have been okay with me but because he didn't ask me I felt like hey you just spent a bunch of my money without asking me so she was still thinking of her money as my money and I think it's because women have been raised to think of our earnings as supplemental as as sort of pin money and and the idea that no this is our money this is our households money and is is still something that we're wrapping our minds around and I spoke to more than one progressive breadwinning wife who who admitted to sort of secret spasms of feeling more entitled to her money than than her husband or partner so it was interesting to see these old questions get revived in a new context one of the things that I also came to to to wonder as I interviewed couples where this was working out really well I interviewed a family in Michigan of five adult siblings who have been raised by a classic male breadwinning dad five of the six siblings now are in female earner households three of them are heterosexual marriages where the husbands have decided to be just you know like this this guy on the cover and these are men in their late 40s who've been very happy as a secondary earners very supportive run their household really well one of the one of the husbands is a statistician by training and he runs his household just incredibly like that and you know has the employment calendar I mean he is not overwhelmed and and he has laundry day and and his wife said that he one year he tried to he wanted to do a statistical analysis of trick-or-treaters so he could gauge how much candy to buy the next year only he decided in the end that there were too many unpredictable variables like the weather so it was not a valid experiment but they tried it for a couple of years but this is the sort of running of the household that he does and it works for their family and these women have been able to really rise in their workplaces because they are so supported by husbands who are very happy in their secondary earner or non-earning role and it did make me wonder and I'm interested you know to know what all of you think about this that the old fashion specialization model of one person as the primary earner and one person as the secondary earner or non-earner if you're going to have a family you know that maybe it's more valid than we thought and maybe for women to really rise to the top maybe that's what it's going to take and I did I don't know if that's the answer but I did find myself asking if maybe sometimes we're going to have to dial back on this expectation of exact equality like a husband and wife who are mirror images of each other and tolerate the idea that maybe one person is going to be need to be the one to pull ahead if you really want to succeed in a high-powered workplace and you want to have a family so that was a question that I found myself wondering as I was doing my reporting so thanks sure okay that's that on okay hey everybody I'm Bridget Schulte and like lies I'm also a longtime reporter at the Washington Post and have been on leave and a fellow here at New America very grateful as well to have the kind of amazing thinking power and just really smart and thoughtful people around here to help support the work my journey was a little different I was part of an internal working group at the Washington Post we were looking at our readership numbers and you know over years you know obviously newspaper readership has been in decline as people have migrated over to online and digital reading this is a couple years ago I think before we fully embraced you know the clicks and you know let's go digital and so we were looking at well at the readership numbers and in this demographic that that our research folks called frenetic families they were noticing that there was a big gap between men and women in sort of the 18 to 34 18 to 44 age range and so they appointed this committee to figure out you know what's going on and so all of the people appointed to the committee were women and we all looked around at each other and most of us were working mothers or had a really hard time getting up in the morning and getting the kids out the door and oh my god I forgot the Girl Scout forms and here's your $11 for your you know school photos I'm just describing last week and you know getting the kids out the door well you know my husband would you know very leisurely read the newspaper and so we looked around we said you know we're really busy and we have a hard time ourselves reading the newspaper in the morning and we work for the newspaper so that's not a good thing so we figured women are just too busy and somebody said well isn't there a time aren't there time studies don't people do like how we use our time and you know isn't there something that would show how busy mothers are and I said you know because we were reporters and we wanted this report to be very you know fact-based and evidence evidentiary and I said yeah I don't know I'll look so with absolutely no more background than the ability to call up Google I did time busy mother and up pops the time use researcher and so I figured I'll give him a call he's the University of Maryland's a local call so I give him a call and I said you know we're doing this we're looking at why women don't seem to not be reading the newspaper to the extent that they used to and not to the extent that men are even though those numbers are dropping as well and we just figured mothers are too busy he said wrong mothers aren't too busy mothers have 30 hours of leisure a week they have more leisure now than they did in the 1960s even though more of them are in the marketplace and I said yeah like nearly three-fourths are in the marketplace you know I said I don't know what you're talking about you're not I don't have 30 hours of leisure a week I kind of did a quick little file it's like okay yoga class all right hour and 15 minutes okay the one night I was surfing the web late at night and ended up with a Solitaire game okay busted but you know that up added up to maybe you know and then there's the weekend but that's running kids around and that's a oh my we forgot the birthday present for this thing and you know it's kind of craziness which I didn't consider you know the Greeks said pure leisure is that place where you refresh the soul that's where you become you know you are at the most human I thought I don't think I had 30 hours or even an hour of that and I said you know I don't know what you're talking about 30 hours of leisure and he said yes you do come and do a time study with me and I will show you where your leisure is and so I marched into this women's group the next day it's like can you believe what this man just told me and one of the one of the people in the committee was also an editor at the Washington Post magazine and said go do the time study and then write about it for me and so a year and a half later I got around to tracking my time and I had the hardest timing this time use researcher gave me this template it's what they use at the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out the American Time Use Survey every year and it's it's primarily for economists although sociologists like to use it to try to tell us more about ourselves it's not really very useful to psychologists who go deeper and tend to have smaller sample sizes but get more interesting results so he so it's this template and you're supposed to from midnight to midnight write what you did and who you were with and label it is it sleep is it personal care is it you know childcare is it you know is it leisure and so I was having the hardest time trying to figure out what my time meant so I called him up at one point I said all right I'm at work so it's work and I'm on hold with the pharmacy to refill my son's EpiPen prescription so that's childcare and I'm surfing the web to try to figure out how to get my brother-in-law's ashes back from China so I don't know what that is and I'm eating my lunch while I'm doing it so how do I label this time and and he just said oh keep a diary and I'll and I'll figure it out and I think what that one instance really to me really symbolizes is how how so many of us live where it's just kind of coming at you all at once all the time and particularly for mothers who are still considered the primary if not solo caregiver because when women entered the first workforce in the early 1970s their lives changed and very little changed around it and I can certainly get into that but generally I'll just to finish up that story I did I started carrying these little books around and noting my time and because I'm a writer I would start writing about how I felt about things it's like you know getting coffee because we'd run out again it's like who are these people at Starbucks in the afternoon with all this time you know I'm so jealous and so he finally I did type up one week and it was so laborious and it took so much time I didn't type up any other weeks I gathered about six weeks worth of data and he went through it with a yellow highlighter and one by one he found what he considered 27 hours of leisure and it included things like laying in bed for 20 minutes listening to NPR in the morning being exhausted and trying to get out of bed and I said I was tired and he said well you're listening to the radio that's technically leisure anytime I got exercise went for a run and I said well I need that for my head you know that's more personal care it's like no that's leisure so that was also leisure and I think the the the big divergence in our opinions about you know you know that kind of Grecian ideal and you know how the time-used researchers consider it came when I was picking my daughter up from a ballet class and the car broke down and we were stuck on the side of the road for two hours waiting for a tow truck and out came that yellow highlighter and I said you're kidding me that's leisure oh oh yeah that's right you were with your daughter so that's child care so if my daughter wasn't there that would be leisure time yeah and I said well that didn't feel very leisurely he said I measure time I'm not a chronotherapist you know and the and the implication being you know you have this time figure it out if you don't feel refreshed it's your own fault just kind of blame the woman kind of thing and which as I began looking into this you find all over the place so this started me on a journey I wrote I wrote a magazine piece and I was very worried that I would be exposing myself to the world as a neurotic disorganized mess and and I told my editor I said I will be honest to the point of not getting fired because I was a you know my life felt really crazy I ended up describing it like time confetti you know you're just shifting all the time between work and home and you know you're you know you've got the babysitter all lined up and you think your child care is all set up and then you're about to go off to get interview of Somali war criminal and she calls you up like I forgot I supposed to go to the optometrist today so I can't pick up your daughter like I can't either you know so just kind of living in this sort of state of breathlessness where things can so easily fall apart and I have resources you know and there when you kind of go further down the income ladder there are far more kind of life and death situations that you know situation like that could end up getting you fired if you're not able to show up at work or get your child care together so there are you know so I began when I when I wrote the story I think what shocked me is I was flooded with emails and some of them actually the comments on the public section of the Washington Post were all pretty nasty you know oh you're an idiot you don't know what you're doing and you don't really love your children because you're a working mother and you tend to get that a lot if you're a working mother you really should be home and not trying to have a big house it's not that big mortgage is big but what shocked me was all of the personal emails that I got from people and many of them were said things like you climbed into my head and you wrote about my life and I think what surprised me about that is that I had felt so isolated and so alone in that sense of being overwhelmed and I was shocked at how largely universal it was I got messages from people you'd think oh maybe it's just type A's on the coast no it was people from you know middle America it was men it was women it was older it was younger it was it were some of the most heartfelt ones were young women who wanted to be doctors wanted to have careers like the people that Liza talked to and were really afraid to start a family because they had seen people my age and they had seen sort of an older generation kind of burning their candle at both ends and out the middle and just not wanting that for their life so I began looking I I began working on this book project and I wanted to look at this in a structural sense if so many of us felt this way why where was this sense of overwhelm coming from and and how could it be better where there solutions out there and you know I didn't want it to be I mean God lover I love Oprah and I love Oprah magazine but you know how many times have you walked along the newsstand and you said 10 ways to take back your time and you know more me time I mean you know it's something that we all yearn for and we all know that those are sort of platitudes and kind of time management tips that you know certainly help I don't want to you know diss them but I think that if it were that easy if there were just 10 things that we could all do I don't think that you would find things like we do in the general social survey they've been asking a question for 40 years like how rushed do you feel do you feel like you have enough time in a day to do everything you need to do at work and everything you need to do at home and what's interesting is large majorities of the US population say no I don't have that kind of time I always feel pressure and more women than men feel that way and the curve of women feeling that way is much steeper it's sort of statistically significant it's much steeper than for men you'll also look at the general social survey the happiness question which again is self-reported and very subjective but it's an interesting measure that at the same time women's happiness has also decreased so there's really something going on I began to want to look structurally and you can't really look at leisure like why we you know why we feel like we don't have this kind of time to refresh our soul unless you look at how things work at the home and who's doing what and and you can't really look at the home without looking at the workplace and so I I think that Liza's doing her book is amazing it's wonderful I would recommend it to all of you where I sort of pick up after the after the baby comes it's sort of once it's once a family's formed and these really fascinating trends I think it's really early it's not showing up in the data yet it'll be really interesting to see what happens in the future but I can tell you like right now we are really out of whack we are out of whack at work we are out of whack at home and we are definitely out of whack in leisure or or free time so I wanted to look structurally what's going on in this larger sense and also internally kind of what are those 10 things that you could do what what what piece of it do you do your own so I think it's really interesting in talking about you know we were talking about the workforce and work and family issues and a lot of times you tend to think that these are women's issues and I'm here today and I want to talk about men because what I'm finding is that that's really the key that's really the key to the future one researcher they spoke to said women have changed as much as they can it's time for the rest of the world to change because when you think about it women entered the workforce again in the 70s and what changed about the workforce well we have an anti-pregnancy discrimination act that went into effect in the 1970s and I went to an EEOC hearing in February and it would curl your toes how much pregnancy discrimination is still out there people getting fired once they tell their bosses you know I'm pregnant this tends to happen in more of the lower income low-wage work working jobs there's one woman who studies these statistics and said you have no idea how many times the word abortion comes up because oftentimes women who work you know as drivers or in bakeries or kind of the lower wage jobs there are a number of instances where they've gone in to tell their employer they're pregnant and the employers has choose you know your job or your baby which is pretty amazing when you think that it's you know we're a nation that you know with family values and that's something that we that we say that we you know that we value but I have two stories that I want to share with you the first is to sort of talk about why men are so important in sort of the next stage of really getting change and moving toward equity fluidity might be the better way to say it you know people shifting roles kind of moving out of very rigid traditional gender roles that have sort of where everybody's kind of stuck and one of the reasons that were stuck when you look at the workplace is because most of the workplace culture is still very much set in the 1950s when you had the the idea is that we had all these June Cleaver leave it to beaver families in reality that was really never more than about half of us families that had a breadwinner and a stay-at-home parent taking care of all the family and house responsibilities and yet that's sort of our nostalgic view of who we were who we who we should be that's a it's a very powerful notion for a lot of us and the workplace the the culture the norms is still very much what researchers call the centered around the ideal worker someone who can work 24-7 at the drop of a hat fly off to wherever you need to go because you've got someone else taking care of your your family responsibilities you don't you're unencumbered by those kinds of burdens and when you think about that when women entered the workforce the idea was and the feminists were pushing the idea we don't want any special favors we want to compete on an even playing field which is a really noble idea but then what would had to have happened with the same time which has not happened is the recognition that then it's families that have children it's not just you can't expect a woman to work like a man and outs the you know then the idea would be that what you outsource everything else to someone else you pay for and we've done some of that you you look at studies you know if you have the resources you pay for someone to come clean your house but when you come when it comes to childcare that's still something that I would argue most people don't want to outsource entirely we still have kind of another competing trend I've oh my god I've only got two minutes left and I've only gotten to the second point I was gonna make so briefly I'll just since I wanted to talk about men the two stories I wanted to tell you is about a lawyer named Aria Lyanna and what he what he his story signifies is what researchers finding they're calling it the male flexibility stigma that because we've got these ideal worker norms in the workplace any kind of flexibility when you look at those kind of programs they tended to come out of women's initiatives oh my goodness we're losing women you know if you look at some of the opt-out statistics there was some research that was done that showed you know yes you've got these equal graduation rates or women graduating at greater rates than men that's been the case for several several decades actually in certain fields but then you look 15 years out 30% of the women MBAs are gone 25% of the women lawyers are gone and why there's a number of different reasons but a lot of it is because that's the time you form the family and you've got workplaces that are expecting you to work in a way as if you didn't have a family and that's just not a choice that women have been willing to make or many of them so Aria Lyanna was a work for a law firm his wife had some difficulties mental breakdown two young children he applied for using his federally the one the one federal policy that we have to support families the Family Medical Leave Act and he started to you know he took some time off so he could take care of their two children and get childcare arranged and take care of his wife and that so went against the culture of his law firm this is in Boston he got comments like oh you know that's for women you know why are you taking this and when he came back to work things went from bad to worse and he wound up being fired and now he is suing his old law firm under a new kind of theory of law called family responsibilities discrimination which is really fascinating and what some people think is the only way to really move that culture in the workforce and I'll leave you with one story a different lawyer different firm wants to blow up the idea of billable hours wants to make work and life work for not just families not just women but for men for fathers who want to be more involved at home for people who want to go back to school for people who want to live in Maine and go hiking in the middle of the day and he is living in Maine he had just gotten back from his you know son's activity at school I called him up it's like oh the refrigerator pair man's coming can I call you back in five I thought this is a guy yeah dogs were barking in the background and he's doing high-level corporate law and being very successful so there are bright spots out there thank you so I come at this set of issues from a slightly different place I I'm father I'm a husband but the way I got interested in this wasn't so much personal as as paying attention to broader scale demographic trends in the world and so I'm going to start off talking about some some some really high-level global phenomenon megatrends but worry not because I'm going to end up in the bedroom so from macro to micro so briefly the big picture on human population today is not what the average man's in the street tends to think we have passed most of us grew up with this idea of the population bomb in our head and in the 1970s and such the world population was growing very quickly but a dramatic change that transcends cultures transcends classes you know has really overtaken the world in the last generation and that is this tremendous decline in birth rates that began in Western Europe and then spread throughout the world to the point where now every developed country no longer produces enough children to replace the current population coincidental with this is of course a great aging of the population because you're having fewer children and yet you have people already born staying with us and so this is more and more becoming to define our world this this global aging that is the result not so much of people living longer as them as them having many fewer children we used to associate this with affluence and education but we are now seeing this trend spread to places that are not affluent nor secular so Iran for example now has a well below sub replacement fertility rate Brazil Southern India all of China basically all of Asia except the Philippines all of the former Soviet Union Mexico is now just right on the verge so this is this is a real sea change and obviously has a lot to do with the relationship between men and women and the contract as it were between men and women now turning to the United States we have generally so far avoided this trend to anywhere near the extent that it has visited Europe or Japan our birth rate is still close to replacement rate it's slightly below but we seem to be on the threshold of a world in which it is we're probably going to catch this meme too first thing is just the most recent data points show a dramatic decline in infertility in the United States just the last two years no doubt having a lot to do with the Great Depression and the recession and the pressures that's put on couples but we're also seeing at the same time a dramatic decline in immigration driven partly by the almost near collapse of birth rates in Mexico and the rest of Latin America and also by the diminishing economic opportunities available to low skilled migrants in the United States as the housing bubble has burst and so we're now looking at new data points that suggests that we may actually be looking at negative net immigration with Mexico I think one of the things our children will wonder about us the most is what was this wall about what was that for so bold new changes in in human population now the causes of this would we could talk for days right but obviously it does have ultimately have to do with sex and reproduction and relationships between men and women in the American context you know I'm looking very closely at what what is this generation now in its 20s thinking about parenthood and about marriage and about career and how does that fit into this larger picture I'm painting and there I think we get so a real interesting picture that I think is sometimes hard for baby boomers like me to absorb because it kind of transcends normal categories of thought in in baby boomer world so one big trend is the one that lies already mentioned which is this increase in in careerism among younger women and in educational attainment to the point where you know we're actually beginning to see well educated young single childless women make eight to nine percent more than their male counterparts we at the same time see a strengthening desire to marry particularly among women this is a dramatic change in younger women when you ask them rank how important the following things are to you your conception of the good life realizing the American dream and marriage is way at the top and rising fast so you have simultaneously this new careerism and this new idea of marriage another thing though that is very different is that although young men are also expressing more desire to marry the gap between the percentage of men who ranked marriage is very important and the percentage of women who do is widening so you have simultaneously a increasing disparity and educational and attainment and often income and competing visions of of what the good life is so men are comparatively less interested in getting married now I next place I'm gonna go I know it's a little bit touchy because I had a breakfast conversation with my wife this morning and it became quite animated both the end but I'm gonna I'm gonna start off talking about not our own culture and in hopes that it won't be as inflammatory I talk about other people stereotypes and people you know particularly and folks on Japan and South Korea now those are two countries that are distinguished in having the lowest birth rates on earth right now about average Japanese woman estimated to have about 1.3 children over her lifetime whereas she would need to have 2.1 to replace the populations so Japan is already shrinking an absolute size of population and of course aging at a tremendous rate now when you talk to young Japanese folks about what's what's going on right with you guys here's the picture I get starting from the well let's start from the female point of view right the female point of view in the last generation was we don't we really don't like the world as we find it because we find ourselves married to these salary men who come home late at night drunk and pay no attention to us or to the kids and so we're really unhappy with that and we have no aspiration to to live that life and also certain lingering Confucian values would play a role here like the Confucian norm that if you marry a man you become responsible for your mother-in-law's health right just comes up a lot in focus groups right but now I think younger women when they when they look across the gender divide that they see they don't see that salary man there anymore they see a completely different type of guy who's young and that that guy is the first thing to know about him is he's addicted to video games the next thing to know about him is he's addicted addicted to internet porn and and he's addicted and he's living with his parents and he's really not that into you right he's got other he's kind of comfortable where he is he doesn't have a sexual imperative thanks to the internet porn that I like to think my generation had so that that's kind of off the table right and and materially kind of comfortable living with mom and dad you know she does the socks and all that would probably be interested if a woman came along who said you know what I'm it's really high-powered woman I make a lot of money and I I would support you in your video addiction should you like to marry me he probably you know take that proposition but he's not obviously very attractive to the opposite sex right because he's not really offering much right and so the opposite sex has has evolved into a new stereotype is very prominent in Japan which sort of translates as the the parasite single is the negative characterization of this new stereotype which is this is the young career woman who may not have a particularly illustrious career but it's still kind of exciting that she has a career at all because in Japan feminism that sort of thing came much later she's living with her parents too so she has a lot of discretionary income and she uses her free time to do things like take weekend vacations to Hawaii and buy shoes in the stereotype right so she's she's looking at at men thinking well or potential marriage partners thinking well you know they're not very sexy they're not very interesting they don't offer any protection or or provision and I'm kind of happy doing what I am with the shoes thing in Hawaii right and so you get to this point where both sexes are just kind of looking across the table at each other and saying I'm not that into you and I see that as a something that is really a powerful force in the world Japan is an extreme example but I think we can all recognize elements in the United States in the younger generation where that that rings true and so the question is you know what happens next right does this generation wind up getting married do they wind up having children when they do what's the division of labor the kind of issues you've been talking about but I see I see a kind of train wreck because I see this combination of of higher aspirations to marry combined with all sorts of circumstances that make marriage extremely problematic even to get to the altar now let's just say one final thing about sort of the psychodynamics of younger generations romantic and sexual thinking right which and this is also kind of hard to get your head around but you have simultaneously I think in in in the younger generation in America abundant polls and research showing that tolerance of other people's alternative lifestyles if you will is way on the rise so gay marriage for example polls enormously higher among young people than it does among older people right tolerance for out of wedlock birth extremely high conception of what a family is much more expansive than traditional generations right but this is combined with another trait of mind which is exceptionally risk averse so that is in terms of how I personally conduct my life right I I will I am not going to take risk right so even even casual sex is way on the decline among teens and when they have sex they have redundant prophylactic devices right sex with your galoshes on right right and then of course the pressure the time pressure and the career pressure on both to graduate so the way this is kind of sorting out so far is for the great mass of Americans marriage is getting farther and farther out of reach so last year the percentage of Americans who were married reached an all-time low right and within the lower middle-class marriage is getting passingly rare you know 40% of our children now are born out of wedlock right but what you're seeing simultaneously is in the upper middle class among people who have means and advantage in life that they are figuring it out and that the prestige of marriage is actually rising right and the divorce rate is going down right and commitment to children is going up right and and so to the extent the upper middle class sets the tone in society right we can look to a world in which marriage will be extremely more prestigious right and maybe even stay-at-home moms will be extremely prestigious because it's so hard to be one and economically but at the same time you know a gigantic percentage of the population feeling romantically thwarted not ever having the children that they hope to have never never having the marriage that they hope to have so those are my thoughts on the big picture where we are talk about what it means later that's great I told you these three were extremely interesting let me ask a quick question of each and we'll open up for the floor lies I just was interested in it's 2030 that the bread-winning division switches that's the tipping point that is the year just be curious to I'll just ask all three questions first but we'll start with Liza just to think about if you think that is gonna happen directly or do you think between now and then factors in between are likely to extend that time or shrink it or what would how should we think about what would get in the way of that number on either in either direction Bridget to give you just a chance to talk more about men either some of the statistics that you know family and work Institute around the stress that men are feeling or more about this family responsibility tort claim or whatever it is I would be interesting but just a chance to expand and then Phil do you see anything that is happening globally that is being successful in terms of stemming the tide towards declining fertility that we should think about in this country that other countries should replicate Liza yes so I thought a lot about this you know what would stop that that graph from continuing to rise that line and and I think you know the economy is changing it's changing in a way that rewards educated workers we know that so women are increasingly the educated workers I don't unless unless somehow we reverted back to a manufacturing economy that with the with the high wages for high school graduates I don't know that that would happen it certainly we if we figure out a way to get the men who in another generation would have been the high wage high school graduate industrial workers if we figure out a way to get the man back into college or get them into the training that will prepare them for a changing economy then then maybe we could equalize that the the other I mean the interesting question that I asked myself when I would talk to these really aspirational well educated young women who apparently do expect a high paying career profession when I would talk to them about their lives moving forward it will be interesting to see whether they are willing to embrace the bread-winning role and whether they are willing to embrace the idea of being the primary earner in their household as they as they wrestle with the responsibilities that come with that and I was talking to I interviewed a number of young women whose husbands and boyfriends were really willing to invest in them invest in their earning potential in a way that women used to invest in their husbands I mean in the 1950s and 60s it was very common for a young woman who went to college to leave after a year or two and get married so her husband would be the better educated person and it was common for her to also work to put a husband through medical school or law school that was the norm I interviewed young women whose husbands were doing that for them I interviewed a woman in a law student in Vermont whose husband is a carpenter and he was working to put her through law school you know to minimize her debt load and with the understanding between the two of them that she would be the higher earning partner so he was investing in her potential and she was good with that she was fine with that and grateful for it but I interviewed another young woman in Atlanta a mechanical engineer who was in a PhD program she was dating a guy also in the PhD program but she was doing better than he was and she was more focused she had a better advisor she was very successful she had some great summer internships she was looking at some really terrific job prospects he was discouraged she had a really tough advisor he was thinking he might drop out and just get a masters he was saying to her you know I'll move for you I'll relocate for you if you get a job in California I'll go with you and then maybe I could take some time to sort myself out and and figure out what I really want to do and so you go girl and I'll you know I'll only support you I'll make the compromises necessary to enable your career and you know on the one hand that's a really important thing for women because one of the things that has that has served to depress women's earning capacity in offices is the fact that husbands have traditionally not been as willing to move for a wife so she can't go to her boss and say if you don't give me this raise I'm gonna go to California because the boss knows that her family wouldn't move for her so for women to have partners who will who will enable them is a really valuable bargaining tool in the workplace but she was thinking this through and she said to herself you know getting boxed in as the primary earner sounds to me like a lot more work and a lot less play so you know does she want that and I had a young woman I my book is called the richer sex and she was interviewing I mean she was introducing me and and she said you know this is scary and and so I thought you know I mean I think I think you know in an ideal world we'll have very flexible roles and we'll just trade back and forth and we'll understand that you know whoever is sort of bettering more inclined to stay home or be the secondary earner and whoever is more inclined to be the primary earner it shouldn't matter the gender but it will be interesting to see whether women and mass are willing to embrace the the idea being the breadwinner okay all right so you wanted me to talk about men if I could borrow your New Yorker for a minute Liza okay thank you okay so here's the picture right the men at the playground with the strollers well I just got back from a research trip to Denmark and Sweden and I saw this I saw this everywhere I saw men with those gigantic baby buggy strollers in the middle of the day on a weekday you know you see men with strollers I'm not going to diss American men American men have have made enormous strides in the last couple decades but you tend to see them on the weekends with their kids and you tend to see them with their spouses I saw lots of solo dads just walking on the street you know on a on a pathway that had like a you know how they just have the outlines on the to say that there's children walking you know usually here we would have a picture of a mom and holding a hand with the kid in Sweden there were dads a picture of the dad holding the kids hand just very different norms one of the things that I discovered is that in Denmark they have a governmental ministry a ministry of gender equity and this is an important goal for them in Sweden in the late 1960s their prime minister went to the United Nations and said gender equity is a huge priority for us and we are going to basically socially engineer it there is really nothing different in the sense decades and decades ago when it came to traditional gender roles men worked women were considered the the primary caregiver and it's still largely that way largely because they've got long long maternity leaves that they started in about the 70s very generous long maternity leaves and what they found over time is well that might have been really great for the kids it also tended to freeze those traditional gender roles because women in those countries they tend to be more in public sector jobs they tend not to earn as much money as men so they do have very much the secondary career so they began to want to try to change that and they tried to encourage men to take paternity leave or parental leave and they came up with different sort of levers if you will to try to force that to happen and initially they gave more time well none of the men would take it then they gave more money and none of the men would take it and then they came up with this use it or lose it strategy where they gave a family a certain amount of time and they said okay and these are the two dedicated daddied months that's what they can sort of call it and if the dad doesn't take it the family loses it so then that began to force some change and now you've got a majority of fathers in both Denmark and Sweden who take solo parental leave some quite long and the interesting thing is what they're finding is then that ultimately when you give a father solo time with an infant they develop through time they begin to understand those cues they develop the competence to become a more competent and confident caregiver which then changes that gender dynamic at home which then also changes the gender dynamic at work and it changes the relationship with the children and what's interesting is what what we've got here with with our cultural norms and we do have you know this very anemic family medical leave act that you know the statistical show mostly women take maternity leave here fathers even though that there are policies it's sort of known in many many places as the kiss of death if you actually do take it when you talk with with workers or those show up on on employee surveys where the employer will say oh we've got these great policies and then the employee service is like yeah but you know you better not take them so there's a real disconnect between the lip service and the actual take-up rate but what's what's very interesting is I was talking to a time use researcher in Denmark and because they made that kind of the you know the social lever changes and because of those changes early on with fathers being more involved they're finding that men's work hours are decreasing and their time at home doing childcare and housework is increasing at the same time women's work hours doing paid work is increasing and is sort of the mirror image there childcare and housework hours are decreasing and so I brought my notebook because I couldn't I couldn't remember exactly the dates but he's predicting complete gender convergence or equity by the year 2023 in the household and that and complete convergence in the labor market by 2033 now and that's that's assuming that the current trends continue and who knows what you know what the future will hold but that's fascinating and I asked what about the United States where time use studies will show that women on average still do at least twice the housework and three times the childcare it's like well you are decades and decades and decades away from that. Well point point I can't resist this point of information about Sweden. I can't point you here peer peer reviewed study but from casual talk with Swedes right particularly men right it turns out there's a pattern in when men take their paternity leave in Sweden and you would think that that would be pretty much every month would be have the same number of men taking their paternity leave right because children are born in more way but it turns out that the great preponderance of men in Sweden taking their paternity leave happens to correspond with the opening of elk hunting season. So that kind of tells you the limits of the unisex vision. But what's what's wrong with that. Actually probably they do right. They also take up the child care. Well that's right. So you asked me what around the world has worked and not worked in raising birth working to stem the tide well I I want to present a vision of basically two ways I see mankind sort of inadvertently solving this problem right. And to to be real shorthand about it one you could call it the Taliban way and the other would be the Swedish way the Taliban way is actually much more real than you might think because as humanity as a whole is seeing ever lower birth rates the one trend that counters that is among people who we might call in shorthand fundamentalists right. So whether you're talking about Israel or you're talking about the Islamic world or you're talking about Christian fundamentalists in this country there's a huge and widening differential. So that those populations are putting more of their children and presumably their ideas and norms into the future. They themselves are having fewer children but comparatively less right. So on a purely Darwinian evolutionary way this might be one way this thing gets resolved the Swedish way of course is in shorthand again to what can we do to smooth over tensions between work and family life. And the Swedish experiment experience has been that they have invested a tremendous amount of public money and propaganda in creating this unisex vision of the world and and have managed to get their birth rate up above what it was in the early 90s but still way below replacement rate. So and it's impossible to point to any other country in the world that has succeeded in getting above replacement rate with those kind of policies. Northern Europe which tends to have more of that kind of work at the moment has higher birth rates in southern Europe that has less on the other hand the United States which has almost none of that has higher birth rate than anywhere in. So it's it's kind of a big mystery about what will work but I think the beginning of wisdom on this question is come to me from work that Catherine Hackham who's a researcher in the UK and she is it pains to show that we're really sort of asking the wrong question when we ask what do women want because it's really kind of an insulting question as if all women wanted the same thing and what her research has found is that across the developed world basically women divide into three big categories. There's about 20 percent of the population that wants a traditional stay-at-home mom type world. There's another 20 percent of the population that wants career and nothing but which is actually consistent with the finding out that about 20 percent of the population now is winding up childless and in developed world and then in the middle is this 60 percent of women that want some kind of hybridization right. Well if you are crafting family policy or pronatal policy you better pay attention to all three kinds of women right not just one and so for example the fins have done something very smart I think right which is to not tie childcare benefits to institutional child childcare that stay-at-home moms in Finland receive a stipend or a mother's pension as it were for what they do and that eases their culture wars right and takes appropriate accommodation to the real diversity of women and men on the subject. Very interesting yeah just two anecdotes on your two types of the Swedish Taliban model just for a second as I think about the last seven years of work family events here the party affiliation of the work life researchers who have more the four or more children is almost entirely Republican. So I think about people have been on this stage talking work family at these events not exclusively but there is this interesting bill about about people who've spoken to a work life researchers or advocates not advocates researchers who have more with four or more children they tend to be conservative. I spoke in the sweet at the Swedish Embassy last June and there was a debating about whether or not the US or the Swedish model and afterwards all the embassy so six embassy employees were just sitting around and this the female Swedish Embassy employees who have had both part of their family raising experience in Sweden part of it here all of them preferred the US so they're trying to think about whether they would rather raise their children in Sweden or in the US and all six of the Swedish Embassy employees women preferred here which I thought was really interesting. Anyway that we can talk more about that but but so let's let's have some questions here so we'll start here. It was fascinating so they thought about well I thought you might ask that but I didn't want to do it so the thought was basically community focus that they felt like there was such an individualism over their reliance either on the government or like the carpool mentality here that it takes a village the pitching in supporting each other culture here where people on the same block help watch the other's kids was absent from their experience. Now I think one thing that cuts against it a little bit these were not none of these people lived in Stockholm like they were they tended to be less to be more Swedish suburban or world than urban and so I think that undermines the point a little bit but they thought that there was either that they were impressed by how people pitched in as a community to support each other's child rearing opportunities in the United States and people carpool like what is carpool and that was not something they had experienced in Sweden like people sort of did their families thing and the next family did their family thing and you sort of we're relying on the government a bit. I mean we we we're taking our and I think there's a cultural people will just stereotype a little bit when you go to a party if you're going to a party in Sweden or a Swedish party here it is less just a stereotype friendly let's say it's harder to break in culturally is an outsider people would say so so there's a little bit less gregariousness and I think that is consistent with a thought that would say you know people are more community focused in a in a in a different kind of way than the U.S. is that was their experience to me. I I can't do anything other than relay what I heard. All right let's have a question here and we'll start going around here. My name is the young. I just want to if you can address some more issues now we are talking about work or others a job but to me they are all job they should be paid and I think at some point then in a superwoman they say you should compensate the household workers what I mean is a household producer which is women you should pay them rather than they got nothing so are we going to have the same trends that we got to reward the housewife for some compensation for their job bearing or household production and second is that the they say the prisoners there's a of which amount who really produce a lot of publication so whether we should award them of the people prisoner go to production in these literature producing and get some of all and this is the third let's keep it let's keep it that was a one guy let's go around and ask a question then if we have time we'll come back to second question because we'll have that so we're going to let's hold on to the first one because it's an important one about compensation for I mean Phil not talked a lot about this about the people who caregiving it's the least confidence let's talk about compensation for caregiving generally but let's let's let's take a couple questions at first and then we can respond so who's got a another single question for our panel here. All right let's let's take a question we'll come back to the observations to let's let's so right here we'll take these three questions and then we'll we'll come back I'd like to hear the observation. Hi I'm with the Association for Women in Science my questions for Bridget when you said that a lot of the responses you got were from women young women who wanted to become doctors and they felt like they couldn't have children they felt like there was they were just terrified to have a family probably because a lot of that coincides with the 10 o'clock etcetera and academia and I was wondering if you could share some of those stories with us and just anecdotally maybe you speak to that a little bit. And then later here let's ask the third question and we'll yeah on the line. Hi my name is Emily I'm with the National Alliance for Caregiving I was just kind of interested to get your take on like the sandwich generation or older like middle aged women who are caring for their adult parents because I know like today you could be caring for your adult parent longer than they cared for you with people living longer and things along those lines. So I just want to anyone on the panel just your general opinions on that. Okay all right so we've got three questions here let's start with Bridget because one was directed to you here the second one was and then see if either Phil or Liza wants to take either of the other two questions on on compensation and then on on the elder care if not I can talk about elder care but but start with Bridget here. Okay all right I can be very brief on each each of the three questions I would say one if you want but yeah I'll just I'll just say in terms of compensating we've got a lot of work to do before we ever get to a point like that point from a societal point of view although it's worth discussing for in terms of you know women in science and doctors what was interesting a couple things when some of the studies came out looking at women you know there was a big argument are they opting out of the workforce are they being forced out of the workforce but there there was sort of a big discussion a couple years ago when some of these studies that came out that showed that you know these large cohorts of women very highly educated from some of the Ivy League schools disappearing after 15 years the one sort of bright spot if you will were women who'd gone to medical school fully 15 year in this one study out of the University of Chicago fully 15 years later 99% of the women who'd gotten MDs were still in the workforce and when they asked anecdotally why well think about it you get to set your own hours you have a whole lot more flexibility you can kind of dial up dial back maybe not much but more than say someone who works in the financial sector or in a billable hours culture like a like a law firm so they were finding that women doctors were staying you'd mention the PhDs because when you look at you know who's getting the PhDs even in science in certain sciences there are a number of women very well represented in those numbers have been growing but then what happens then who gets tenure when you look at who gets tenure it's it's fathers and it's childless women you know it's the mothers who because it coincides right with like you're saying the tenure clock coincides right with family formation time so that there have been some there's an awful lot of talking about it you know there's the projects to retain women attorneys there's the University of System in California has done some very interesting things certain there have been different attempts to try to stop the tenure clock I open it up for everybody can you you know can you get a year off again you know can you can you stop the tenure clock and I think that there have been some some interesting beginnings to try to work on that issue but I think that's still you know a huge problem there was just a book written by Rachel Conley who's a labor economist out of Bowdoin called professor mommy and it was really more of a self-help book saying you have to try you have to try to stay in because we're losing so much sort of intellectual capital and so much talent and we need these ideas to have these really full discussions and a really bright academia Phil you have anything paying the people who do all this caregiving for free now one competing vision that a lot of people have forgotten about is the competing vision of what used to be called maternal feminism it is the vision that for example mother Jones had mother Jones is sort of remembered as this feminist icon but what she was really all about is we would say you know enforcing wage discrimination against women because in her vision what was horrible was that you had these capitalists coming in and taking the children and the women out of the house and putting them into the mills in mines right so her whole progressive era stick was about let's not let the capitalists do that in the next generation of sort of progressive feminist minded women in you know we had people like Francis Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt these the people who brought you the Social Security Act which if you think about it was carefully crafted to make the world safe for the stay at home married mother right so we have the spousal benefit that you get right it's in the same title Social Security Act we have aid to families for dependent children that was the old welfare program in the thinking of Eleanor Roosevelt and in Francis Perkins nothing could be more obscene right than taking women out of the home mothers out of the home and putting enforcing them to work right well some other woman took care of her children right so this was a a version of where the gender contract was in those days it also included another important concept that's totally forgotten this buzz phrase of the nineteen tens called municipal housekeeping and what municipal housekeeping was was bright energetic well educated Protestant women use their energy through their energy into social causes one of them which was prohibition right but also the great increase in and just the hygienic standards of city life that led to such a dramatic decline in infant mortality right this was a role that woman women taken if you think about Eleanor Roosevelt and her relationship to her husband right she was she was almost the ultimate municipal housekeeper right who eventually wound up addressing United Nations right and it seems to me that one of the deficits we have in our society today is that whole civic side of life you know from the from the PTAs to to the Girl Scouts to everything that's not market right is in deficit and so it's possible that we could have a new gender division of labor that revisited some of those trade-offs that that's those generations made I mean I have thoughts swirling based on what they said but I don't know that I need to select them on anybody just briefly I know I wanted to add I wanted to add one thing again in Denmark I went to a father's playground they didn't want to call it a play group because they felt like it was too feminine but it's a it was basically a place where dads from all around Copenhagen came and played very roughly with their children was very interesting to see but very quietly big bonk on the head and there was like nobody went rushing over or we are on it was really interesting to see but but one of the things that they do in Denmark is if you take care of a certain number of children you do get paid so you can be sort of a paid stay at home you get paid from the government so it is sort of a way to compensate for child care but it's not just for your kid you have to take care of like two or three about the about sort of degrees in careers in medicine I think also just following up on what you said about medicine the economist Claudia Golden has done really interesting work showing why certain fields in medicine have actually flipped from majority male to majority female and they have I mean psychology has flipped to being majority female among physicians under 45 pediatrics general medicine internal medicine have all flipped and veterinary medicine now veterinary medicine classrooms are now majority female predominantly female and one of the interesting things that she's shown is that women can strategically find professions that will enable them to continue to work after they have children and to keep their foot in the door and certain specialties like veterinary medicine has changed and emergency facilities that take after hours work are now standalone facilities so vet practices are now the hours are more containable they're more regular and predictable and so women spot that and they move into that profession because it does offer a more regular schedule and she's shown that even certain surgical specialties when new procedures are invented that enable the surgery to be done in a more predictable time that women gravitate toward those fields so anyway I thought that was interesting as we will take the next three questions starting with the one that was in the back and then I want to make sure the comment here but I will just say that it's very interesting the sandwich generation question where you have all these policies are predicated on the assumption that children were taking care of children but Phil just indicated we have pollinating birth rates globally and that we have these people living longer we have this you know the sandwich is starting to flip in the other direction 20% of the population is elder care responsibility now and that's only going to rise for obvious reasons so let's take the next three questions here who's the lady had her hand up had left before it will take Susan's here so one two and then I made the gentleman's over here if we could thanks for pointing out I mean it's very clear that there are many different kind of issues going on here and not one way to solve it but I wanted to know if you could speak a little bit about what you think our government's role is in in in any of these particular issues that have been brought up and and I and maybe in a in a way that addresses not just women in academia who I think actually don't have the hardest brunt of the work family conflict but maybe a broader spectrum of women in the US okay let's just come down and take some questions and we'll just stack them here's got it was our question here the gentleman and Susan yeah I was going to ask largely the same thing just about what changes you would ideally see in US policy you mentioned the FMLA and sort of what you would change about that if you had the power Senate help committees having a hearing on May 10th on some of this so we'll hear some ideas let's take the I was wondering I guess your perspective on the role of GDP the fact that you know the main measure of the success of America is GDP but it doesn't count household work it doesn't count work life balance it doesn't count so many other aspects like social support if you think measure like gross national happiness could advance it all right good so we'll take the then let's just keep coming down the line here and just stack all our questions and maybe we'll go through a lightning power around here and end up hi I'm Susan Laban so I'll pose a question to the panel and it kind of fits in with what some of the other comments were of what would we like to see happening and so the vision that I have of helping this is to see what we could do about reduced working weeks and this you know we had about what kind of changes in the workplace could happen and when I think about when you talk about the appeal of the Taliban I lived in North Africa and you know many years ago sort of foresaw this because our concept of modernity is so limited and what are the options that we provide people with are so limited if you care about family and you're in that part of the world so I'd like each of your take on how that could maybe help the dilemmas of the career breadwinner and the flexibility issues okay and let's see if we have a final maybe that final question from the lady here hi I have a question about the secondary earner potential and that sort of as a strategic decision that couples are now making I think my generation you know you have two either full time or you have one time full time and one part time but there's never this really strategic decision who's going to earn a little bit less and then take on a little bit more and I think that's an interesting evolution maybe that certainly I'd like to hear a little bit more from the panel about all right so let's just as we wrap up here let's just go down the line here and we'll start with Liza we've got questions on governmental policy and what the U.S. should be doing GDP versus other measures Susan's questions on work weeks et cetera and the globe piece and then looking at the secondary earner potential and anything that you want to address on that line or comments that you felt were unable to get to earlier let's go down and see what feels right to talk about Liza would you comment on any of those things that you have something to yeah I don't know if I'm commenting to any of them directly but they're all so interesting just the strategic secondary earner one of the things that really struck me in this this Michigan group of extended siblings is that all of the men had made the decision to be the secondary earner or stay-at-home dad one of them is a real stay-at-home dad one of them sells real estate and the other one had sort of gone in and out of the workforce to embark tending jobs and working in the restaurant industry all the men had made that decision because they felt as though their work for workplace was completely unforgiving of fathers and one of the men in particular the one who was a statistician and accountant had been working in financial planning they wanted them to work 60 or 70 hours a week he said I'm not going to do that my dad did that I love my dad he was never around and I I don't want to be that kind of father and and they said that's unacceptable he said you know I it was just they were in an impasse and and he said you know I'll give you 50 hours a week but I won't give you 70 hours a week and they said okay you can dial back to 40 hours a week for as long as it takes you to find another job and so he did and he said there was so much unrest that he had to actually leave earlier because people were so in sense that somebody was just working 40 hours a week so how do you address that kind of workplace culture I mean the so the men I interviewed had opted out because they had even less workplace flexibility than their wives did and in that particular family the wife was working in healthcare for the Henry Ford Health System and she I mean she was very proactive about seeking out flexibility and she gathered together a group of women and they made a presentation to their boss for a four day work week and she got it so she actually in the end benefited from more sort of a more flexible attitude from her bosses than her husband did and she said when her husband went became the stay at home dad she said it was such a relief it made family life so much easier on us you know we didn't have to both whip out our planner when the kid got sick you know I could come home and dinner was made you know he's such he's so good at running the households that I have weekends so she didn't feel as though her kids had been neglected and and I am in a two earner household and I I thought God somebody running the household what a concept and so so it was interesting now I would also say that just speaking to the government policy and there's so many ways to answer that one of the couples in that family the husband had been in the restaurant industry which is extremely demanding she works in the auto industry but she works in marketing and one of the things and she's done incredibly well she directs a global marketing for her company she travels all the time but one of the things that drives her husband crazy is he feels like because she's a marketing she's not compensated the way some of the other sectors in the auto industry that are more male are are are and it was interesting listening to them talk about that because she'll say well you know I mean in marketing we're not as important and I'm thinking my God you're in China you're in Brazil you're in Europe I mean they need you to market their product how can you say that you're not as important as the engineers or whatever the guy fields are at your company and her husband was the one who's saying you know she's not being paid what she should be paid she's the breadwinner in our family and we definitely still have in the workplace vestiges of this the men are the breadwinners mentality and so you know certainly enforcement of of wage discrimination that does still exist not just you know one on one lawyer versus lawyer but you know why should marketing be paid less than I don't know what product development or something and I think you know the Obama administration has made some steps toward toward and you know enforcing equal pay laws but you know that is still there's clue is still work to be done in that in that respect thanks a lot Richard okay I know that we're short on time so I'll just I'll try to give a big picture sort of what's what's the vision you're you're absolutely right when you look at work hours you know extreme work hours are on the rise you know you could you could question how productive you are and I'll just go back to when we got the 40 hour work week Henry Ford instituted a 40 hour work week on his factory floor he got a lot of flack people thought he was crazy what are you doing you're giving your workers all this time off and then a couple of years later when we he was so much more efficient so much more productive and made a whole lot more money than everybody else followed suit there are studies now that show for knowledge workers which is where we are now you really aren't very productive after six hours there's some really interesting work that you know the we have brainwaves we breathe you know we kind of pulse and so that you're we're much more efficient when we kind of pulse our our work and we're not just sort of sitting a button a chair for 60 hours you're really not very efficient after that you know you're kind of you're a you're a warm body what I would like to see what's really the answer is a completely fluid workplace a very different idea that work is what you do not where you go not when you do it that is that would embrace this sort of set a fluidity this flexibility for both men and women that would sort of encompass what you're talking about that there are different things that that women want and I would argue different things that men want sort of you know loosening up of traditional gender roles when it comes to to government policy we are the only OECD country we are the only developed country in the world that does not have paid parental leave I think and Papa New Guinea are up there with us so we're not in really great company and yet that was the hard it was a really hard one fought that wasn't until Bill Clinton came in and it was the best they could do and there's no pay to it we have this belief that we want to keep our taxes low and we don't want all of these other benefits you look at Denmark and they've got this incredibly high tax rate but you've got this incredibly happy population why because you get everything Marcus about what the size of New Jersey they're a very different population we're a very we're a much more complex economy I'm not in any sense arguing that their solutions are ours but there's something that we should look at when you look at childcare we had a childcare act that passed the house in the early seventies and was vetoed by Richard Nixon sort of on Cold War Soviet fears oh my god we can't have children raised in a communal setting we prefer private setting well what that's done then is we've got we have no standards childcare we have no you know accessibility and affordability we've got some block grants at the state level that go to the very poorest of the poor which is good but certainly when you've got you know 80% of child child school aged children their mothers their work outside of the home you've got a lot of a whole bunch of you've got single parents you've got dual income parents you've got you're all over the map but you don't have the traditional estimate 17% of your family budget and in lower-income families it's up to there is something that came out last week at 67% of the family budget it's really unsustainable so I think childcare is really key if we're gonna move forward and I I would definitely encourage paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers I don't know how likely that is we're gonna get it you know in the big picture you've got to just you've got to disengage healthcare from your workplace and look at what we've done in the last couple months so I don't know how likely that's gonna be anytime soon there are things that that you can do and there is a role for government to play it's just an argument that we are not even having in this country it's just not even on the agenda and that's probably because we've got what 16 17% of women in Congress and so that needs to change as well all right thank you Phil the last word well on certainly one of the reasons the United States has a higher birth rates in any other developed country is by comparison we have a very flexible workforce that a workplace that allows for more part-time work you know as compared to say Germany or Japan right still long ways to go but but that is important to this whole fertility question I think there's a lot more we can do it's totally insane to me that we have an education during these particular years of one's 20's when women are in their prime reproductive age and you know where's it said that you have to go to college when you're 22 on that said I think you know we have to be careful what we wish for because I think a lot of our thinking on this is still got under the thrall of this almost we all are organization men and now organization women and why can't we get this organization to be more family friendly whereas what the bigger picture on the labor front is more and more long term secured salaried employment is totally vanishing you know more and more of us are free agents of one kind contingent workers the government's not even keeping track of this anymore but the last time they looked in 2005 a third of the workforce contingent workers well they're high flex right but they if you think about that population and what they need it's not corporate sponsored daycare my final thought would be that ultimately you have to restore the economic basis of the family to bring this fertility question around and so we're living in a world now where childlessness really pays right you get attention regardless of whether you have children right your children are not economic assets to you as they were in a agrarian setting or in a small shop some trends in technology are bringing more production back into the home that's helpful but until we figure that out one way or another we're going to see this long term population aging and decline that brings us to this family social contract paper you and I wrote a couple of years or whatever we wrote sitting outside if you want to hear more about that last point in any case I knew how interesting but this is even surpassed my expectations were high about how interesting this would be having the three of you together will you please join me in thanking Liza and Gilbert we're going to talk about quality child care here with the federal government's director of child care essentially among other people in Maryland on the 16th of May in this room at the same time but anyway thanks for joining us today we are adjourned