The Second Shift Isn't What It Was

In 1989 the sociologist Arlie Hochschild published a book about working parents with a title that turned into a phrase. The Second Shift described what many women did when they came home from a paid job: a second working day, unpaid, in the house. Her research team had spent years observing dual-earner couples, sitting in their kitchens, watching who got up when the baby cried.

The most quoted line from the book is an estimate. Drawing on time-use studies of the period, Hochschild calculated that women in these couples worked roughly an extra month of twenty-four-hour days each year compared with men. That number has been argued over ever since, and it should be. It was an estimate built from other people's data, not a measurement.

What has lasted is the idea underneath it, and two other phrases from the same book that get quoted less often.

The stalled revolution

Hochschild called it a stalled revolution. Women had moved into paid work in large numbers. The workplace and the home had not changed to match. The result was a revolution that had happened halfway, with women carrying both the old role and the new one.

Thirty years later, the honest answer is that the revolution has moved, slowly, in one direction. Men in most rich countries do more housework and much more childcare than their fathers did. Women do somewhat less housework than their mothers, partly because they do less of it at all, and partly because some of it has been bought: ready meals, cleaners, machines. The gap in hours has narrowed.

It has not closed, and the way it has narrowed matters. Men have moved most into the parts of family life that are visible and pleasant: playing with children, cooking on weekends, the school run. The parts that have moved least are the routine daily tasks and, above all, the management of the whole.

Family myths

The third phrase from the book is the one I think about most. Hochschild found that many couples told themselves a story about their arrangement that did not match what she watched them do. She called these family myths.

One couple she followed had settled on a division in which he took care of the downstairs, meaning the garage, and she took care of the upstairs, meaning everything else. Both described this as fair. The story protected the marriage from an argument neither of them wanted to have.

I meet family myths constantly. They are rarely lies. They are agreements not to look too closely, made by two people who love each other and are tired. We split it fifty-fifty. He does more than most men. It evens out.

Where the gap went

If you measure only the minutes spent scrubbing and cooking, the second shift looks smaller than it did in 1989. That is real progress, and I do not want to dismiss it.

But many women I speak to say they feel more stretched than their mothers did, not less. Part of that is paid work getting longer and less predictable. Part of it, I think, is that the work has changed shape. Less of it is physical and more of it is the thinking: remembering, planning, coordinating schedules that are more complicated than they were a generation ago.

Time-use diaries are good at measuring a woman standing at a sink. They are bad at measuring a woman in a meeting who is also, somewhere in the back of her mind, working out who will collect the children on Wednesday.

The second shift has not ended. It has moved indoors, into the head, where the diaries do not reach.