News Release

Book studies dual-career couples, employer policies

Book Announcement

Cornell University

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Two-career couples in the United States continue to struggle in managing conflicting family and work demands. Increasingly outdated workplace and work-hour policies based on the one-career-per-family model, they find, have little regard for the needs of workers, their spouses or their families, according to a Cornell University sociologist.

A new book, It's About Time: Couples and Careers (Cornell University Press), edited by Phyllis Moen, the Ferris Family Professor of Life Course Studies at Cornell and director of the Cornell Careers Institute, says that U.S. employers need to create new career paths that support dual-career couples. These options should have innovative flexibility, such as reduced work hours for new parents and semiretired workers whose benefits and future career options would be protected.

"Our research suggests that it is about time for the United States to confront the realities and needs of contemporary working couples, and indeed, all members of the new workforce," says Moen. "What's required is more than Band-Aid, short-term -- and often short-sighted -- policy remedies. We need to reimagine and reconfigure how we structure work hours, work weeks and occupational career paths to allow workers of all ages and in all stages of the life course to meet the time needs and goals of both their jobs and families."

The book is based on the Cornell Couples and Careers Study (CCCS), a mostly middle-class sample of 2,216 workers from 20 to 73 years of age, 93 percent of them with a spouse or partner. Thirty-three contributing authors, most from Cornell, analyzed various aspects of dual-career couples' lives, such as how they prioritize their careers, plan their work schedules, time parenthood, seek leisure, commute, manage their households and participate in their communities.

The researchers find that regardless of income, most two-career couples are exceedingly stressed for time as they try to cope with the demands of two jobs, two commutes, long hours, business travel, children's and ailing relatives' needs, household work and their own expectations and goals. Moen says that's because the work world remains structured around a single-breadwinner model that assumes a continuous, full-time march up a career ladder toward seniority and security. Underlying this model is the assumption that the worker has the backup of a full-time homemaker, which is less and less true for all workers, men or women, says Moen.

"We need visionaries who understand the new workforce and can help reshape the lock-step social organization of careers and the life course, breaking away from the traditional breadwinner-homemaker model," says Moen. "Such reconfiguring must include, for example, continuous access to health insurance and benefits as people change jobs, and a comprehensive reassessment of hidden and outdated assumptions embedded in government programs, such as unemployment insurance, Social Security and pension requirements. We also need family-friendly employers with innovative ideas and policies that promote a range of alternative career paths and work hours, redesigning benefits, reward structures and opportunities to fit today's workforce and today's families."

The 436-page book includes 20 chapters, all drawing on the same Couples and Careers data, as well as detailed policy recommendations calling for various social and organizational changes that could broaden the array of working options available to workers.

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The research reported in the book was supported by the Cornell Careers Institute, established in 1997 with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and by the National Institute on Aging through its support for the Cornell Gerontology Research Institute.

Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release.

Information on Phyllis Moen:

http://www.human.cornell.edu/faculty/facultybio.cfm?netid=pem3&facs=1

Information on the Cornell Couples and Careers Study:

http://www.blcc.cornell.edu/cci/

Information about the book:

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/


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