Back in the 1800s, the U.S. labor movement aimed at reducing impossibly long working hours—and succeeded with the Adamson Act in 1916, which gave us the 40-hour work week. A century later, that’s all changed. Research released this month in the journal Gender & Society confirms that “overwork”— working more than 50 hours per week—has become part of the job for many Americans, though with different effects for men and women. Over the past thirty years, hours at work—especially in higher income jobs—have increased, and over one-third of men and nearly one-fifth of women in professions work more than a 50-hour week.

A new Gender & Society study reveals how overwork contributes to the “stalled gender revolution” and helps to explain why there isn’t more equality in the workplace, despite the popular belief that equality between men and women is a social good. The new study gives hints, too, about the challenges women face in order to “lean in” and get ahead.

Who is affected by overwork? In “Overwork and the Persistence of Gender Segregation in Occupations,” Indiana University sociologist Youngjoo Cha reports that overwork affects men and women differently—especially in fields where there are a lot more men than women to begin with. Dr. Cha finds that the impact of overwork on men and women is especially pronounced in occupations where the majority of employees are men, known as “male dominated occupations.” She found that:

• In male-dominated occupations, overwork was more likely than in balanced fields or female-dominated fields.
• Mothers were 52 percent more likely than other women to leave their jobs if they were working a 50-hour week or more, but only in occupations dominated by men.
• Higher education levels make it more likely that women stay in their jobs—but not enough to overcome the discouraging effect of being an overworking mother.
• Mothers in male-dominated occupations were more discouraged despite the fact that the women who survived in those more masculine fields may on average be more committed to work than overworking women in other jobs.
• Meanwhile, men (whether fathers or not) and women without children were not more likely to leave their jobs in overworking fields.
• When mothers left their jobs, some moved to less male-dominated professions; others entirely left the labor force.

The problem, according to Cha, is simple. Overworking mothers continue to have a larger share of caregiving responsibilities, compared to other workers. Cha explains that “Overwork disadvantages women with children in particular. In overworking workplaces, you have to be there or be on call all the time. That expectation can be met by people who have few caregiving or community responsibilities and who are not primary caregivers at home.” While men and women have adjusted their ability to share domestic caregiving in recent years, these more extreme situations of overwork demonstrate the limits of the flexibility that men and women often aim for—but can’t always achieve.

Why does overwork affect mothers only in male-dominated professions? Cha’s finding that overwork discourages women in male-dominated occupations begs the question, why? “If it were a case of women’s reticence to work additional hours,” Cha explains, “we would expect overworking women to be discouraged regardless of whether mainly men or women were at work.” But her results do not show that. Instead, the results suggest that something about jobs that are mainly populated by men discourages women. What’s that something? Cha observes that male-dominated professions are more likely to maintain strong and inflexible expectations of overwork.

Does this tell us anything about what dual earner couples can expect? Workplaces dominated by men tend to operate on outdated assumptions about “separate spheres” marriage — that is, families that have a homemaking woman and a breadwinning man. Yet today both partners are employed in nearly eighty percent of American couples.

Is this a case of opting out? Cha considered whether she had found evidence of “opting out”—the claim that women, when they can, leave work when they become mothers. “In my study, not all women with children leave the labor force. When they work long hours, it is the combination of being a mother, working long hours, and being in a male dominated profession that is discouraging.” Where overwork only in a male-dominated occupation influenced married women’s choices, Cha also found that husbands’ income didn’t change the basic findings.

In her article, Cha argues for promoting workplace policies that minimize the expectation for overwork, such as setting the maximum allowable work hours, prohibiting compulsory overtime, expanding the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime provisions, and granting employees the right to work part-time hours without losing benefits. She advocates labor policies that can reduce work-family conflicts and benefit women, men, families, and firms.

As University of Massachusetts sociologist Joya Misra, editor of Gender & Society, comments, “‘Leaning in’ might not be the same for everyone. Cha’s study shows us that despite our best efforts, work and home still seem to generate unequal opportunities and benefits. The loss affects everyone: We’ll stop losing highly qualified women in their careers of choice when we reduce barriers like the culture of overwork and unequal sharing of care-work at home.”

The study is based on analysis of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a national longitudinal household survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. The data covers years from 1996 through 2007. The sample was limited to full-time workers ages 18-64 who were in a job at the beginning of each of the survey periods.

-Virginia Rutter

You heard about the letter: Princeton alumna Susan Patton worries that Princeton women might not find husbands as smart as they are if they don’t find ’em while still at college. Behind her anxiety is the view that: one, marriage is a partnership (between two different sexes) of intellectual equals—and, two, college sorts people into roughly equal intellectual groups.

I’ve been listening to lots of fun commentary about the Patton letter when I am not pondering other news about troubles in elite education. A week before the Patton letter, Carolyn Hoxby and Christopher Avery (Stanford and Harvard; they must be smart!) presented new information about how elite colleges are failing to recruit students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Hoxby and Avery report that among the high achieving high school students, only 34 percent of those from low-income families end up at the fancy colleges that their extremely high grades and high test scores would qualify them for. This is less than half the rate for “achievers” from high-income families, where 78 percent go to top-tier schools. The smart students in the bottom income quarter go, instead, to local universities or community colleges. These economically disadvantaged kids, Hoxby and Avery believe, are not aware of the elite educational options, and don’t appear to have information about how much aid is available from the most elite schools.

So for women who recognize that rushing into marriage really is not a smart thing to do, but are worried that they can’t find smart partners if they aren’t at Princeton or the like, they can relax, slow it down, and realize that there are a lot of smart potential partners who are not at elite schools. Not even counting all those smart men who don’t even start (or start but don’t finish) college, given the growing gender gap in higher education. It turns out that there are lots of smarties who aren’t at elite and selective colleges.

But, Patton might still be worried. Part of me thinks that she might be saying “smart” kids but meaning kids from a “higher social class.”

Patton’s letter reminds me that the heteronormative dream (Girls! Find your ideal boy!) is still profoundly concerned about matching on social class as much as it is about finding an intellectual (or some other human quality) peer. But what do I know? My boyfriend went to Princeton.

-Virginia Rutter

The folding of Gender Across Borders one year ago brought home the challenges of online feminism. Like, the fact that it’s (more often than not) unpaid. Piled on top of paid jobs and activism, plus (for me at least) raising children and working on longer writing projects. (Or at least talking about them.)

Fortunately some folks who are a heck of a lot smarter than I am have been thinking about the need for sustainability in the online feminist ecosystem. And while they don’t have all the answers, they’ve started a public conversation to generate exchange, debate, and new directions.

Tonight at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, I heard Courtney Martin and Vanessa Valenti (along with some amazing bloggers from Feministing, Crunk Feminist Collective, SPARK Movement, F-Bomb, Feminist Teacher, and Feminist.com) present a report, #FemFuture: Online Revolution, about where online feminism needs to go. Their inspiring and thought-provoking report can be found here. It reminded me of the HUGE amount of amazing feminist work happening online… and I also learned about amazing folks and projects that I’d missed (such as the successful crowdfunding undertaken by queer Nigerian Afrofeminist blogger/online activist Spectra for social media and communications training for African women’s and LGBT organizations).

Martin and Valenti propose a range of strategies under the category of “more”… more collaboration, reciprocity, infrastructure, coordination, strategic thinking, and sustainable business models (both non-profit and for-profit). Because, as they put it, “An unfunded movement further privileges the privileged.”

They have some (preliminary) ideas about how to strategize long-term, though mainly they’ve started a conversation for feminists who are online. And ones who aren’t, too. The conversation turned global with the presence of organizations like WEDO and Digital Democracy, my new favorite org that’s empowering marginalized communities to use technology to fight for human rights in a handful locations, including Haiti. DD’s insight? Think mobile.

Your insights?

Earlier this month I wrote about gender, debt, and college drop out rates-men’s and women’s different debt tolerance (women have more) is related to their early job market prospects (men have more) and helps explain why men drop out of college more.

Now, here’s a new piece of the gender gap in education puzzle. According to a new briefing report presented to the Council on Contemporary Families, “the most important predictor of boys’ achievement is the extent to which the school culture expects, values, and rewards academic effort.” Sociologists Claudia Buchmann (Ohio State) and Thomas DiPrete (Columbia University) present their in-depth findings on the much-debated reasons why women outstrip men in education—also the subject of their new book—in “The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools.” The full CCF briefing report is available here.

When did the gender gap begin? Some of the gender gap in schooling is new and some is not. For about 100 years, the authors explain, girls have been making better grades than boys. But only since the 1970s have women been catching up to—and surpassing—men in terms of graduation rates from college and graduate school. The authors report, “Back in 1960, more than twice as many men as women between the ages of 26-28 were college graduates. Between 1970 and 2010, men’s rate of B.A. completion grew by just 7 percent, rising from 20 to 27 percent in those 40 years. In contrast, women’s rates almost tripled, rising from 14 percent to 36 percent.”

Is the gender gap translating into wages? “The rise of women in the educational realm has not wiped out the gender wage gap - women with a college degree continue to earn less on average than men with a college degree.” But because more women are getting college degrees, growing numbers of women are earning more than their less-educated men age-mates, and the gender wage gap has narrowed considerably.” But, report the authors, if men were keeping up with women in terms of education, men would on average be earning four percent more than they do now, and their unemployment rate would be one-half percentage point lower.

What should schools do? The authors debunk the notion that boys’ under-performance in school is caused by a “feminized” learning environment that needs to be made more boy-friendly. Making curriculum, teachers, or classroom more “masculine” is not the answer, they show. In fact, boys do better in school in classrooms that have more girls and that emphasize extracurricular activities such as music and art as well as holding both girls and boys to high academic standards. But boys do need to learn how much today’s economy rewards academic achievement rather than traditionally masculine blue-collar work.

Please link here to read more about the gender gap in educational achievement and the sources of it.

-Virginia Rutter

This month’s column features one of our past guest authors: Chloe E. Bird, Ph.D. is a senior sociologist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and co-author of Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choices and Social Policies (Cambridge University Press).

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In the past two months, two of my friends–both seemingly healthy women–became unlikely victims of cardiovascular disease. One, a woman who by any textbook definition would be considered at low risk for heart problems, nonetheless suffered a heart attack. Thankfully, she is recovering. The other, a longtime friend and a mentor of mine, tragically passed away after suffering a stroke. These experiences left me wondering how we can accelerate efforts to reduce cardiovascular disease risk and mortality in women.

As a women’s health researcher, I am concerned about how long it is taking to bring attention and resources to this problem. After all, it has been decades since we’ve learned that cardiovascular disease affects women every bit as much–or even more–than it does men. Indeed, since 1984, cardiovascular disease has killed more women than men in the United States. When it comes to women’s health, cancer gets a good deal of the attention; somehow, it hasn’t fully registered that so many of our mothers, sisters, friends and daughters are being affected by another, often silent killer.

Commonly referred to as heart disease, cardiovascular disease includes both heart disease and other vascular diseases. When tallied separately, stroke is the third leading cause of death among women. Both strokes and cardiac events are all too common in women over 40 and, sadly, so are deaths.

Consider a few statistics:

• In the U.S., women account for 60 percent of stroke deaths, and 55,000 more women than men suffer a stroke each year.
• Worldwide, heart disease and stroke kill 8.6 million women annually–accounting for one in three deaths among women.
• Whereas one in seven women develops breast cancer, more than one in three women has some form of cardiovascular disease.

Although the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign has done much to raise awareness, there is still too little attention devoted to preventing heart disease in women and improving the quality and outcomes of their care.

While we should celebrate the significant improvements in the care and survival of men with cardiovascular disease, those gains began decades ago, and the death rate among men has fallen more quickly than it has for women. Unfortunately, women continue to face lower rates of diagnosis, treatment and survival. The new Million Hearts campaign aimed at preventing a million heart attacks and strokes by 2017 has partnered with WomenHeart, a national coalition for women with heart disease. This effort is essential and represents progress, but prevention is not the only challenge.

Why are outcomes worse for women? Even if biomedical research on cardiovascular disease had not traditionally focused almost exclusively on men, these conditions would likely still be harder to recognize and treat in women. Women don’t tend to have the “TV heart attack”–the familiar image of a man clutching his left arm or his chest in pain. Rather, for women, the symptoms of a heart attack are often more subtle and less specific. Women can present with symptoms like throat pain or a sore back. In fact, 64 percent of women who die suddenly from heart disease had no previous symptoms at all.

Furthermore, tests that are mostly reliable in assessing men’s cardiac risk are not as accurate in women, largely because they are aimed at identifying major coronary artery blockage. At least half of heart attacks in women are caused by coronary microvascular disease, which involves narrowing or damage to smaller arteries in the heart. This not only makes the diagnosis challenging, but it poses problems for treatment as well. Women often go undiagnosed or incorrectly untreated after major blockages have been ruled out, and optimal treatment of microvascular disease remains unclear. Consequently, 26 percent of women over age 45 will die within a year of having a heart attack, compared with 19 percent of men. The deficits in women’s cardiovascular care may have developed unintentionally, but our efforts to address them need to be both intentional and focused.

Fortunately, we know what it will take to close the gap and get women better diagnosis and treatment for cardiovascular disease. We can start by looking to the fight against breast cancer. Our first task is to call for increased public and private funding for public-health, biomedical and health-services research to reduce women’s risk and improve their outcomes. Second, on the private side, there are many foundations dedicated to addressing cardiovascular risk in women. But they and the women they serve would benefit from more collaboration and better coordination of effort. Finally, doctors and medical clinics need to do more to improve assessment and the quality of women’s cardiovascular care. Otherwise, women’s care and outcomes will continue to lag behind men’s.

Our bodies are complex systems. So, if we want to take on women’s health in a way that truly moves the needle on outcomes, we need a comprehensive approach. Women’s health care in general needs to become a primary focus for research and practice. And improving women’s health and longevity will require us to expand our focus beyond sex-specific reproductive cancers and predominantly female diseases, such as breast cancer. This doesn’t mean that we should divert resources from other areas of study, of course. But we need to recognize that woman-specific health care should not be confined to conditions that don’t (or don’t often) affect men.

The stakes for women are high, but we can and must bring greater attention to women’s cardiovascular health. Personally, I am not willing to let go of another friend, colleague or relative to a condition that could have been caught and treated if women routinely received appropriate preventive care, diagnostic testing and treatment. It’s time for feminists to take on heart disease as a women’s issue.

- Crossposted with permission from the Ms. Blog -