Stay at home dad galore...

[Feckless]

Uargh I just wanted to find something about stay-at-home-dads having higher divorce but couldn´t find anything appropriate. Well but a few intersting articles with numbers ( ).....anyhow enjoy.

Is there no fathers forum?

Statistics

64.3 million - number of U.S. fathers
159,000 - number of stay-at-home dads in 2006
2.9 million - number of preschoolers cared for by their dads while mom is at work.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau

from Wiki

I'm not saying that the stories of unhappy breadwinning moms aren't interesting and important, only that they are not as representative as they pretend to be. Some of these moms explicitly blame at-home daddyhood for their problems -- they seem to feel that the arrangement robs their men of masculine authority and self-respect. This is true of Trunk's blog entry, in which she reports being shocked and dismayed to discover that her husband describes himself as a "stay-at-home dad" in an online professional networking profile. "Surely writing stay-at-home dad on a LinkedIn profile cannot be good," she writes, clearly ashamed of her husband.

It's a digital variation of an image that keeps recurring in these stories: the public moment when a coworker or old school friend asks the breadwinning mom what her husband does for a living, and she feels a deep sense of shame. She marks that as the moment when the marriage declined.

It's really quite horrible, when you think about it. I think there's two things going on, socially. One is that some women seem unprepared for the pressures of providing, just as some dads must struggle with the demands of caregiving. They weren't raised for these roles, they never imagined themselves doing it, and they have few role models. The second thing is that social support is extremely important -- this is one of the insights that came out of a recent University of Texas study of at-home dads, and it's certainly true in my experience. If you spend all day, every day, walking uphill with the wind in your face, you get tired. Much better to have people behind you, pushing you forward.

But we have tended to focus on social situation of the at-home dad, sometimes at the expense of the breadwinning mom: they need support, community, and role models just as much, if not more. The pressures they face are enormous: all the usual breadwinning pressures, plus sexism, plus the social ambiguities of role reversal.

<i>Daddy Dialectic</i>: Divorce, Stay-at-Home-Dad Style

STAY-AT-HOME DAD STATISTICS

The number one question that leads people to rebeldad.com is the same one that first send me scrambling the web when I became an at-home dad: how many of us are out there. The answer, unfortunately, is far from simple. I've written probably dozens of posts on the topic, and this page is an effort to pull together all the estimates -- and link to the rebeldad.com commentary for each estimate. It should go without saying that the numbers and definitions are extraordinarily varied, and one estimate cannot be fairly compared with any other.Except where noted, all data is for the US population, and, where possible, a link to the source data is provided.
AT HOME DAD NUMBERS

17.3 percent of all children aged 0-4 with employed mother
Census Bureau, 2007 (based on 2005 data, Excel file)
Or maybe it's 25 percent (Press release)
Or 17.2 percent ("historical table")
Or 18.2 percent ("detailed table 2b")
rebeldad.com analysis
Also:additional rebeldad.com analysis
159,000
Census Bureau, 2007 (based on 2006 data, Excel file)
rebeldad.com analysis
additional rebeldad.com analysis
143,000
Census Bureau, 2006 (based on 2005 data, CSV file, sorry)
rebeldad.com analysis
147,000
Census Bureau, 2005 (based on 2004 data, Excel file)
rebeldad.com analysis
98,000
Census Bureau, 2004 (based on 2003 data)
rebeldad.com analysis
Also additional rebeldad.com analysis
105,000
Census Bureau, 2003 (based on 2002 data)
rebeldad.com analysis
18.5 percent of fathers with working wives
Census Bureau, 2003 (based on 1999 data)
rebeldad.com analysis
1,915,000
Census Bureau, 1997 (based on 1993 data)

22 percent of fathers
Spike TV survey, via Time magazine, 2004
rebeldad.com analysis
80,000 (Japan)
Social Insurance Agency, as cited in newspaper report
rebeldad.com analysis
155,000 (UK)
Cited in newspaper report, 2004 (story now in paid archive)
rebeldad.com analysis
11 percent of fathers (UK)
Early Learning Centre, 2004
rebeldad.com analysis
MEN CONSIDERING AT-HOME FATHERHOOD
37 percent
careerbuilder.com, 2007

"Four-in-ten"
careerbuilder.com, 2006
rebeldad.com analysis
49 percent
careerbuilder.com, 2005
rebeldad.com analysis
43 percent
careerbuilder.com, 2004

56 percent
Spike TV survey, 2004
rebeldad.com analysis
40 percent
careerbuilder.com, 2003
rebeldad.com analysis
"Almost half" (UK)
Pregnancy and Birth Magazine survey, 2004 (based on newspaper report)
rebeldad.com analysis
"One-third" (UK)
Pregnancy and Birth Magazine survey, 2003 (based on newspaper report now in paid archives)
rebeldad.com analysis

Stay-At-Home Dad Statistics

Many breadwinning mommy bloggers disowned the image of the "seething" working mom who doesn't respect her "subservient" stay-at-home husband: see, for example, Elizabeth at Half-Changed World or Rebecca at Adventures in Applied Math. But we should not dismiss the feelings expressed by Brayfield and Dunleavey--there's obviously a parallel between the fish-out-of-water feelings they express and the angst of a new stay-at-home dad who finds himself alone on the playground.

So what should we think?

Let me tell you a story. One day I was talking with another stay-at-home parent on the playground. While our kids chased each other around the slide, we got to commiserating. I told her how overwhelmed I felt by the daily routines of childcare and housework.

"Well, now you know how women have felt for centuries!" she said, almost cheerful.

Right. I get it. It's a good perspective. And so, to all you ladies out there in reverse role families, let me return the favor.

When I read about women who "seethe" with resentment against the obligations that supporting a family forces on them, or when I hear that they live in "terror" that they'll be the breadwinner "forever," I'm afraid that there's only one response.

Get ready.

You can feel it coming.

Here it goes:

"Well, now you know how men have felt for centuries!"

[... deleted feminist blabla from original article ...]

Dunleavey and Brayfield sound to me like they have (or had) damn good husbands, not to mention good jobs and happy, healthy kids. The husbands' main failing is that they don't measure up to Dunleavey and Brayfield's image of traditional fatherhood: "Someone who walks out the door with a pressed shirt on, a leather briefcase, and a confident gait. Someone who wins bread." But whose failing is that, really? As their writing makes clear, the problem here is not that their husbands are failing as partners and parents. The problem for Dunleavey and Brayfield is that their image of the father and their image of the mother are both stuck in the 1950s, a long-gone era.

My simple point is that when we talk about these things, we need some perspective and we need some empathy--and we need to look forward, to what we really want and where we're really going.

When I read stuff like this, I just want to take these women gently by the shoulders and tell them this is the way it is. "I write here a fair amount about what I call 'reverse traditional families'--families with working mothers and at-home fathers," says Half-Changed World. "One of the strains on women in these families is that we rarely give ourselves mothering credit for being breadwinners. We often beat ourselves up for the things that we don't do, without giving ourselves corresponding brownie points for the things we do. Maybe we should stop worrying about whether we're good enough mothers, and decide that we're damned good fathers."

These are wise words. It's certainly better than the angry and unhealthy alternative described by Dunleavey and Brayfield. To them I say, as a working father: Welcome to the club! Stop by and talk anytime! We're all in it together!

<i>Daddy Dialectic</i>: Mom vs. Herself

The sample
Complete data was submitted by 213 men who considered themselves SAHFs. The average age was 37 and the sample was primarily Caucasian (93%). Ninety-seven percent of the sample had been employed prior to becoming a SAHF. Sixty-seven percent of the sample reported being currently not-employed and endorsed being a full time childcare provider. Another 30% of the sample worked part-time in or outside of the home. Ninety-eight percent of the sample was married. Seventy-two percent of the sample had a bachelors degree or higher. Average number of children was 1.8 (2 was the most common number of children).
Reports of Psychological Well-Being, Life Satisfaction, and Relationship Satisfaction
Overall, the sample reported average to moderately high levels of life satisfaction and psychological well-being . The average for the sample for well-being and life satisfaction was 29 and 26, respectively, out of a possible 35 points. Relationship satisfaction levels were slightly higher with a mean of 30 out of a possible 36. This data is comparable, if not slightly higher, to data reported in other studies on non SAHFs.
Predictors or “correlates” of Well-Being, Life-Satisfaction and Relationship Satisfaction
Importantly, there was a considerable range in the scores on the measures used in the study. In other words, some of the men were doing great – reporting high levels of life satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, and low levels of distress. Others were lower on these variables and not doing as well. So we were interested in looking at what variables were related to or predicted distress and life and relationship satisfaction. We found several significant variables described below.
1) Social Support – Men who reported high levels of social support reported higher levels of relationship satisfaction, psychological well-being ( i.e., less distress), and overall were more satisfied in their lives. Social support seemed important in several different contexts – with their partner, friends, and family. Conversely, those who had low social support in these areas seemed to be struggling more in their relationships and in life.
2) Parenting Confidence and Skills – Men who reported higher levels of confidence or self-efficacy (essentially another word for confidence) with many of the basic tasks of parenting seemed happier in their lives. Interestingly, there were a few different types of parenting self-efficacy that told us further information. These included how well men encouraged their children to be autonomous in life (and in their play) as well as how confident men felt about being nurturing toward their children. Men who rated themselves higher on these dimensions (having more confidence in being nurturing toward their kids and encouraging them to be independent at times) reported being happier in their lives and experienced less distress.
3) Masculinity Conformity – An additional focus of this study was how stay-at-home fathers rated themselves on a commonly used measure of conformity (or adherence) to traditional male role norms or values. These are essentially statements that men either agree or disagree with in terms of what it means for them to be a man. For example, very traditional norms of masculinity would include such ideas that men should be powerful, successful, have dominance over women, solve problems by themselves, avoid emotional expression, etc.
Overall the sample had significantly lower conformity to traditional masculine norms and values than similarly aged men in the community (as contrasted to other data to be published). In general, this is a good thing as there is a significant literature base that suggests that strict adherence to these traditional values is related to a number of psychological and physical problems including substance abuse, depression, anxiety, problems in relationships, etc.
However, as with the other variables in the study there as a considerable range in responses. What we found is that SAHFs who had lower scores on this masculinity measure (which represented less traditional and more flexible male gender roles) reported being more satisfied in life and their relationships and had lower levels of psychological distress. Conversely, men who had higher conformity to these masculine norms had lower reported levels of life and relationship satisfaction and higher distress. In the most simple way of explaining this - SAHF who considered themselves more (traditionally) masculine seemed to be struggling some in their roles, reporting more distress and not being as happy in life and in their relationship. Masculinity conformity was also related to social support, with men who had endorsed more traditional ideals of masculinity reported having lower levels of social support in their lives.

University of Texas At-Home Dad Research Summary

Return to work not easy for stay-at-home dads

Men can face societal sanctions if they chose to be full-time caregivers

[...] it appears men who make the decision to become stay-at-home dads may be in even more career hot water.

Men have the added problem of trying to return to work in a society that just doesn’t get why they made the decision to leave a budding career in the first place. Even though women face similar discrimination, experts say, society is more accepting of moms making such a choice. Men, on the other hand, are thought of as “unmanly” when they decide the become nurturer and take time away from the traditional hunter role.


[...]


“In our culture, we look at work and family issues as women’s issues and don’t acknowledge men have at least the same kind of concerns about their families. And the additional thing we dump on them is that so much masculinity is tied up in our salaries and professional accomplishments. When you disconnect from that, are you a man anymore?”


Men put this pressure on themselves, and their working wives often do this as well, not fully accepting the uncommon family structure, Brott adds.
The feminist movement was supposed to open the world to such role reversals, but alas it’s been a tough sell at home and in the workplace.
“Men face more prejudice when they decide to return to the workplace than women do. In fact, some companies have a lot of prejudice, so many men simply take vacation leave instead of Family Leave when a new baby comes. They know it would affect their career promotional path to advertise loudly ‘family is first’ in many companies,” says Robin Ryan, career coach and author of “What to Do With the Rest of Your Life”.


[...]


The number of stay-at-home dads still pales in comparison to women who make that choice, but the numbers are growing.


Nearly 160,000 men stay home with their kids today, almost three times the number that were staying at home just ten years ago, according to the U.S. Census. And many more men would take on the role, experts say, if there wasn’t so much macho baggage out there.


[...]


“While indeed it’s extremely tough for women to get back to work after a long time away, it gets even tougher for a man to do the same. Society has unwritten rules for dads that decide that their family is more important than corporate America.”


It does, agrees Scott Haltzman, MD Clinical Assistant Professor, Brown University Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior.


“How does the workplace view a man that takes time off of his career to raise children? They tend to look at him as not having the kind of drive or seriousness of purpose that they would want in leadership positions,” he says about what he sees as a pervasive stereotype.


And a double whammy for stay-at-home dads when they return to work, is they usually have little support at the office or plant because there are rarely dads who made a similar choice to commiserate with.



“It’s so important for men to have the support of other men, to receive the validation they need to make tough choices. Men get that support from men’s groups where men get the fathering, the wisdom and the tough love they need to make unpopular decisions,” says Wayne Levine, a clinical psychologist and founding director of BetterMen.org


“They’re in an identity vacuum,” adds Haltzman, “because the workplace doesn’t have anything to guide them when they show up at the doorstep saying, ‘I’m ready to get back to work.’”


Despite the challenges, Haltzman suggests men hold their heads up high when they return to work instead of feeling sheepish or embarrassed of his choice: “He needs to be able to paint it in the most positive light.”

Return to work not easy for stay-at-home dads - Careers

Stay-at-Home Dads Fight Stigma

Men Who Parented Full Time Say They Get Third Degree at Interviews


When Steven Greenfield, a 40-year-old software-development administrator in San Jose, Calif., started looking for work early last year, he found he had some explaining to do. Managers kept quizzing him about his decision to stay home the prior four years to raise his three young daughters.


One interviewer asked him if he was gay or "just weird, since 'stay-at-home dad' isn't something a man is willing to admit to," he was told. A second interviewer accused him of failing to keep current with technology because "raising kids was too time-consuming," although the interviewer never bothered to ask Mr. Greenfield about any of his specific technological abilities.


A third, informed of Mr. Greenfield's stay-at-home status, simply seemed at a loss for words. The interview wandered off track, and ended quickly.


According to the U.S. Census Bureau's March 2002 Current Population Survey, among two-parent households, there were 189,000 children with stay-at-home dads. Though the figure is small next to the 11 million children with stay-at-home moms, the number of children living with stay-at-home dads has risen 18% since 1994. (The number of children living with stay-at-home moms rose 13% between 1994 to 2000.) Career and family experts say there probably has been a further bump during the economic downturn because some men who have been laid off have stayed home while their wives work.


Now, with signs of life in the economy, some of those stay-at-home fathers are venturing into the job market -- and often are finding a stigma attached to their decision. While most employers are accustomed to dealing with mothers who return to the work force after a period at home, few have experience with fathers attempting to do the same.


"This is still kind of new to us all," says Susan Seitel, president of Work and Family Connection Inc., a consulting firm in Minnetonka, Minn. "And while we have trained managers to expect women to have family responsibilities, the expectations are not the same for men."

Stay-at-Home Dads Fight Stigma - WSJ.com

Why I Left My Beta Husband


A few years ago, my husband, Mark, and I were at one of those hip downtown restaurants sipping mojitos and nibbling on lime-spiked seviche when one of my bosses appeared from a cloud of Cuban-cigar smoke and patted my shoulder. When I introduced him to Mark, he naturally asked what he did for a living. We both froze.
"I do some freelancing," Mark said.
"He studied film at NYU," I said at the same time.
Mark looked at me and shrugged. "I stay home with our daughter," he said, as my colleague quietly balked.
"He makes it possible for me to do my job," I said, laughing. But inside, I was mortified. Technically, I had it all back then, including a gorgeous toddler and a cool job.
What I didn't have was a husband I felt proud of.

God knows I wanted to be proud of him. Mark is smart and funny and the only person I know who gets off on explaining why the Sherlock Holmes tales are more colonialist than patriarchal. And if you asked me about somebody else's stay-at-home husband, I'd be all over the subject, spouting statistics about how important the father-daughter bond is to girls' self-esteem and how limiting it is to expect women to mind the home front. But living it was completely different.


Maybe it's because the plan wasn't for Mark to be a stay-at-home dad. I went to work when he started graduate school, thinking that I'd head back for my own Ph.D. once he was done. I envisioned us as hard-core academics, reading passages from Joyce to each other while I put together a fancy dinner of organic rutabaga soup with apple crème fraîche swirls on top. Instead, I fell in love with my first job at a small food magazine, and eventually, after a few promotions, I found myself working as a staff writer for a national women's magazine.


Things went less smoothly for Mark. By the time we found out I was pregnant—three years into our marriage—he'd been looking for a job teaching film for six months with no luck. Then he began applying for any old job, but nothing panned out. Still, the minute my pregnancy test flashed its double pink lines at me, I knew I needed to put my career on hold.


I stayed home with our daughter for six months after she was born while Mark continued, yes, looking for a job. In 18 months, he got just two calls. Meanwhile, I was being pursued by headhunters. Eventually, I took an editing job at a health magazine.


I felt like myself again—pitching ideas, doing the witty-banter thing in the halls with my colleagues. But my marriage started to fall apart. I felt guilty about being glad to go back to work, and in my head, I made it Mark's fault. Because he couldn't find a job, I blamed him when I was working late and had to miss the baby's bedtime; it was his fault I had to go in early every day, since the fact that he couldn't find a job meant that I couldn't afford to lose mine.

[...]

I was reminded why I had once thought Mark was the sexiest man in the world.

But our sex life was in ruins. I chalked it up to the transition period all new parents go through. Then one day, I realized it had been almost a year since Mark and I had made love.


Sometimes he'd say, "I really think things would be better for us if we could just be intimate again." Or he'd put the baby to bed early and come into the living room with two glasses of wine and a book of poetry—our classic recipe for seduction—but just the thought of him touching me made me recoil. "Maybe I'm just not a sexual person anymore," I told him, and I honestly meant it.


The truth is, I wasn't attracted to him anymore. It wasn't that he'd changed—he still had the same floppy brown hair, bright green eyes, and long freckled limbs that had literally made me quiver when I first met him. But in my head, I'd neutralized him as a sexual being. I wanted to be overwhelmed by the sheer power of his masculinity in the bedroom, but I wasn't. Because I felt like the man in our relationship.


We went to see a therapist. "Don't you think I resent you for how easy it is for you?" Mark asked me during one session. "You have this great job, and I'm home like a slave, running errands, taking care of your shit, and you can't even spare me five minutes of conversation at the end of the day."
I think it was the first time I'd actually listened to what he had to say in years. He said that he was angry with me for always putting work first and angry with himself for not being able to find a job. He said he didn't appreciate being treated like a nanny-slash-housekeeper-slash-gardener. But what alternatives was he offering?


We separated a few months later.


In retrospect, I realized I had this preconceived idea of what a sexy, attractive man should be like. I imagined being married to, well, someone like me. Someone whose job sounds interesting to other people. Someone who walks out the door with a pressed shirt on, a leather briefcase, and a confident gait. Someone who wins bread. Does that make me a sexist? "I always felt embarrassed and guilty—you had all these ambitions for me that I felt like I wasn't living up to," Mark said to me after our divorce.
So nobody was more surprised than I was when I went ahead and fell for another stay-at-home dad.

Why I Left My Beta Husband - * MSN Relationships - article

A Breadwinner Rethinks Gender Roles


WHEN my son was born last fall, my husband and I had a plan. After a short maternity leave, I would continue to work, and he would quit his job to take care of the baby.


I didn’t think of myself as becoming the breadwinner; I had always earned the higher income. The fact that my mate would have a job at home, just not a paying one for now, didn’t bother me.



The main hurdle, we assumed, would be figuring out how to afford the shift from two incomes to one. That has turned out to be the least of our problems. The real challenge is navigating the kinds of financial and emotional issues that you can’t enter into a calculator or plug into a spreadsheet.



Like so many women raised at the tail end of feminism’s first wave, I assumed that my spouse and I would enjoy a relationship based on equality. Equality is an overworked word, but to me it meant sharing the income, chores and child care.



So when my husband asked me the other day, “Did your concept of ‘equality’ ever include supporting the family?” I had to admit that my answer was no.


I wanted it to be yes. If men could provide for their wives and families, as they have traditionally in many cultures, why shouldn’t women feel just fine about assuming that role themselves? Why didn’t I?


To put it simply, because we’re not there yet, says Kathleen Gerson, a co-author with Jerry A. Jacobs of “The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality” (Harvard, 2004). “We are all quite comfortable with the dual-earner household. It’s become a cultural template,” she said. “But for some reason we hit a roadblock when it comes to single-income households where the single earner is a woman.”


According to Ms. Gerson’s research, the number of households where the wife is the sole earner, from 1970 to 2000, jumped from about 4.1 percent to over 7 percent, and has grown since then. That does not include women who are the primary earners in their families.


A 2003 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that about a third of wives earned more than their husbands. And about 43 percent of household income overall was earned by women, according to a 2003 study by the Families and Work Institute, a group in New York.


This data doesn’t begin to reveal the uncomfortable situation that breadwinner women are in: How to renegotiate expectations for everything from who manages the money to who does the laundry — when you’re C.F.O. of the household.


When I say uncomfortable, I’m trying to be polite. The women I know in these shoes are seething — with uncertainty, resentment, anxiety and frustration. The patterns that seem “normal” when the husband is the breadwinner don’t hold up when women earn most or even all of the income.


That is partly because “men have a sense of esteem, of identity that comes with being the provider,” says Barbara Risman, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. “Women don’t get the same identity benefit — there’s a sense that one has a double burden.”

[...]

I’m earning a good living. But for many frustrated women, financial power hasn’t created the balance they were hoping for, and they’re still working what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild dubbed “the second shift.” As one breadwinner friend of mine put it, quoting an old Enjoli perfume commercial about a woman who “can bring home the bacon/fry it up in a pan”: “I didn’t think I’d have to serve the bacon and clean the pan, too.”And I didn’t think I’d feel so guilty, or derelict in my womanly duties, when my husband is quick to comfort our fussy 4-month-old — or reminds me where we keep the muffin tin. Or that I’d feel so much chest-tightening pressure when I monitor our bills — or remind myself that if I don’t sign us up for life insurance, nobody will. Because it’s my job.

A Breadwinner Rethinks Gender Roles - New York Times

For women, MBA = Divorce


The numbers are in and they don’t look good. And this time I’m not talking about the economy. I’m talking about the fact that women MBAs are twice as likely to get divorced than the men with whom they graduate. As reported in the WSJ, according to a study Washington & LeeUniversity School of Law Prof. Robin Fretwell Wilson, 12% of women MBAs reported having divorced or separated as compared to 5% of male MBAs.


And why is this news?


There is a recent obsession with the “opt-out” generation, made up of women with advanced degrees who take a permanent detour off their high-powered career tracks to stay at home and care for families. For those women that remain in the workplace, struggling to succeed in a world where many high-achieving men have wives to take care of the details, we are left wondering how they do it. Wonder no more. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they don’t.



The fact is that ambitious, career-driven women are not attracted to guys who want to stay at home and change diapers. They want similarly ambitious men in their lives. And a lot of ambitious, career-driven men think they want to marry high-achieving women. Think about how many couples meet in business school, for example. After a few years, though, men realize that marrying their equal was not such a good idea, because now there is no one to pack lunches in the morning or drive the kids to soccer practice. And women realize that marrying a man on his way to the top leaves them stuck holding the diaper bag. Divorce ensues. But why the uneven statistics—that is, more women getting divorced than men? My theory is that women hold on to the illusion that they can do it all longer than men do. Men figure out earlier that women can’t do it all. They realize they want someone who will do the things they can’t do while climbing the corporate ladder—like lunches and soccer practice. For example, I have a good friend from business school who had a thing for girls in suits. He always told me he wanted to marry an ambitious, powerful woman. He’s now engaged to a woman who works in child care and is ready to follow him wherever his job takes them. I think they’ll be very happy. He figured it out.


The myth of having it all

About 30% of MBA students are women. Despite all their efforts, business schools can’t seem to increase this number. Part of this is due to the fact that most business schools want candidates to have 3-5 years of real-world work experience. This pushes the average age of applicants to 27-30 years old--right about the time women begin to think about getting married and starting a family. And there is no better way to destroy the value of your newly-minted MBA than to immediately take maternity leave at the fabulous job you just worked your butt off to get. Maybe, then, we should be surprised that any women choose to go to business school, at all. Who are these women who make up the 30%? Are they born without biological clocks? With no interest in family or children? Focused only on crashing their way through the glass ceiling to arrive at the corner office? A few, yes. The majority, though, are victims of the biggest lie of all: that they can have it all.


As a woman in business school, there are women-only conferences where you can hear successful females tell you how they made Managing Director and still have a great family life. There are recruiting events where you can listen to top female executives tell you how you can be successful and still have time to cook dinner and have meaningful time with your significant other, no sacrifices required. These women are lying.


I realized they were lying the day I heard someone tell the truth. I was at a day-long conference for women in finance, lunching with hundreds of other bright, ambitious young women MBAs in the banquet room of a posh, Midtown hotel. The keynote speaker was the former CFO of a Wall Street investment bank. She took the podium and began to tell us about her career and share the secrets of her success. She talked first about all the long nights she put in at the office, then about how she put off having children, and eventually about how she hid her first pregnancy, revealing it only after she was promoted. My epiphany happened as she told us about going into labor with her first child, and how the first thing she did after she heard the baby cry was grab her Blackberry and start responding to emails—from the hospital delivery room. At this point the banquet room grew silent as one hundred horrified young women looked on. I was stunned, then relieved. What we had suspected all along was finally out in the open—that you can’t have it all.


I felt the same way a year later as I started my job at an investment bank and Sallie Krawcheck, CFO of Citigroup at the time, spoke to our training class. She told us about all the times she missed parent-teacher conferences and dinner dates with her husband. She said that she was forced to choose between being a great CFO and being a great wife and mother. She chose her job and she doesn’t apologize for it.
Maybe you’re smarter than I was when I started business school; maybe you already know that you can’t have it all. And maybe that’s fine with you. Not having it all in one area of life, like your career, means you can have a lot more of other parts of life, like family, vacation, friends and hobbies. For some people, that’s what makes them happy. Spend some time figuring out if you’re one of those people, or if you are like Sallie Krawcheck.


In choosing a job after business school you are really choosing a lifestyle. That lifestyle can change, of course, but by thinking through what you want ahead of time you avoid waking up five years from now and regretting the 100 hour weeks that have left you friendless and alone. Or the flip side, realizing that what you really wanted was to be a CEO by the time you were 35 but now you have three kids and a mortgage. Think about it.

For women, MBA = Divorce « The Naked MBA

The Opt-Out Revolution


[...]



The eight women in the room have each earned a degree from Princeton, which was a citadel of everything male until the first co-educated class entered in 1969. And after Princeton, the women of this book club went on to do other things that women once were not expected to do. They received law degrees from Harvard and Columbia. They chose husbands who could keep up with them, not simply support them. They waited to have children because work was too exciting. They put on power suits and marched off to take on the world.



Yes, if an early feminist could peer into this scene, she would feel triumphant about the future. Until, of course, any one of these polished and purposeful women opened her mouth.



''I don't want to be on the fast track leading to a partnership at a prestigious law firm,'' says Katherine Brokaw, who left that track in order to stay home with her three children. ''Some people define that as success. I don't.''



''I don't want to be famous; I don't want to conquer the world; I don't want that kind of life,'' says Sarah McArthur Amsbary, who was a theater artist and teacher and earned her master's degree in English, then stepped out of the work force when her daughter was born. ''Maternity provides an escape hatch that paternity does not. Having a baby provides a graceful and convenient exit.''



Wander into any Starbucks in any Starbucks kind of neighborhood in the hours after the commuters are gone. See all those mothers drinking coffee and watching over toddlers at play? If you look past the Lycra gym clothes and the Internet-access cellphones, the scene could be the 50's, but for the fact that the coffee is more expensive and the mothers have M.B.A.'s.
We've gotten so used to the sight that we've lost track of the fact that this was not the way it was supposed to be. Women -- specifically, educated professional women -- were supposed to achieve like men. Once the barriers came down, once the playing field was leveled, they were supposed to march toward the future and take rightful ownership of the universe, or at the very least, ownership of their half. The women's movement was largely about grabbing a fair share of power -- making equal money, standing at the helm in the macho realms of business and government and law. It was about running the world.



''We thought there would be a woman president by now,'' says Marie Wilson, director of the Ms. Foundation for Women and president of the White House Project, who has been fighting to increase the representation of women in work and politics since 1975. ''We expected that women would be leading half the companies in this country, that there would be parity on boards.'' Instead, Wilson has just finished a book that includes an examination, in her words, of ''how far we haven't come,'' titled ''Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World.''
Arguably, the barriers of 40 years ago are down. Fifty percent of the undergraduate class of 2003 at Yale was female; this year's graduating class at Berkeley Law School was 63 percent women; Harvard was 46 percent; Columbia was 51. Nearly 47 percent of medical students are women, as are 50percent of undergraduate business majors (though, interestingly, about 30percent of M.B.A. candidates). They are recruited by top firms in all fields. They start strong out of the gate.



And then, suddenly, they stop. Despite all those women graduating from law school, they comprise only 16 percent of partners in law firms. Although men and women enter corporate training programs in equal numbers, just 16 percent of corporate officers are women, and only eight companies in the Fortune 500 have female C.E.O.'s. Of 435 members of the House of Representatives, 62 are women; there are 14 women in the 100-member Senate.



Measured against the way things once were, this is certainly progress. But measured against the way things were expected to be, this is a revolution stalled. During the 90's, the talk was about the glass ceiling, about women who were turned away at the threshold of power simply because they were women. The talk of this new decade is less about the obstacles faced by women than it is about the obstacles faced by mothers. As Joan C. Williams, director of the Program on WorkLife Law at American University, wrote in the Harvard Women's Law Journal last spring, ''Many women never get near'' that glass ceiling, because ''they are stopped long before by the maternal wall.''



Look, for example, at the Stanford class of '81. Fifty-seven percent of mothers in that class spent at least a year at home caring for their infant children in the first decade after graduation. One out of four have stayed home three or more years. Look at Harvard Business School. A survey of women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 found that only 38 percent were working full time. Look at professional women in surveys across the board. Between one-quarter and one-third are out of the work force, depending on the study and the profession. Look at the United States Census, which shows that the number of children being cared for by stay-at-home moms has increased nearly 13 percent in less than a decade. At the same time, the percentage of new mothers who go back to work fell from 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2000.



Look, too, at the mothers who have not left completely but have scaled down or redefined their roles in the crucial career-building years (25 to 44). Two-thirds of those mothers work fewer than 40 hours a week -- in other words, part time. Only 5 percent work 50 or more hours weekly. Women leave the workplace to strike out on their own at equally telling rates; the number of businesses owned or co-owned by women jumped 11 percent since 1997, nearly twice the rate of businesses in general.



Look at how all these numbers compare with those of men. Of white men with M.B.A.'s, 95 percent are working full time, but for white women with M.B.A.'s, that number drops to 67 percent. (Interestingly, the numbers for African-American women are closer to those for white men than to those for white women.)



And look at the women of this Atlanta book club. A roomful of Princeton women each trained as well as any man. Of the 10 members, half are not working at all; one is in business with her husband; one works part time; two freelance; and the only one with a full-time job has no children.



But to talk to the women of the book club -- or to the women of a San Francisco mothers' group with whom I also spent time, or the dozens of other women I interviewed, or the countless women I have come to know during the four years I have reported on the intersection of life and work -- is to sense that something more is happening here. It's not just that the workplace has failed women. It is also that women are rejecting the workplace.



I say this with the full understanding that there are ambitious, achieving women out there who are the emotional and professional equals of any man, and that there are also women who stayed the course, climbed the work ladder without pause and were thwarted by lingering double standards and chauvinism. I also say this knowing that to suggest that women work differently than men -- that they leave more easily and find other parts of life more fulfilling -- is a dangerous and loaded statement.



And lastly, I am very aware that, for the moment, this is true mostly of elite, successful women who can afford real choice -- who have partners with substantial salaries and health insurance -- making it easy to dismiss them as exceptions. To that I would argue that these are the very women who were supposed to be the professional equals of men right now, so the fact that so many are choosing otherwise is explosive.



As these women look up at the ''top,'' they are increasingly deciding that they don't want to do what it takes to get there. Women today have the equal right to make the same bargain that men have made for centuries -- to take time from their family in pursuit of success. Instead, women are redefining success. And in doing so, they are redefining work.
Time was when a woman's definition of success was said to be her apple-pie recipe. Or her husband's promotion. Or her well-turned-out children. Next, being successful required becoming a man. Remember those awful padded-shoulder suits and floppy ties? Success was about the male definition of money and power.



There is nothing wrong with money or power. But they come at a high price. And lately when women talk about success they use words like satisfaction, balance and sanity.



That's why a recent survey by the research firm Catalyst found that 26percent of women at the cusp of the most senior levels of management don't want the promotion. And it's why Fortune magazine found that of the 108 women who have appeared on its list of the top 50 most powerful women over the years, at least 20 have chosen to leave their high-powered jobs, most voluntarily, for lives that are less intense and more fulfilling.



It's why President Bush's adviser Karen Hughes left the White House, saying her family was homesick and wanted to go back to Austin. It's why Brenda C. Barnes, who was the president and C.E.O. of Pepsi-Cola North America, left that job to move back to Illinois with her family. And it's why Wendy Chamberlin, who was ambassador to Pakistan, resigned, because security concerns meant she never saw her two young daughters.



Why don't women run the world?
Maybe it's because they don't want to.



[...]


Sarah Amsbary also raises the question of biology. ''It's all in the M.R.I.,'' she says, of studies that show the brains of men and women ''light up'' differently when they think or feel. And those different brains, she argues, inevitably make different choices. Amsbary graduated with a degree in English, not science, in 1988, and while at Princeton she was one of the first women in the University Cottage Club, which, when I was there, was still an all-male eating club known for attracting preppy good ol' boys. I can only imagine that being the first woman in such a place was its own kind of Darwinian experience.



When I talk to Jeannie Tarkenton, another member of the book club, biology comes up yet again. ''I think some of us are swinging to a place where we enjoy, and can admit we enjoy, the stereotypical role of female/mother/caregiver,'' Tarkenton says. ''I think we were born with those feelings.''



Tarkenton graduated in 1992 and worked first in publishing and then on the start-up of the Atlanta Girls' School, until she had her first child in 2000. She went back and worked three days a week, until her second child was born last year. ''I didn't want to work that hard,'' she says of her decision to quit completely. ''Women today, if we think about feminism at all, we see it as a battle fought for 'the choice.' For us, the freedom to choose work if we want to work is the feminist strain in our lives.''



When these women blame biology, they do so apologetically, and I find the tone as interesting as the words. Any parent can tell you that children are hard-wired from birth: this one is shy, this one is outgoing; this one is laid-back; this one is intense. They were born that way. And any student of the animal kingdom will tell you that males and females of a species act differently. Male baboons leave their mothers; female baboons stay close for life. The female kangaroo is oblivious to her young; the male seahorse carries fertilized eggs to term. Susan Allport, a naturalist, writes in her book ''A Natural History of Parenting,'' ''Males provide direct childcare in less than 5 percent of mammalian species, but in over 90 percent of bird species both male and female tend to their young.''



In other words, we accept that humans are born with certain traits, and we accept that other species have innate differences between the sexes. What we are loath to do is extend that acceptance to humans. Partly that's because absolute scientific evidence one way or the other is impossible to collect. But mostly it is because so much of recent history (the civil rights movement, the women's movement) is an attempt to prove that biology is not destiny. To suggest otherwise is to resurrect an argument that can be -- and has been -- dangerously misused.



''I am so conflicted on this,'' says Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and author of ''Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection.'' Female primates, she says, are ''competitive'' in that they seek status within their social order. So it would follow that women strive for status too.



But there is an important qualifier. When primates compete, they do so in ways that increase the survival chances of their offspring. In other words, they do it for their children. ''At this moment in Western civilization,'' Hrdy says, ''seeking clout in a male world does not correlate with child well-being. Today, striving for status usually means leaving your children with an au pair who's just there for a year, or in inadequate day care. So it's not that women aren't competitive; it's just that they don't want to compete along the lines that are not compatible with their other goals.
''I'm very interested in my family and my environment and my work, not in forging ahead and climbing a power structure,'' Hrdy explains by way of personal illustration. ''That is one of the inherent differences between the sexes.'' Then she warns, ''But to turn that into dogma -- women are caring, men are not, or men should have power, women should not, that's dangerous and false.''



In a loftlike apartment in San Francisco, a weekly play group is meeting over lunch. Lisa Tafuri Krim is ''hands down'' the best cook in the group, the other mothers all agree, as they grab bites of her crepes with goat cheese and tomato while chasing their toddlers. The conversation, mostly about food allergies and baby music classes and coming birthday parties, occasionally drifts toward the faraway world of work.



''I got a call from a guy that I hired,'' says Krim (University of Michigan '93; Harvard Business School '98), who is working part time now at a brand-consulting firm she joined before she became pregnant. ''Now he's way ahead of me on the ladder. He calls and says, 'Hi, stay-at-home mom.'''
The women of this play group did not know each other when they were matched, purely on the basis of their children's ages, by the Golden Gate Mothers Group, an organization designed to make it easier to be a mom in San Francisco. But when they made their introductions at their first gathering more than a year ago, they saw themselves reflected in the capsule descriptions of one another's lives.



''Everyone had an M.B.A.,'' says Tracey Liao Van Hooser, the only one in the present group without one, though she does have a degree from Brown University and a decade of work in advertising and marketing to add to the cumulative résumé. ''It was wonderful to find a group of women who had made the same decisions I had. This play group is the reason I feel so happy with my choice.''

[...]

There is a powerful institution run largely by women: Princeton University. Shirley Tilghman is a molecular biologist who took the top job more than two years ago. Her provost, Amy Gutmann, is a professor of politics and was dean of the faculty before being appointed to the post by Tilghman.
Of the five academic deans who report to Gutmann, three are women: Nancy Weiss Malkiel, a historian, is dean of the college; Maria M. Klawe is dean of the school of engineering; Anne-Marie Slaughter, a lawyer, is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. On top of that, Janet Lavin Rapelye is the new dean of admissions.



This has not gone unnoticed. One member of the class of '41 wrote to the Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine that since ''we now have a lady president and a lady second in command, to save time I recommend that the trustees promptly convert Princeton to a single-sex female university and be done with it.'' Another wrote to suggest that the name of the school be changed to ''Princesstonia.''



Tilghman says she was not really surprised by this old-guard crankiness. These were the same alums, she says, who objected to coeducation in the first place, arguing that women would not donate large amounts to their alma mater after they graduated. Meg Whitman, class of 1977 and president and C.E.O. of ebay Inc. seems to have silenced that objection with her recent $30 million gift.



What did surprise Tilghman, though, was the reaction -- or lack of reaction -- from current female students. Last spring, after one of these new deans was appointed, The Daily Princetonian ran an editorial suggesting that the president was practicing ''gender-based affirmative action.'' Tilghman waited for the women on campus to ''rise up in protest'' at the implication that ''the only way you can possibly justify appointing a woman is in the interest of affirmative action, because, after all, it couldn't possibly be because they were the best person for the job.''



But nothing of the sort happened. ''Have these young women internalized the idea that women really do not lead?'' she asks sadly. ''There was a time when that kind of thinking would have inspired outrage.''



One such time was in 1968, when Tilghman graduated from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. ''I am very much a child of that revolution,'' she says of the early years of the women's movement. ''I came of age at the time when Betty Friedan set things in motion, and it had a tremendous impact on my life. It opened doors for me,'' as a woman in the sciences, ''beyond a shadow of a doubt.''



Now Tilghman finds herself presiding over a new generation, one that is, arguably, more accomplished and more qualified than any that has come before, but one that is not at all sure what to do with all that talent. She raised her son and daughter on her own (she was divorced when her children were young), and she is more than aware of the compromises made both at work and at home. She sees the effect those compromises have had, particularly on her daughter, a 2003 Princeton graduate.
''A life in science, combined with motherhood, meant leaving undone a lot of things I might have wanted to do,'' she says. ''There were books I wished I had read, courses I wished I had taken, community service I wished I had done, places I wished I had seen, friends I wished I had made -- but time constraints made this impossible.'' Her daughter, she says, ''is not as ambitious as I was. I think she saw the trade-offs that I made as ones she might not be prepared to make herself. She is looking for more balance in her life.''



Other members of that generation seem to feel the same way, Tilghman says. She and I had dinner one night in a dining room of Prospect House, where university presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, used to live. We were joined there by Gutmann and Slaughter. Pointing at them, Tilghman said, ''I think that for every one person who looks at an Amy or an Ann-Marie and says, 'I want to be like her,' there are three who say, 'I want to be anything but her.'''



Tilghman is now a leader. In that role she wonders how to educate women to enter this shades-of-gray world and how to create an environment for her own staff that encourages a balanced life. But Tilghman is also a scientist, and she suspects that policies and committees, while crucially important, cannot change everything. And she wonders whether evolution has done both men and women a disservice.



''My fantasy is a world where there are two kinds of people -- ones who like to stay home and care for children and ones who like to go out and have a career,'' she says. ''In this fantasy, one of these kinds can only marry the other.'' But the way it seems to work now is that ambitious women seem to be attracted to ambitious men. Then when they have children together, ''someone has to become less ambitious.'' And right now, it tends to be the woman who makes that choice.



[...]


And what she has concluded, after all this thinking, is that the exodus of professional women from the workplace isn't really about motherhood at all. It is really about work. ''There's a misconception that it's mostly a pull toward motherhood and her precious baby that drives a woman to quit her job, or apparently, her entire career,'' she says. ''Not that the precious baby doesn't magnetize many of us. Mine certainly did. As often as not, though, a woman would have loved to maintain some version of a career, but that job wasn't cutting it anymore. Among women I know, quitting is driven as much from the job-dissatisfaction side as from the pull-to-motherhood side.''



She compares all this to a romance gone sour. ''Timing one's quitting to coincide with a baby is like timing a breakup to coincide with graduation,'' she says. ''It's just a whole lot easier than breaking up in the middle of senior year.''



That is the gift biology gives women, she says. It provides pauses, in the form of pregnancy and childbirth, that men do not have. And as the workplace becomes more stressful and all-consuming, the exit door is more attractive. ''Women get to look around every few years and say, 'Is this still what I want to be doing?''' she says. ''Maybe they have higher standards for job satisfaction because there is always the option of being their child's primary caregiver. When a man gets that dissatisfied with his job, he has to stick it out.''



This, I would argue, is why the workplace needs women. Not just because they are 50 percent of the talent pool, but for the very fact that they are more willing to leave than men. That, in turn, makes employers work harder to keep them. It is why the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche has more than doubled the number of employees on flexible work schedules over the past decade and more than quintupled the number of female partners and directors (to 567, from 97) in the same period. It is why I.B.M. employees can request up to 156 weeks of job-protected family time off. It is why Hamot Medical Center in Erie, Pa., hired a husband and wife to fill one neonatology job, with a shared salary and shared health insurance, then let them decide who stays home and who comes to the hospital on any given day. It is why, everywhere you look, workers are doing their work in untraditional ways.



Women started this conversation about life and work -- a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men.



Looked at that way, this is not the failure of a revolution, but the start of a new one. It is about a door opened but a crack by women that could usher in a new environment for us all.



Why don't women run the world?



''In a way,'' Amsbary says, ''we really do.''

The Opt-Out Revolution - New York Times

Charlie LeDuff on life as a stay-at-home dad

[...]

I am sad for those fathers I had the pleasure to know during the years I was a correspondent. I remember the soldier in Iraq who was not there for the birth of his child. The journalist who came back from the war zone only to be called Uncle by his son. The Mexican man in Long Island, his only presence at home back in the old capital being his photograph and a Western Union receipt. The New York fireman scratching around in the dirt for the body of his son, who died on an unseasonably warm September morning when a skyscraper collapsed upon him.



I was mulling this over one workday morning as I drove my daughter to a Mommy and Me yoga class. Me—yoga at noon. To think.
"I'm sorry," said the nasally male clerk at the salon desk.
"Sorry about what?" I asked.



"The class is closed."



"The class is closed?" We had arrived early. There was no one else there.


"Yes," he stammered. "Closed, uh, well, closed…"



"What are you trying to say? Closed to me because I'm not a mommy?"


"I'm afraid so. Some women might not feel comfortable."


I left without incident. Why shouldn't -women have a club where they could be free from the testosterone of the male interloper? I could have made a scene about the unfairness of it, the double standard—the fact that the golf clubs and fraternal orders have been pried open by women in the name of equality. I could whinge on about the birthing classes and prenatal checkup appointments that treat the fathers as only slightly better than a nuisance—a damp dog, more or less.



But as Claudette and I leave Yoga World, I'm thinking I really ought to be out there living the big life. I wonder what border my friend Mike is crossing, what glorious trouble might he be getting himself into. I wonder if Mike does yoga.



We go off to the park to see the Latina nannies who care for the Little Lord Fauntleroys of a neighborhood filled with two-career families. It's only a 15-minute walk from my own neighborhood, but it's another world altogether. My friend Angelica tells me, "The children love us more than they love their parents. The little one calls me Mommy."



Hearing her say it makes me feel less self-centered—and that what I'm doing is important to this little person. I made a promise to my kin and I'm keeping it. My child will never call someone else Daddy. And so we run our epic little routine: Breakfast. Nap. Walk. Church. Park. Lunch. Nap. Bath. Book time. Toy time. Mommy time. Dinner. Bed. Then a nice glass of Pinot for Papa.



Still, the ennui must show. A man in my neighborhood who was painting a house stopped painting as he saw me leaning into the perambulator, trying to coax the little howler to sleep. His name was Jose. He was older and wore overalls and paint speckles. This man offered me something so deep, so penetrating, I wrote it down.



"The whole world is in your brazos there, amigo," he said, pointing to the carriage. "That little girl is your world and your future and your blood. That is your hair and your eyes—I can see. A man, if he is truly a man, does what God asks him to do. To honor his family."



"I know this," I say, fascinated that the stranger could decipher me from across a street. "But it is hard sometimes for me to be happy about it."
"Ah. Sometimes you see this duty as women's work?"
"Yes," I say. "They must be better at it."



"This does not matter," he tells me. "You must be better. If not the woman then the man, yes? This is preferable to the stranger who is not truly able to give the child love."



He said it just like that. The nut graph, we call it in journalism. The point of the story. Jose articulated the thing my friends—the go-to-work dads—were not able, or not willing, to tell me: You have to decide if the child is more important than the stature, the action, the money. If she is, you must accept it and get on with the routine.



My daughter has awakened. She is standing in her crib, her arms out. "Hi, Daddy," she clucks. Or maybe it's "Kitty, kitty." It doesn't matter, really. She is talking to me. I like this more and more as the days go on. I need her. She has become my purpose.



[...]

Charlie LeDuff on life as a stay-at-home dad: Magazine: mensvogue.com

AM articles (keeping information together....YAY!):
Househusband backlash as high-flying wives ditch men they wanted to stay at home - Househusband backlash as high-flying wives ditch men they wanted to stay at home

House Husband? Or Mangina? - http://antimisandry.com/kellymacs/ho...gina-6541.html

Men's rights: Seeking a role in domestic life - Men's rights: Seeking a role in domestic life

"Momblocked" mothers feel edged out by dads - "Momblocked" mothers feel edged out by dads

Modern Women 'Happy To Be Housewives' - Modern Women 'Happy To Be Housewives'

You see my problem? No matter what I was searching for SAHD - Divorce Rate / SAHD - Custody....nothing turns up. Either taboo or non-excistand I don´t know. If you have links....please post. This has become more a bit about gender roles and choice women have men don´t.

[Marx]

Studies should be in the 'Studies' zone, and moved to Father's Forum for quick forum reference.

[Percy]

I wonder how many of these SAHDs try to get their wives to do housework after her day at the office (not that she is down a coal mine or up a transmission pole or out at sea trawling for fish).

0% probably.

Feckless, once again you do us all proud giving us the fruits of your searches to read and think about.

I just might suggest an AM award at the end of the year !

[Feckless]

I can´t imagine men nagging....like in those articles the wifes will come back from work and THEN start nagging themselves about those little things only they see (my wife and I have different views on dust, dirt and what needs cleaning)...

There is such a thing as an AM award? I am not going to England for this....

[Feckless]

Statistics about Stay-at-home Dads According to the US Census Bureau, there are 66.3 million fathers in the United States today.
(Click here for more statistics about fathers who are not stay-at-home.)
US Census Bureau
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/001792.html

There are an estimated 105,000 “stay-at-home” dads. These are married fathers with children under 15 who are not in the labor force primarily so they can care for family members while their wives work outside the home. Stay-at-home dads care for 189,000 children.
US Census Bureau
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/children/001125.html

There are 2 million preschoolers whose fathers care for them more hours than any other child-care provider while their mothers are at work. This is a ratio of about 1-in-5 preschoolers of employed mothers.
US Census Bureau
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/child/ppl-168.html

================================================== ===

“The United States had an estimated 5.5 million “stay-at-home” parents last year — 5.4 million moms and 98,000 dads, according to a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. It contains the Census Bureau’s first-ever analysis of stay-at-home parents.

Among these stay-at-home parents, 42 percent of mothers and 29 percent of fathers had their own children under age 3 living with them. Thirty-nine percent of mothers and 30 percent of fathers were under age 35.”

U.S. Census Bureau
NOVEMBER 30, 2004
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/families_households/003118.html

================================================== ===

Rebeldad provides a great collection of statistics about stay-at-home dads on the internet.
http://www.rebeldad.com/stats.htm

<click here for statistics about fathers who are not stay-at-home>

http://seattledads.org/Default.aspx?tabid=112

On Fathers Day, an estimated 159,000 stay-at-home dads, or 2.7 percent of the country's stay-at-home parents -- almost triple the percentage from a decade ago -- will celebrate what has become a full-time job, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But experts say that number should be far higher because the census definition doesn't consider single fathers, those with children over 15 or those who work part-time or flexible hours to be home. Federal labor statistics show the number of fathers providing their young children's primary care is more like one in five.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061601289.html

[Percy]

There is such a thing as an AM award? I am not going to England for this....

You could come to Tasmania. !

[Feckless]

Where that devils come from.....naaaaaaaaa I am already fed up with the she-devils

[rachel1089]

My partner stayed at home to care for our child simply because my wage was larger than his so it made sense financially. I had a well paid but extremely boring job that meant all I really did all day was sit at a computer whilst my boyfriend cooked, cleaned and cared for my little boy. I always felt his occupation was far more difficult, and tiring, than mine.

Unfortunately my child died when he was just under a year old and I found the difference in the way my boyfriend and I was treated quite appalling. I was praised for working and the 'life skills' which I had apparently gained from staring moronically at a computer screen undeniably helped me to attain a place on a university course. In contrast my boyfriend, who works in the manual sector, found it difficult to get a job and now that he has found one still receives comments questioning his sexuality just because he chose to care for our child.

[Feckless]

My partner stayed at home to care for our child simply because my wage was larger than his so it made sense financially. I had a well paid but extremely boring job that meant all I really did all day was sit at a computer whilst my boyfriend cooked, cleaned and cared for my little boy. I always felt his occupation was far more difficult, and tiring, than mine.

Unfortunately my child died when he was just under a year old and I found the difference in the way my boyfriend and I was treated quite appalling. I was praised for working and the 'life skills' which I had apparently gained from staring moronically at a computer screen undeniably helped me to attain a place on a university course. In contrast my boyfriend, who works in the manual sector, found it difficult to get a job and now that he has found one still receives comments questioning his sexuality just because he chose to care for our child.

That is the sexism usually forgotten about....times are changing though...

[ftumch]

feck:

Uargh I just wanted to find something about stay-at-home-dads having higher divorce but couldn´t find anything appropriate.

... just a thought, re: finding statistics to fit preconceived ideas. After all, this is what the feminists have done for years to prove the evils of patriarchy (dv, rape, wages, etc)

I have been offline for a few days, so not chance yet to read your rather lengthy post, just a quick skim...

from personal experience:
I was a SAHD and never asked her to to do anything at home, I appreciate what it is to go out to work to provide. I also never got a lie-in, even at weekends, even though I know many men who do just that for their wives. But... the issue of money... mmmm.. now there was a sticking point....

rachel: I understand your pain love, and know how good women are at the networking... they will support, gee-up, all that... men.... we men are stoic, it happens, get over it, etc

[Feckless]

... just a thought, re: finding statistics to fit preconceived ideas. After all, this is what the feminists have done for years to prove the evils of patriarchy (dv, rape, wages, etc)

I know, I know. Being biased is a big problem, the question is how to look at certain informations, or how to get data in the first place. I look at what is there, look at the research and often read the other sites arguments as well (for example you heard that women are less happy than men? I believe that this research is msileading and agree with feminist critics of that research). I still hope I can be balanced but in reality, no one really can be.

[ftumch]

agree with feminist critics

Shh! I won't tell anyone

All statistics require scrutiny, breaking down, and they aren't always the answer, my opinion, but agree this is something we never see... ie, rate of divorce where there is SAHD compared to SAHM... maybe THEY don't want us to know? (kidding. a bit)

[Feckless]

Shh! I won't tell anyone

All statistics require scrutiny, breaking down, and they aren't always the answer, my opinion, but agree this is something we never see... ie, rate of divorce where there is SAHD compared to SAHM... maybe THEY don't want us to know? (kidding. a bit)

Actually that was the point I was searching for as there has been articles ala "women divorce men because they are not breadwinners" without data of course. So I searched for that data and found....nothing, quite the contrary, one of those SAHDs blogged about the difference in divorce rate, and....not much of a difference. If you have other data, let me know.

[ftumch]

Actually that was the point I was searching for as there has been articles ala "women divorce men because they are not breadwinners" without data of course. So I searched for that data and found....nothing, quite the contrary, one of those SAHDs blogged about the difference in divorce rate, and....not much of a difference. If you have other data, let me know.

I figured that was what you were after, but I doubt such data is available. I mean, who would pay for it? The feminist groups certainly wouldn't since "women divorce men because they are not breadwinners" would be a selfish act, and women aren't, er, selfish are they?

I've looked at UK govt statistics online before now, and know they don't have such details, usually just things like divorces granted through behaviour, desertion, adultery, abuse etc. I seriously doubt a woman would use this as an excuse for divorce, more likely behavioural or irreconsilable differences and such like. I doubt such details would be even mentioned in court papers.

What would be needed for this kind of data would be a British Crime Survey style survey... ie anonymous, aimed at divorcees at both genders, and with questions designed to elicit particular responses. For example: Who was the main or sole breadwinner? If sole breadwinner, how did you feel about it? [range of response, V happy to V unhappy....] If we could raise funds, would be worth paying some sociology egg-heads to carryout such a survey.

From personal POV, I've been there... criticised for not earning, it was always her money not ours, criticised for cleaning, for not cleaning lol, and on and on..... I do believe men are hard-wired to provide, that women are hard-wired to marry up... and if we could prove this it would go some way to undermining much of the feminist argument.........

as I wrote this, BBC R4 have just played an advert for forthcoming new series of the generally excellent More Or Less (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...ss/8213670.stm)

I've just emailed them, will see what comes back....

[Feckless]

I figured that was what you were after, but I doubt such data is available. I mean, who would pay for it? The feminist groups certainly wouldn't since "women divorce men because they are not breadwinners" would be a selfish act, and women aren't, er, selfish are they?

I tried to recreate that research but failed somehow. I believe motivation for that ressource have people who believe every men should be working and every women should stay at home. The very traditional lot. Ah well, as I said if you got something show me (there was an article on a raise in divorce with sahds but nothing substantial (that article was my starting point))