ABSTRACT
Over the three decades-1960s, 1970s, and 1980s-the proportion of married couple families with both spouses in the workforce doubled, from 28 percent in 1960 to 54 percent in 1990, reaching an apogee at 60 percent in the mid-1990s.3 Yet “[i]f child care worries are increasingly shared by men and women, child care work is not. Women still do the bulk of all household tasks. Of the woman employed full time, 76 percent still do the majority of the housework.”4 Time diaries (similar to Nielsen television logs) other than the University of Wisconsin study show slightly better numbers now than they did in the 1950s. Yet persistent inequities remain. In 1960, the average working woman recorded 17 hours per week doing household work, compared to three hours for males. By 2006, the working woman recorded 11 hours while the working male recorded five.
