Gender Equality

An urgent call for real-world solutions to gender inequality

The age of the male breadwinner and the female caregiver has passed, but gender inequality is as persistent as ever. This work intervenes in debates on domestic inequality, examining tensions between work and family life for women. It explores class disparity, who should care for infants, and fatherhood in a dual-earner family.In the labor market and workplace, anti-discrimination rules, affirmative action policies, and pay equity procedures exercise a direct effect on gender relations. But what can be done to influence the ways that men and women allocate tasks and responsibilities at home?
In Gender Equality, Volume VI in the Real Utopias series, social scientists Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers propose a set of policies-paid family leave provisions, working time regulations, and early childhood education and care-designed to foster more egalitarian family divisions of labor by strengthening men's ties at home and women's attachment to paid work. Their policy proposal is followed by a series of commentaries-both critical and supportive-from a group of distinguished scholars, and a concluding essay in which Gornick and Meyers respond to a debate that is a timely and valuable contribution to egalitarian politics.