Having It All · Episode 4 of 10 · 22 min
The Second Shift: Why the Revolution Stalled at Home
In 1989 sociologist Arlie Hochschild described what working wives already knew: after the paid day ended, employed women worked what added up to an extra month of twenty-four-hour days each year at home. The workplace had admitted women, but the household never renegotiated. Later time-diary research shrank that estimate, and the gap has narrowed, but it has never closed.
Who's who
- Arlie Russell HochschildBerkeley sociologist and author of The Second Shift
- Anne MachungHochschild's co-author and interviewer
- Suzanne BianchiTime-diary researcher who tested and revised the housework figures
- Melissa MilkieResearcher whose 2009 study put the gap at about a week and a half
- Allison DamingerSociologist who formalized cognitive labor in 2019
Where it happens
- San Francisco Bay Area, California+3 more episodesWhere Hochschild interviewed about fifty two-job couples
Timeline
- 1983Hochschild's The Managed Heart coins 'emotional labor'
- 1989The Second Shift is published
- 2003Bureau of Labor Statistics launches the American Time Use Survey
- 2009Milkie, Raley and Bianchi find a gap of about a week and a half per year
- 2013Pew finds fathers' housework more than doubled since 1965
- 2017'You Should've Asked' comic makes 'the mental load' household English
Still debated
Hochschild's 'extra month' figure came from averaging older time-use studies, and later work found a smaller gap. Near-equal total workloads do not erase women's more fragmented work and mental load, which diaries capture poorly.