Working Women
As I said before, the research question that I am looking to answer is; how do men and women differ when they are combining work and family? Although I have not completed my interviews, I have come to a lot of interesting conclusions. So far I have interviewed two females, and 1 male, about the ways that they balance work and family. I have also chosen my fourth participant, but I have not yet interviewed him. The people that I chose to interview are all of the same race and class, so that I could be sure that what I find is in fact due to gender. My participants are; a female store manager, a male store manager, a female elementary teacher, and a male car salesman. The questions that I asked them, which are attached to this paper, gave me a lot of good evidence that proves what we have been learning in this course. Women tend to have more responsibilities at home with the children, while men are more devoted to their jobs. There is a lot of evidence that the women are sacrificing their careers more in order to take care of their children, which is not hard to believe. I will go in much more detail on that subject in my final paper. I also got several responses that were not what I expected. For
I found a lot of similarities in the ways the family responsibilities are handled among the people that I interviewed, and also many differences. In two of the interviews, the men worked more hours and the women had to either cut their hours of work, or take a leave of absence after having children. It is also interesting that the men's work schedules were not affected by having children. In all three interviews I was told that the women devote the most time to their children, while the men spend more time at their workplace. Also, everyone said that in a family with both parents working, like their own, the time that each of them devotes to caring for their children should be equal. It is obvious that among my participants, and most others, it does not usually work out that way. Someone has to make sacrifices at work, and it is typically the women. Previously I believed that men viewed childcare as a woman's responsibility, but how I see it now is that if they had the chance to be more involved they would. It comes down to the simple fact that in most cases it is not possible to have the childcare responsibilities equally shared. Someone has to devote more time to their job, and that someone is usually the man. But, It is very clear that the opportunities for women have improved greatly from the past, and are still continuing to get better. An article that I found in Ladies Home Journal, which is titled Women and the workplace, describes the
Some common words found in the essay are:
, Home Journal, Women America, store manager, home children, caring children, research question, women concerned, interviews women, balance family, child care, care children,
Approximate Word count = 986
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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