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Let me tell you a little bit about what we found in the study.
We used data from the nationally representative 2003 to 2007 American Time Use Data,
and we showed that working moms were about twice as likely
or more than twice as likely to get up for the night shift of care-giving for dependent children
in the house hold than working fathers were.
And this was based on a very large sample of about 20,000 Americans
in contemporary families here.
What was interesting about this finding was that
this was after taking the kind of differences between men and women in their age,
in how many hours of week that they are working for pay
and whether they had a partner or a spouse to help with the family load,
and whether they were kids around
or other people who might need care in the household.
The way that we collected this data was
to ask people to tell us everything they did for a single 24-hour period,
and they were asked to provide when they started the activity and when they finished it.
So based on the information in these diary days,
people who had an infant in the households
and were in dual career couples so they had a partner
and the both partners worked,
showed very large differences by gender.
And we found that about one in three of these mothers
in dual income couples were getting up
to provide care compared to only about one in ten of these fathers.
Even among parents of infants who are sole breadwinner in a couple,
28% of women reported getting up at night to take care of their child
compared to just 4% of men who were the only earner in the couple.
Most people on the street that you would ask would tell you that’s not surprising to me at all
that women are more likely to get up than men,
but what surprised us was that
even among people that had the same sets of career ambitions
and they were working long hours and so on,
we are still seeing these big gender differences
that we argue are part of social expectations.
But taking on the lion’s share of night time care-giving responsibilities,
if it’s solely women who are doing this
or for the most part women who are doing this,
this is important for two main reasons.
One is that sleep has been in increasing numbers of studies
in the medical literature and elsewhere,
linked very strongly to health and well-being outcomes.
It has also been strongly linked to accidents either traffic accidents or accidents at work.
The second reason why this is so important is because
it could have very important ramifications for people’s careers.
And so, if women are taking on the burden of this during the child bearing years,
that could have unintended consequences for people’s career trajectories.
And as we know most young people,
most middle-aged people in United States today
regardless of gender are planning to have a serious paid work career.
So that’s kind of an unmeasured motherhood penalty
that we are finding in this data.