Penguin unearthed

Fathers and children

The ABS released a study (as part of their annual social trends review) of fathers and how much they are working these days. In previous posts, I've trawled through various ABS products to find out how many stay-at-home dads there are. This study answers the question - 3.4% of families with children under 15 had a father not working while the mother worked full or part-time. A further 6.3% had neither parent working.

The ABS didn't analyse how many families had a mother full-time and father part-time (our arrangement) but about 7% of fathers in total are employed part-time, and that's an increase from 4% in just over 10 years. I think that's the big story. I'm on an email list for mothers who work with the dad at home, and I'd say about half of the dads in that group actually have some paid work. So looking just at stay-at-home dads who don't do any paid work is going to miss lots of families where the dad is the primary carer (a very popular pattern with the genders reversed).

But for fathers and mothers working full time, the use of overtime has increased in the last few years. So the world of work is polarising even more into part-time and very full-time jobs. My personal preference for how we would manage our family would be for us both to have serious part-time jobs. But employers would much much rather have one very full time person than two good part time people.

David Maister had a great post on this topic, in which his view (as a consultant to professional services firms, rather than the whole world of work) is that the whole organisation has have the same view about "intensity" (I think he means willingness to drop everything and work), or it won't work, the organisation is in conflict. And from an organisation's view, if you have an unlimited pool of people that you can choose from, I'm not sure that I disagree. But the world isn't like that; if you're trying to choose great people for your organisation, sometimes you have to compromise, and I think I'd rather compromise on intensity than some other things like the ability to talk to people.

posted by Jennifer @ 7:12 am