FAMILY, WORK & CLASS - Assignment Research Writer

*ONLY USE ATTACHED MATERIALS TO ANSWER*

Question #1: Think about your home (either your current home if you live with a partner/spouse/significant other/family or the house you grew up in) – is there a gendered component to how labor is divided? Think about the mental load cartoon and what we’ve read this week as you answer. Consider the following questions/categories in constructing your answer:

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Who knows the Dr. information for the family?
Who knows when you’re down to 1 roll of paper towels or toilet paper
Who thinks about birth control?
Who does meal planning? Grocery shopping, cooking?
Who knows how old your sheets and towels are?
Who decides what time dinner is?
Who knows where the thermometer is?
Who knows if you have cold medication or throat lozenges?
Who monitors laundry detergent levels?

Question #2: What is ONE policy that you would like to see implemented right now to benefit families/workers? Would your policy benefit everyone equally? How would it help families? What about people who are not married, or don’t have children? Who would be left out – or how would you decide who benefits?

Question #3: If you were designing a workplace that centered the needs of a diverse workforce (in regards to gender identity, sexual orientation, family status, age, etc) what would it look like? What would the standard hours be? Would people be able to work remotely? What type of amenities/benefits would you include? For all of the details you provide, also include why you made that decision.

Cartoon on mental load: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/

7/23/2018 Maternity Leave: U.S. Policies Still Fail Workers – Bloomberg

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-01-28/maternity-leave-u-s-policies-still-fail-workers 1/11

Can the U.S. Ever Fix Its Messed-Up Maternity Leave
System?

Why U.S. maternity leave policies still fail women and children

PHO

OGRAPHER: STEVEN BRAHMS FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK. SET DESIGN: JASON SINGLETON. GROOMING: ANGELA DI CARLO

January 27, 2015, 10:02 PM ES

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7/23/2018 Maternity Leave: U.S. Policies Still Fail Workers – Bloomberg

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-01-28/maternity-leave-u-s-policies-still-fail-workers 2/11

One week into her new job, Letitia Camire learned she was pregnant. It was 2011, and
she’d just been hired as the office manager for United Tool & Machine, a small, family-
owned tool and die company outside Boston. Her salary was $30,000 a year. Camire
clicked with her co-workers immediately. Her boss, the owner and president, started
asking her about long-term career goals. “They seemed so family-oriented,” says
Camire, now 32. So when her morning sickness became noticeable (“I just sat at my
desk looking like death warmed over”), she felt she owed her new work family an
explanation. She was only a few weeks along when she walked into the president’s
office one morning, shut the door, and told him she was pregnant.

“His face immediately changed,” she says. “The first words out of his mouth were,
‘You know you’re still on your 90-day probation period.’ So I pretty much knew what
that meant.” A few weeks later, she was let go. The company told her it was a
reorganization move, but she didn’t buy it. She knew that according to the 1978
Pregnancy Discrimination Act, firing or demoting an employee because she’s pregnant
is illegal, but she also knew discrimination can be hard to prove. The U.S. Supreme
Court recently considered the case of Peg�y Young, a United Parcel Service employee
who was forced into unpaid leave when she told her company she was pregnant and
couldn’t carry packages heavier than 20 pounds. Young has lost in lower courts because
UPS’s accommodation of disabilities not caused by workplace injuries is gender-neutral.
The court will issue its decision later this year. “I didn’t have the financial resources to
fight,” Camire says. United Tool & Machine says Camire was let go because her job was
eliminated, and that the president was unaware she was pregnant at the time.

Camire soon found herself in the awkward position of interviewing for jobs while
pregnant. She wasn’t showing yet, but she told recruiters anyway. “I just didn’t want to
waste anyone’s time,” she says. Luckily, the Israel-based electronics company Orbotech
had no qualms about hiring her. Camire was a new employee, though, so she didn’t
qualify for the short-term disability insurance that it, like many companies, uses as a
workaround to give maternity leave. Instead, she ran through her sick days and
vacation time and relied on her husband’s salary to allow her to take nine weeks off,
unpaid. “We put a lot of things on credit cards,” she says. They stopped going out to
dinner. They streamlined their grocery budget, drove their cars as little as possible, and
gave up—for a while, anyway—the idea of saving for retirement. “Financially, I probably
should’ve been back even sooner than that,” Camire says. But she couldn’t find a local
day care center that would take such a young baby.

Her story isn’t unusual. Unless you work for a company that voluntarily offers it, or
in one of three states, paid maternity leave doesn’t exist in the U.S. A law called the

By Claire Suddath

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7/23/2018 Maternity Leave: U.S. Policies Still Fail Workers – Bloomberg

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-01-28/maternity-leave-u-s-policies-still-fail-workers 3/11

Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) grants up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave every year,
but it applies only to full-time workers at companies with 50 or more employees. About
half of all working Americans are covered by FMLA. The other half—freelancers,
contract workers, entrepreneurs, people who work at small businesses—are on their
own. Paid leave is even rarer: Only 12 percent of American workers have access to it in
the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This comes as a shock to a lot of young women. “Wait, what?” Kathryn, 33, says
about the moment she realized the New York media startup she’d recently joined didn’t
offer maternity leave. “I thought we had laws about this.” (Kathryn asked to have her
last name withheld because of a nondisclosure agreement with her former company.)

Most new mothers are in their 20s or 30s, which means they grew up in a world of
female Supreme Court justices, politicians, and astronauts. They have more college
degrees than men, they entered the workforce in near-equal numbers, and they chose
their careers assuming that having children wouldn’t mean losing money. Almost two-
thirds of women with children under 6 work, about twice the rate of the previous
generation. “I went to college and found something I loved. I got a job. I married and
had babies and just assumed maternity leave was something that existed,” says Annalisa
Spencer, 31, an electrical engineer in Salt Lake City who has three children, and got no
leave for the third. “Nobody told me it would be like this.”

In 2013, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D�N.Y.) introduced legislation that would make
employers offer new parents three months of paid leave at 66 percent of their salary,
but the bill, the Family Act, has been stalled in Congress for more than a year. Even if it
passes, it won’t fix a system that paints a huge segment of the workforce into a corner.
In a country where the median household income is $53,000, 66 percent of a salary
might not be enough to support a family. But the Family Act would drastically change
the lives of many American workers. One of the reasons women make less than men—
16¢ per dollar less, according to the Pew Research Center—is that they’re clustered in
lower-paying fields, or in positions where they work fewer hours. Yet young women
right out of college experience almost no gap at all. The discrepancy grows as they get
older and advance—or fail to advance—in their careers. And the first bump in the road
seems to happen right as they start to have children.

“We have these policies set up
from the Mad Men era when

dads worked and moms stayed
at home. But that doesn’t

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reflect the American workforce
anymore.”

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7/23/2018 Maternity Leave: U.S. Policies Still Fail Workers – Bloomberg

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PHOTOGRAPHER: STEVEN BRAHMS FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK. SET DESIGN: JASON SINGLETON. GROOMING: ANGELA DI CARLO

According to the United Nations’ International Labour Organization, there are only
two countries in the world that don’t have some form of legally protected, partially paid
time off for working women who’ve just had a baby: Papua New Guinea and the U.S.

The U.S. is also way behind the 78 countries that also offer leave to fathers. Forcing
mothers back to work early can have consequences for children. When they’re on
maternity leave, their children are more likely to be breast-fed and taken to the doctor
for checkups. Studies have found that a year after having a baby, women who took at
least a month of leave reported higher salary increases.

With no federal action, some states have stepped in. Five states pay new mothers
through their disability insurance programs. In 2004, California passed the country’s
first paid parental leave law, open to both mothers and fathers. There, new parents get
up to six weeks off at 55 percent of their current paycheck, up to about $1,000 a week.
Since then, New Jersey and Rhode Island have followed.

The policies vary widely across industries and pay grades. A BLS survey of
“business, management, and finance” workers—basically, those in white-collar jobs—
found that 26 percent of them get paid leave. At many Silicon Valley companies, which
compete for talent, new parents have it made. Facebook offers a little more than four
months to everyone. Google offers five for mothers and three for fathers or new
adoptive parents. The company developed its policy a few years ago when it noticed
that many new mothers were quitting their jobs. After it added two more months and
offering full pay, the number of new mothers who left the company dropped by half.

Some older companies also have generous policies. Goldman Sachs offers four paid
months, and General Electric offers two months to moms and two weeks to dads or
other parents. Waitresses and sales clerks are often out of luck; only 6 percent of
service workers get anything at all. That means the ability to adjust to parenthood,
learn to breast-feed, and manage a newborn becomes a luxury only certain people can
afford. “We have these policies set up from the Mad Men era when dads worked and
moms stayed at home. But that doesn’t reflect the American workforce anymore,” says
Gillibrand, who as partner at the Manhattan law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner wrote
the firm’s maternity leave policy in 2002.

Recently, some companies have started to offer leave to fathers. This decreases the
likelihood that an employer will shy away from hiring young women, and it de-
stigmatizes the idea that new dads need time off, too. In the 10 years since California
adopted its policy, the number of requests submitted by men has gone up each year
and stands at 26 percent. In general, the amount of time they take off is much shorter,
typically no more than a week or two. And as children age, the cost of day care and

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nannies starts to squeeze families’ income, sometimes prompting one of the parents to
go part-time or decide to stay home. Even today, that person is usually the mother.

In most places, the only parent offered time off is the mother; she qualifies for short-
term disability insurance after she physically gives birth. That’s what Spencer, the
electrical engineer in Utah, used when she got six weeks at half pay after she had her
first child. (She skipped payments on her 401(k) to take another six unpaid.) By the time
her third child came along, she had dropped down to part-time so she wouldn’t have to
pay so much for rising day care costs, which meant she didn’t get any maternity leave at
all. “I’m hourly now, so it’s not like I’m getting paid for time I’m not working,” she says.
She spent her last maternity leave working from home.

Even women in high-income positions have trouble figuring out how the patchwork
of policies applies to them. “I have three months of paid leave, 46 days of unused
vacation time that I saved up, and then the six weeks that California offers, but I don’t
know if it runs concurrently with my vacation time. It was very confusing. For a while I
didn’t even know what day my leave officially ended,” Jeanette Barzelay, a civil litigation
attorney in San Francisco, told me. Because Barzelay lives in California, she’s covered
under the state’s paid-leave law.

Despite the confusing system, Barzelay did take a lot of time off—six months,
partially paid. But most people, even in California, aren’t that lucky. Colleen, a fast-
talking 44-year-old television director in Los Angeles, didn’t use California’s paid leave
when she had her second child in 2008 because it doesn’t include job protection. For
years, she has worked 65- to 70-hour weeks with studios such as Walt Disney and
Nickelodeon. (Colleen asked to have her last name withheld because she doesn’t want
to jeopardize her relationship with the studios.) She’s highly paid, but as with most
production workers in Hollywood, her contracts for TV shows run from week to week.
Because she’s a contract employee, FMLA doesn’t cover her, and California’s law, which
does, doesn’t require studios to let her keep her job. “There’s this kind of unwritten,
unspoken thought that you could be replaced at any moment,” she says. So when a TV
studio asked her to return to work three weeks after having a C-section, she had to
show up. “I told them I needed to recover from major surgery before I go back to
running around on set all day. They were like, ‘Umm, we really need you back,’ ” she
says. “I wasn’t in a position to argue with them.”

Gillibrand’s bill would apply to every company, no matter what size, and would keep
people like Camire from having to rely on credit cards or people like Colleen from
working right after a C-section. It includes fathers, adoptive parents, and same-sex
parents and would be paid through a new payroll tax of two-tenths of 1 percent. It’s
endorsed by groups such as the National Partnership for Women and Families and the
Small Business Majority. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant

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Association, which have historically opposed paid leave, haven’t come out against it.
Furthermore, polls suggest that paid family leave is overwhelmingly supported by men
and women across the political spectrum.

So why is the Family Act at a standstill? Gillibrand says Congress doesn’t think it’s
important enough. “The issue isn’t being raised because too many of the members of
Congress were never affected by it,” she says, pointing out that 80 percent of Congress
is older and male. “They’re not primary caregivers. Most members of Congress are
affluent and are able to afford help or able to support their [wives]. It’s not a problem
for most of them.” Hillary Clinton has also admitted that while she supports paid leave,
it’s a political battle the U.S. isn’t ready to fight. “I don’t think, politically, we could get it
[passed] now,” she said in a CNN town hall meeting last June.

Washington won’t be able to ignore this forever. “You’re finally starting to see
momentum on this issue,” says Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for
Women and Families. Over the past decade, Ness has noticed that young parents are
becoming increasingly angry at the lack of employer support when they start to have
children. “This will be part of the conversation during the next election,” she says. “The
sleeping giant is waking up.”

Before it was passed, California’s law was vehemently opposed by manufacturing
and small-business associations, which argued that it would be too hard for companies
with just a few employees to handle someone’s six-week absence. The California
Chamber of Commerce called it a “job killer.” To get it passed, lawmakers agreed to
fund the law by taxing people’s paychecks, not businesses. As a result, a 2011 survey
found that 91 percent of California business owners said the law either helped or had no
effect on their profitability. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that
California women in low-wage jobs were more than three times as likely to take some
sort of maternity leave under the law, and returned to their old jobs in higher numbers.
Over time their wages were higher, too. “Businesses in California don’t seem to be
reporting a strong negative effect. I haven’t seen evidence of a significant downside,”
says Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of
Virginia.

Gillibrand’s bill is a sweeping piece of legislation that would, as Carrie Lukas, the
managing director of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, puts it, “rewrite
employment contracts for every working American.” Lukas is against the act because
she’s “worried about the way it’ll change women’s employment prospects. It’s written
in gender-neutral language, but every employer in their right mind knows who’s going
to take advantage of these benefits.” As hard as it might be for paid-leave advocates to
accept, she has a point. That’s exactly what happened in Sweden.

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In any discussion of parental leave, Sweden is the promised land. Parents are given
16 months of paid leave, two of which are reserved just for fathers, and they can divide
the rest however they like until their child is 8 years old. While on leave, the
government pays 80 percent of the parent’s income, even if she’s self-employed.

“We’ve got it so good here,” says Christine Demsteader, a single mother living in
Stockholm. She runs her own communications company but still took 16 months off
when her only child was born a few years ago. “The thing is, we have only one system
for doing things: Women take a year off, then they go back to work and the kid goes into
day care,” she says. “You don’t have another option.”

“And it’s understood that a woman who becomes a mother cannot have the same
career as a man,” adds her friend Lisa Rydberg, who’d run over to Demsteader’s house
when she heard that an American journalist was calling.

For all Sweden’s efforts at gender equality, men still make about 35 percent more
than women, according to a 2012 Swedish government report. And although the top five
spots on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index are all held by Nordic

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countries, their percentage of female chief executive officers is no higher than the 5
percent achieved by Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. “I just know I’d get a promotion
three years later than a colleague who is a man,” says Rydberg. “That’s how it is.”

Intentionally or not, Sweden seems to have routed women onto the “mommy track,”
a slower, less demanding career path for women with children. In the U.S. it often
comes under the guise of the purposefully vague term “caregiver status,” which
companies use when offering reduced hours and a lower salary to parents who need
flexibility. In academia, universities will often pause the so-called tenure clock for
female professors who take time off to have children. Some of these policies can be
helpful. But they also have the side effect of segregating those who use them into
positions where they’re just not expected to advance.

Most women try to get around this by gaming the system. A biolo�y professor at the
University of Pittsburgh planned her pregnancy so that she’d give birth during the
summer, when she already had time off. (Unpaid, of course.) Colleen the TV director
tried to have her kids between TV seasons; she succeeded two out of three times. Of
course, this method assumes a woman gets pregnant only when she wants to, she has a
healthy pregnancy and delivery, and her baby doesn’t need special care. “I had this one
window when I had to have the baby,” Kate Lytton, a ballet teacher in Akron, told me.
Lytton had her daughter in July and took six weeks off unpaid, but could do that only
because classes weren’t in session. “When she was a week late, I worried she’d cut into
my leave time.”

In fields without a seasonal break, women put off having children until they’re in a
senior position, then cross their fingers and hope it’s not too late. “The standard
practice for women in law is to make partner first and then start a family,” says Chelsea
Petersen, a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie in Seattle. Nine years ago she was 34
and a midlevel associate at the firm, which is exactly the wrong time—professionally—to
have kids. “That’s when you’re really working hard, trying to prove yourself. But with
my age, I couldn’t wait another seven years,” she says. A year after having her first and
only child, Petersen found herself crying in a fetal position on the floor of her office,
suffering from exhaustion. “Days would go by where I wouldn’t have eaten a real meal
or taken care of myself for five minutes,” she says. Over the years, Perkins Coie has
extended its leave policy to cover fathers and created a support group for working
parents. Still, Petersen can count at least 10 women in her department who’ve left,
many because the demands on their time were too much. As far as she knows, she’s the
only one who had a baby, made partner, and stayed full-time.

Not everyone can work as hard as Petersen. Or even wants to. “Listen, I know Sheryl
Sandberg wants me to lean in,” Colleen told me. In her book Lean In and her 2010 TED
Talk, the Facebook COO urged women to accept promotions or go for new jobs even

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when they knew they might be pregnant soon. “Well, OK, Sheryl, I think that’s a really
great notion,” Colleen says. “But it’s different for us. It just flat out is. There is nothing
we can do about it, because biologically it’s like, well, you’re having babies now.”

Luckily, there is some middle ground between the American patchwork and Swedish
sabbatical—and the best example of it is Canada. “Unlike the Scandinavian countries,
Canada’s tax rate isn’t radically different from the U.S.,” says Ruhm at the University of
Virginia, which means any program it has could conceivably be implemented in the U.S.
“I’ve become an incrementalist—try something small, see if it’s working, and then tweak
it. That’s what Canada does.” Canada passed its first national maternity leave law in 1971
and has been adjusting it ever since. In 2000 it lengthened its available leave from six
months to a year. About four months of that is reserved for mothers; the rest is
available to all parents. They receive 55 percent of their salary (up to an income limit),
paid through the country’s unemployment insurance program, and are guaranteed
their jobs when they go back to work.

Gillibrand’s Family Act looks a lot like Canada’s model. And because it has never
been debated or amended—the Senate Finance Committee has been quietly ignoring it
for more than a year—it hasn’t yet been muddied up with loopholes or concessions. It
won’t turn working motherhood into anything resembling “easy.” But it may be the
closest thing to a workable solution.

https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions?in_source=article-meter

7/23/2018 Maternity Leave: U.S. Policies Still Fail Workers – Bloomberg

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-01-28/maternity-leave-u-s-policies-still-fail-workers 11/11

PHOTOGRAPH: STEVEN BRAHMS FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK. SET DESIGN: JASON SINGLETON. GROOMING: ANGELA DI CARLO

Nine weeks after Camire had her baby, a daughter she named Catherine, she went
back to work at Orbotech. “I was like, thank God I get to talk to someone other than a
lump!” she laughs. She stayed at the company for two years, where she oversaw sales
and shipping. In 2013 she became pregnant with her second child. This time, Camire
qualified for the company’s short-term disability pay, which allowed her six weeks off at
two-thirds of her salary. (FMLA provided another six, unpaid.) Then she started
thinking about the future. Day care costs for her children would run about $25,000 a
year in Boston. When she factored in gas, meals, and other costs, the amount of money
she’d be able to provide for her family was laughably small. So three months before she
was supposed to go on maternity leave, Camire told her manager she wouldn’t be
coming back.

“The company was completely shocked,” she says. Sure, she could’ve taken the leave
and then refused to come back afterward, but Camire didn’t want to do that. “I
would’ve burned bridges personally and professionally. That sat heavily on me.”

For the next few years, she’ll stay at home. Her son, Charlie, is 7 months old.
Catherine is almost 3. Camire’s days are filled with diapers and bottles and nap times
that never seem to align. In some ways, raising a child while working was easier, she
says. “At day care, I had someone to help me figure out the developmental milestones.
They’d send a note saying, y’know, Catherine takes an 8-ounce bottle now instead of 6.
With Charlie, I have to figure that out on my own.” She misses Orbotech sometimes and
plans to go back to work in a few years once the kids are in school. She just hopes no
one minds the long employment gap on her résumé.

©2018 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved
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FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER

A Comparison of Physicians and Emergency
Medical Technicians

CARLA SHOWS
Daytona State College
NAOMI GERSTEL
University of Massachusetts

Using a multimethod approach (including a survey, interviews, and observations), this
article examines the link between class and masculinities by comparing the way two
groups—professional men (physicians) and working-class men (emergency medical tech-
nicians, or EMTs)—practice fatherhood. First, the authors show that these two groups
practice different types of masculinity as they engage in different kinds of fatherhood.
Physicians emphasize “public fatherhood,” which entails attendance at public events but
little involvement in the daily care of their children. In contrast, EMTs are not only
involved in their children’s public events but also emphasize “private fatherhood,” which
entails involvement in their daily care. Second, the authors suggest that these differing
types of involvement can be explained by the contrasting employment conditions of each
group as well the gender order of their families, especially the divergent labor market
positions of spouses and the division of parenting. The authors conclude by arguing that
these working-class fathers are “undoing gender” while professional fathers reproduce
the conventional gender order.

Keywords: class; gender; masculinities; work; family; parenting; fathers

AUTHORS’ NOTE: We gratefully acknowledge support from NSF (No. SES-0549817), the
National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians (NAEMT), and the Political
Economy Research Institute (PERI); we would like to thank Irene Boeckmann, Dana
Britton, Michelle Budig, Dan Clawson, Jill Crocker, Dustin Avent-Holt, Donald Tomaskovic-
Devey, Robert Zussman, and the anonymous reviewers at Gender & Society. Address all
correspondence to Carla Shows, Daytona State College, 1200 West International
Speedway Boulevard, PO Box 2811, Daytona Beach, FL, 32120-2811; e-mail: showsc@
daytonastate.edu.

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 23 No. 2, April 2009

161

-187
DOI: 10.1177/0891243209333872
© 2009 Sociologists for Women in Society

161

162 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

A large and growing literature documents recent changes and growing variation in the relationship of gender, paid work, and parenting.
Although most of this research focuses on the range of women’s experi-
ences, some suggests that most men still emphasize employment as cen-
tral to their practice of fatherhood (Lamb 1995; Orloff and Monson 2002;
Townsend 2002), leaving far more of the parenting and daily caregiving
to mothers (Casper and Bianchi 2002; Craig 2006). Few studies, however,
focus on the varied experiences of men to examine how employment
shapes fatherhood (Astone et al. forthcoming), fewer explore how parent-
ing shapes men’s employment (Lundberg and Rose 2000), and almost
none compare fathers in different class positions.

This article examines the relationship between class and fatherhood. We
compare two groups of fathers, one in a professional occupation and the
other in a nonprofessional occupation; we argue that these map broadly
onto two class locations—one upper middle class (physicians) and the
other working class (emergency medical technicians, or EMTs). We first
compare these men’s class-linked practices of fatherhood and, second,
argue that their ways of doing fatherhood entail enactments of distinctive
masculinities, based in the dynamics of their occupational and familial
relations, which have consequences for doing (or undoing) gender.

To address the first issue, we argue that these two groups of men practice
different types of fathering—with physicians emphasizing “public father-
hood” and EMTs performing not only public fatherhood but also participat-
ing in the daily routines of “private fatherhood.” Second, we suggest these
different fathering practices can be explained by the contrasting employ-
ment conditions of each group and the gendered character of their families,
especially their wives’ involvement in the labor market and parenting.

Three sets of literature frame our analysis. First is the limited literature
that directly examines fatherhood, masculinity, and class. The second is a
growing literature on paid work hours, schedules, and families. The third
set of literature roots fatherhood in gender relations by addressing the con-
nection of fathering to mothering.

FATHERHOOD, MASCULINITY, AND CLASS

Much recent work on the relationship of masculinity to the practice of
paid work and domestic life (Coltrane and Adams 2001; Cooper 2000;
Townsend 2002) draws on the now classic theoretical formulation of
Connell (1992, 1995). Developing the concept of “hegemonic masculinity,”
she argues that much older literature used a categorical model of gender

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 163

that treated men as an undifferentiated group, but contemporary research
documents a considerable range of masculinities. While prior scholarship
tended to conflate sex and gender, Connell offers a counterview; she sug-
gests diverse masculinities can be traced to the “social dynamics generated
within gender relations” (1992, 735) and through other structures that vary
across social locations. In fact, class is a social location Connell empha-
sizes, although she criticizes work on masculinity for being “class-bound”
(1992, 735). Further, Connell and others (e.g., Brines 1994; Griswold
1993; Kimmel 2000, 2006) suggest that men’s involvement in gender rela-
tions at home, especially parenting, provide an important locus of institu-
tionalized inequality and significant site for the (re)construction and
expression of various masculinities.

Researchers suggest that the way men combine family and paid work
now entails two models of masculinity: (1) the still dominant “neotradi-
tional model of masculinity” (Gerson 2007) in which men put their job
prospects (or breadwinning) first but rely on their partners for daily care
of children; and (2) an alternate, more egalitarian, model of a “newly con-
stituted masculinity” (Cooper 2002), which entails substantial sharing in
the daily care of children in addition to market work (see also Dowd 2000;
Townsend 2002).

Some research looks at the relationship of social class to the two mod-
els of masculinity. Much quantitative research, especially time-use stud-
ies, examines the number of hours men spend with their children;
summarizing this literature, Pleck and Masciadrelli (2004, 238) conclude
there is “no consistent relationship between paternal involvement and
socioeconomic variables.” Recent qualitative work on fathering, however,
finds some differences by class.

For working-class men, some studies suggest the priority of the bread-
winner model, showing that working-class men feel that their masculinity
is threatened when they cannot enact the primary breadwinner model
of fatherhood (Gerson 1993). Williams (2000), however, indicates that a
disjuncture exists between this ideology and the practice of fatherhood,
especially for working-class men whose ability to fulfill the primary
breadwinner role is waning. Indeed, Pyke (1996) finds that some working-
class men emphasize a hypermasculine provider role while sharing in
family work. Using longitudinal English data, Sullivan (2006) shows that
men assumed more responsibility for family work if they were employed
in working-class (manual or clerical) jobs. Deutsch (1999) similarly finds
that, among the alternative-shift working-class couples she studied, men
did much of the work of parenting even while insisting that their wives
were the primary parents.

164 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

Research on middle-class fathers finds a contrasting pattern. A number
of qualitative studies suggest that such fathers, especially professionals or
the “educational elite,” espouse some version of egalitarian parenthood
(Cooper 2000; Deutsch 1999; LaRossa 1997; Risman 1998). Yet research-
ers suggest that middle-class fathers do not enact these ideals (Griswold
1993; LaRossa 1997) due to employment constraints as well as the culture
of masculinity in which they believe (Coltrane 2004; Cooper 2000; Pyke
1996). Coltrane (2004) argues that whereas managerial and professional
couples were the most likely to share family work in the 1970s and 1980s,
by the 1990s and 2000s most sharing occurred in the working-class.

Not only does the level of paternal involvement vary by class, but the
type of engagement varies as well. Coltrane and Adams (2001) find that if
men participate in “enrichment” or leisure activities with children, they
are less likely to do daily chores such as cooking and cleaning. Lareau
(2002, 749) ties this variation in type of engagement to class. She shows
that middle-class parents were much more likely to participate in orga-
nized leisure activities with their children than working-class families,
who tend to have “more free time and deeper, richer ties with their
extended families.” As this quotation suggests, one important aspect of
Lareau’s (2003) work is that she does not simply focus on the nuclear
family but widens her lens to include extended kin. Her work suggests that
there is class variation in these ties—with working-class parents signifi-
cantly more likely than those in the middle-class to rely on relatives for
help with children (for review, see Gerstel and Sarkisian 2008). These ties
shape the demands on both fathers and mothers. Although these studies
provide important leads for comparing working-class to middle-class
fathers, few have made these explicit comparisons.

WORK HOURS, SCHEDULES, AND FAMILIES

The total hours of household employment have climbed because of
women’s increased work hours (Jacobs and Gerson 2004). This is particu-
larly true for parents: Paid working time has increased dramatically for
mothers since 1970 (Bluestone and Rose 2000), and the sum of estimated
annual hours worked by U.S. mothers and fathers is higher than those of
parents in any other country (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006). Gender
is essential to understanding these hours. On one hand, some research sug-
gests that men do more routine child care when they are employed fewer
hours (Coltrane 2000). On the other, while mothers tend to cut back their
hours of employment, research suggests that fathers increase their work

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 165

hours after the birth of a child (e.g., Jacobs and Gerson 2004; for excep-
tion, see Astone et al. forthcoming). Importantly, class influences hours
and schedules, with professionals working longer workweeks than other
occupational groups (Jacobs and Gerson 2004) and the working-class more
likely to alternate shifts (Presser 2003). Although longer workweeks
decrease fathers’ participation in family work, alternative schedules
increase it (Barnett and Gareis 2002; Deutsch 1999; Presser 2003). This
suggests a bifurcation of job hours and schedules by class.

GENDER WITHIN FAMILIES: FATHERING AND MOTHERING

As Connell (1992, 1995) argues, the organization of gender relations is
central to the practice of masculinity. When employed, wives challenge
the neotraditional model of masculinity, or as Griswold (1993, 220) puts
it, “Women’s [paid] work, in short, has destroyed the old assumptions
about fatherhood and required new negotiations of gender relations.”
Research has shown that fathers are likely to be somewhat more involved
in parenting when their wives are employed. Moreover, fathers’ child care
and work time correlates with the employment schedules of mothers
(Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Brayfield 1995). Coltrane (2000)
argues that the employment schedules of wives and husbands are perhaps
the most consistent and important predictors of domestic sharing that
researchers have documented. Furthermore, researchers find that when
wives have higher relative earnings, or when the gap between husbands’
and wives’ earnings is lower, the gendered gap in the division of domestic
labor is reduced (Cooke 2007).

Although we might expect the influence of mothers on fathers to vary by
class, little literature examines this connection. In one important study of
equal parenting, Deutsch (1999) finds that mothers influence fathers’ par-
ticipation by either fighting for more equal participation (especially in the
middle class) or by using alternate schedules (especially in the working
class). Other research shows that among the affluent, wives not only develop
an ideology of intensive mothering but also sometimes make the decision to
withdraw from the labor force to concentrate on mothering; this frees fathers
to focus on breadwinning (e.g., see Blair-Loy 2003). For working-class
wives, it is much more difficult to “opt out” (Boushey 2005; Kuperberg and
Stone 2008). Indeed, as Stone (2007) argues, opting out is often dependent
on the earnings of highly paid husbands. Extending these findings, one of
the arguments we make in this article is that wives influence fathers’ involve-
ment in parenting but do so in ways that vary dramatically by class.

166 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

METHOD

This article uses data collected in the Northeast as part of the Study of
Work Hours and Schedules. The four occupations in the larger study—
EMTs, physicians, nurse’s assistants, and nurses—were selected to vary
by class and gender (for a more detailed discussion of the research meth-
odology of the larger study, see Clawson, Gerstel, and Crocker 2008;
Gerstel, Clawson, and Huyser 2007). This article focuses on the two male-
dominated occupations in the study—EMTs and physicians—selected
due to variation in characteristics that research suggests are tied to class.

Class is a concept that is much contested with little consensus about
how to conceptualize or operationalize it (Wright 1997). Acker (2006)
defines class in terms of differential access to resources, including wages,
intrinsic to employment and organizations; while Hout (2008) suggests
that objective criteria of class (which are correlated with subjective class
identification) include what people do for a living, their income, and their
education. Still others emphasize lifestyle or consumption in their discus-
sions of class (see Lamont 2000; Weinenger 2005). Some minimize the
importance of class, arguing against the possibility of aggregating dispa-
rate groups, suggesting that the key factor influencing economic differen-
tiation and inequality is organization (Baron 1994) or occupation (Grusky
and Sorensen 1998).

Rather than examine a heterogeneous collection of scattered individu-
als, our study examines people situated in particular occupations. A vari-
ety of indicators of class—used in the general theoretical and empirical
literature on class cited above—are distinctive among our groups.
Physicians and EMTs differ not only by occupation, income, and educa-
tion but also with regard to their lifestyles as well as workplace con-
straints. According to the U.S. Department of Labor (2003), EMTs earn
an average of $26,930 (a figure including both basic-level EMTs, who
earn less, and paramedics, who earn more), while physicians earn
$139,640 (a figure for family practitioners, the lowest-paid set of physi-
cians). In our study, both groups earned more than the national average for
their occupation: The physicians earned a mean of $206,000 (probably
because the sample included both specialists and a smaller number of
family practitioners); the EMTs, with a starting wage of only $8.50 per
hour, earn a mean of $50,000 (our research included more EMTs who
were paramedics than basic level). The minimum training required for
each occupation differs dramatically: Although physicians must attend
medical school for at least four years after college, EMTs can be certified

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 167

with as little as three weeks of instruction. Thirty-nine percent of the
EMTs in our study had a high school diploma or equivalent, and 33 per-
cent had an associate’s degree. The percentage of each occupation paid on
an hourly basis (i.e., with their hours monitored by the organization) is
67.4 percent of EMTs but only 2.0 percent of physicians.

We are using an individual definition of class but should note that many
have made important arguments about the class position of families and
the contribution of wives and husbands to a family’s class position. As we
discuss in more detail below, the employment and earnings of each
group’s wives in our study were tied to the different positions of their
husbands: The doctor’s wives were significantly less likely to be employed
and, if employed, more likely to work part-time. They also contributed a
significantly smaller share of the family’s income than did the EMTs’
wives. These differences contribute to variation in the ways the EMT and
physician men practice fatherhood.

We chose EMTs and doctors because these occupations operate in the
same sector of the economy and we could obtain a random sample of both
occupations from state certification lists. Certification is a required process
generating regularly updated and publicly available lists that made it pos-
sible to generate a true random sample. We chose health care as our
research site because it accounts for more than one-seventh of total GDP
(U.S. Census Bureau 2006) and is part of the growing service sector rather
than the diminishing manufacturing sector. Like an escalating number of
workplaces, many health care organizations operate 24/7 with alternative
schedules. The characteristics of these occupations closely approximate
those of the United States as a whole (Gerstel, Clawson, and Huyser
2007).

For each occupation, we collected three kinds of data: (1) mailed sur-
veys, (2) observations, and (3) intensive interviews. First, surveys on
hours, schedules, family characteristics, and demographics were mailed to
a random sample of 200 physicians and 200 EMTs. The response rate for
the surveys was 57.6 percent for physicians and 64.7 percent for EMTs.
In the survey, 78 percent of the EMTs and 71 percent of the physicians
were men. For this article, we focused on the married fathers with children
younger than 18 years old still living at home, which included 55 physi-
cian and 41 EMT fathers. Moreover, only a small proportion of our survey
respondents were nonwhite: 16 percent of the physicians (most of whom
were Asian) and only 5 percent of the EMTs (primarily African American
and Hispanic). Although we could find no national data on EMTs, the
proportion of white physicians in our sample was only slighter higher than

168 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

in the nation (American Medical Association 2008). Consequently, we
cannot do a fully intersectional analysis including comparisons with race
as well as class and gender.

In addition to demographic items, the survey’s closed-ended items
included hours usually worked at main job, number of jobs held, hours
worked at all jobs, number of weekends worked in the past 30 days, per-
sonal income, and satisfaction with hours and schedules. Family variables
included marital status, spousal employment status and number of hours
worked, family income, and an item indicating whether the respondent
had a family member who would like him or her to reduce hours at work.
For a measure of spousal income, we subtracted respondent income from
family income; because family income included investments, the spousal
income is likely an overestimate (especially for doctors, who are likely to
have more investment income than EMTs).

Second, observations were conducted at nine work sites (representing
four different types of organizations), including three hospitals (with two
floors in two hospitals and the emergency room in the third), two EMT
sites, two nursing homes, and two physician’s private practices. These
sites differed in terms of the public/private status and size. One hospital
was large and located just outside of a major city, while the others were
small community-based hospitals. One EMT site was a fire department
staffed by 30 firefighters while the other was a private service with
approximately 50 employees. The two private physician practices included
a specialist’s office and a family practitioner’s office. The frequency of
observations ranged from once to thrice a week, covering various day,
evening, and night shifts. During each visit, researchers spent anywhere
from three to ten hours observing the work site, shadowing individual
workers, and talking to individuals and groups at the workplace. Time
spent in these sites ranged from six months in two hospitals to two days
in the third and two months in each of the EMT sites, doctor’s offices, and
nursing home. Field notes for each visit were recorded, transcribed, and
coded using Nvivo8.

Third, intensive interviews were conducted with 200 respondents,
including the 31 fathers we focus on here (EMTs, n = 13; physicians, n =
18) who were contacted through the survey sample as well as observation
sites. This subset was generally representative of the larger survey sample.
Interviewers included five women and two men, but we identified no
observable differences related to the interviewer’s gender. We offered
respondents $35 for their interviews, which were open-ended and lasted
one to two hours. Open-ended questions covered work schedules and

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 169

hours, preferences for and perceptions of hours and schedules, time off,
decisions relating to time and money, and time and relations with spouse
and children. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. We developed
codes from the literature and interview text and revised after one round of
coding was completed. We used multiple rounds of coding using Nvivo8
to ensure consistency.

In the following sections, we first look at the physicians’ fathering and
then turn to the EMTs. Comparing them, we distinguish between “public”
fathering, which entails primary involvement with children in leisure
activities and events outside of the home that are visible to some larger
public; and “private” fathering, which entails a primary focus on the quo-
tidian tasks of families, typically less visible to a larger public because
much occurs at home.

PHYSICIANS AND PUBLIC FATHERING: “BEING THERE”

Physicians tended to highlight participation in or presence at their chil-
dren’s public events as the way they were involved in their children’s lives.
Even with their long hours or hectic schedules, physicians emphasized
their concerted attempts to attend those activities. Sometimes this kind of
paternal involvement required creativity in scheduling:

I coached [my son’s] soccer, and the way I coached his soccer was I would
book two hours in my afternoon and I would not have patients there, and I
would go to [town] and coach his practice and do the work, bring him home
and then go back to work, and then work ’til 9:00.

As this father’s comment suggests, doctors let their children influence
their schedules because they can; when they choose to do so, they exert
significant control over their schedules. Physicians engage in other public
activities with their children as well. When we were observing in his
office, a surgeon showed us—with pride—his phone’s screen with a
photo of his daughter dressed for Halloween, saying she was going trick-
or-treating with him. But during our interview with this physician, he
barely mentioned his daughter, suggesting her daily care was his wife’s
domain.

“Being there” for public events was important to these physicians. Yet
even when they were able to leave the office to attend their children’s
events, work sometimes followed. One physician had a $3,000 car phone
installed so that he could return phone calls while watching his children:

170 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

[I would] sit at a parking lot by my kids’ soccer games and answer my calls
that I had to do, and still be able to see their games. [Before the phone] I
would go to their shows at night with a pocketful of dimes, and sometimes
not see any of the shows that they had because I was back at the pay phone
making calls. So the phone set me free as far as that was concerned, so it
got me so that I could sit and watch them.

Though able to be physically present at the game, his attention was divided
between his family and his work. Yet to him, being at the game was what
mattered. He is demonstrating, possibly to himself, his child, and the com-
munity, that he cares as a father. In some sense, the very difficulty of his
being there makes this demonstration all the more dramatic.

Through their participation in these activities, the doctors are publicly
“doing fatherhood.” This performance of gender and fatherhood entails
signs of “paternal visibility” (Coltrane 1996; West and Zimmerman 1987)
to their children and the wider community. Moreover, like the men
Townsend (2002) studied, a large part of what it means to them to be a
father is to be a provider. Many of these physicians adopted a neotradi-
tional model of masculinity (Gerson 2007)–one suggesting that what it
means to be a good father is to be a good breadwinner and provide finan-
cially. This is reinforced by the income associated with class position:
Participation in public activities often requires a significant financial out-
lay. How do we explain such public fathering? To answer that question,
we first look at the physicians’ jobs and then turn to their family lives.

THE DEMANDS OF PHYSICIANS’ PAID WORK

In the survey, physicians reported working an average of 50 hours per
week. However, these hours are underestimates. As became clear in the
intensive interviews, many physicians did not include nondirect patient care
or off-hours work in response to survey questions asking how many hours
they work. They did not report activities such as checking work- related
e-mail, participating in hospital committees, staying current in medical lit-
erature (often required for recertification), or being on-call; including these
activities often led to estimates of 60 or more hours per week.

While much work entailed direct patient care, paperwork—documenting
patients’ visits and illnesses, preparing material for insurance companies,
making referrals—kept physicians at their desks in the evenings, well after
their patients went home. Most said that paperwork could easily take an
extra two or three hours per day. We observed a number of them eating

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 171

lunch on the run, coming in early and staying until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m., even
if they finished patient care by 5:00. Sitting at their desks, they completed
necessary documentation for patient records, referrals, and “most of all for
insurance companies.” Several said that since their office had “gone elec-
tronic,” they would often go to their home computers in the evening to enter
patient data they “just had not gotten to during the day.” These were hours
when their families were likely available or in need of routine care.

Being available to patients was important to many physicians and often
meant being on-call. While physicians could sometimes rotate their on-call
status with their colleagues, their turn often interrupted their home lives.
One hospital physician described being on-call in this way: “I mean, you
can’t do anything; you’re basically . . . it’s like a full day of work.” Or as
another doctor put it, “You’re always aware your beeper is there and could
go off at any time; you can’t just relax.” Importantly, much of this work
occurred before or after shifts or during weekends—that is, at key moments
when family members are likely to be home.

To explain their long hours, physicians talked about a number of causes.
They emphasized the hours and schedules of medical school and residency
that helped socialize them to their current long hours. A number of physi-
cians said they quickly learned the long hours “demanded” of their occupa-
tion and internalized these beliefs. Much of this dedication and willingness
to work long hours was influenced by the commitment built into the pro-
cess of becoming a physician (Becker 1960) or what Blair-Loy (2003)
terms more broadly a “work-devotion schema.” Many years in school, long
hours studying and in residency, and hundreds of thousands of dollars for
training push physicians toward intense career commitment. As one physi-
cian succinctly said, “There was just no time for anything else.” Another
talked at some length about the process and distinguished the experience
of physicians who are fathers from those who are mothers:

Physician: Once you get married and once you have kids, things change
dramatically and always . . . well, I shouldn’t say always but 80% of the time
women doctors want to work less. It’s always the main topic of discussion
and a comparison about what kind of schedule do you work. Guys don’t do
that. We don’t . . . if anything, there’s this more . . . that if you don’t work at
least 50 hours, you’re not working enough . . . with guys I would say.

Q: Because…what’s that about?

Physician: When we train in medicine, it’s like a hazing type of thing. It’s
a bad . . . it’s not the best way but you have this that the ones who work the
most are looked up to . . . you have to work harder than them . . . that gets

172 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

respect. When you work more, you have a big edge in terms of, well, that’s
a big badge. Now I wouldn’t say just for men. Man or woman I would say,
but man especially.

His comments suggest that doctors learn that respect—especially as men
physicians—is related to extremely long hours on the job, which means
fewer hours at home. Later in the interview, he commented that he felt sad
that he could not spend more time at home having dinner with his family
or putting his children to bed. But his version of fatherhood and masculin-
ity, which he learned in part from the “hazing” in medical school and from
the hierarchy in medicine, requires long hours on the job rather than a
schedule with fewer hours and more direct family involvement.

Physicians also talked about a sense of obligation to be available to their
patients. A private practice physician explained, “I mean, if you take care
of people it’s really . . . you’re at their mercy and not yours. People don’t
choose when they get sick, and you have to take care of them when they’re
sick.” Although they sometimes tried, physicians found it difficult to “hand
off” patients to others—either because of patient insistence and “loyalty”
to them or because of a special skill and relationship with that particular
patient. In one private practice we observed, office personnel were
instructed to try to convince patients to see a nurse practitioner instead of
a physician overwhelmed with patients; the staff often met resistance from
those to whom they referred as “loyal” patients. After changing jobs and
reorganizing his priorities to give more attention to his family (though not
changing his hours greatly), another doctor told us about resistance from a
patient. As he put it, the patient eventually “fired” him by letter, complain-
ing that if he had “problems” with his children he should “have better child
care.” In this study, obligations to their patients often resulted in physicians
spending more time at work than their EMT counterparts.

Money—to pay back medical school debt, to maintain a particular style
of life and consumption—also kept them on the job. Earning income was
essential to understanding themselves as physicians, men, and fathers.
Indeed, public fatherhood required a significant income. One physician
said, “If I wanted to see less patients I would see less patients. The prob-
lem is your income takes a hit. And there’s so many things taking a hit on
your income anyway.” One doctor who worked 60 hours a week reported,
“We don’t have an extravagant lifestyle by any means, but I am afraid we
have gotten used to a particular way of living. I have to work the hours I
do to get what we now think we need.” At a meeting in which emergency
room doctors were arranging shifts for November and December, one
doctor said he did not want to work on Christmas. The ER director

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 173

reminded this younger doctor that he and his wife wanted a new kitchen
and, with a smile, indicated it was the young doctor’s obligation to pro-
vide the domestic accoutrements they desired. The young doctor agreed to
come Christmas day. Overall, then, training, paperwork, obligation to
patients, the medical hierarchy, desire for respect as men, and the particu-
lar style of life that their breadwinning could provide kept these doctors
on the job and away from the daily routines of their families.

THE DEMANDS OF FAMILY: THE ROLE
OF PHYSICIANS’ WIVES

The ways doctors organized gender relations at home made it possible
to work the long hours they did. As the survey showed, physician fathers
were likely to have either stay-at-home wives or part-time employed
wives (43 percent of physicians had employed wives compared to 86 per-
cent of EMTs; physicians’ employed wives also worked far fewer hours:
an average of 13 hours compared to 30 for the employed EMT wives).
With an occasional exception, the physicians’ wives’ chose jobs that were
less demanding or allowed them to work part-time so they could be avail-
able for their families; these choices also allowed their husbands to spend
long hours on the job. Some doctors said that they sometimes relied on
“nannies” or “au pairs” to help with child care and that this allowed their
wives to pursue their own careers. Yet even with such paid child care,
many physicians relied primarily on their wives to provide daily and rou-
tine parenting. One physician’s wife, a physician herself, worked part-
time so their children could have a parent who was “more available.”
Though this father perceives himself to be equally involved, he admitted,

Quite honestly, on a day-to-day basis, kids need mom more than they need
dad, and I honestly think that’s true. . . . I don’t know whether . . . it’s not
meant to be a sexist statement or anything like that, but we both share in the
house . . . I mean I’ll do stuff for the kids just as much as she will, just not
as frequently.

This physician’s comment entails seemingly contradictory assertions. He
views his participation as “just as much” as his wife but “just not as fre-
quent.” Thus, the unequal practices entailed in public fathering were
sometimes invisible to the physicians. Struggling with an involved father
ideology in the context of their demanding work, they often feel unable to
reduce job demands to participate in routine daily child care. In doing so,
they reinforce the gender order rather than contest it.

174 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

Physicians often seemed at a loss when asked whether they took off
time to care for their sick children. When asked if he ever stayed home
with his kids when they were sick, a doctor explained why his wife typi-
cally stayed home with them:

You feel that when you have a whole schedule of 24 patients’ schedules and
you call in to cancel . . . it’s not like it’s easy to reschedule, and sometimes
there’s people in there that you really wanted to see who you were worried
about. So it is a pressure, it isn’t an easy thing just to get up in the morning
and say “I’m not coming in.”

Clearly this physician felt very pressed by his obligation to care for his
patients, an obligation that took precedence over staying home with his
children when they were sick. The structure of his job and family life led
him to organize his time so that he took care of patients and his wife took
care of their kids.

Leaving most of the care of the children to their wives was not an easy
bargain for the physicians. While a minority of EMTs (about one-third)
had a family member who wanted them to reduce their hours, more than
half of the physician fathers reported the same (χ2 = 9.42; p < .05). Occasionally a doctor would emphasize the loss and pain that this sort of parenting entailed. Tears rolled down the cheek of one doctor as he described his need to be in the hospital while his wife was bathing and putting their children to bed.

Even among the doctors, there was some heterogeneity: A very small
minority reported reducing hours or shifts in response to their wives’
pleas. One doctor who divided his time between patients and research told
us he shortened his workday at his wife’s insistence: “My wife said I
needed to [come home], essentially, and I agreed with her. I didn’t have
the insight to see the impact of what not being home was having on peo-
ple.” The chief physician at a large medical center said that he tried to
come home “by 7:00” at the request of his wife. He told us about their
conversations, centering on her telling him to restrict work and “to come
home at a certain hour.” Gesturing toward the piles of paper on his desk,
he remarked that it was often difficult to get home for dinner, especially
with the paperwork that piled up by the end of the day. But he tried.
Among the male physicians, however, these two were exceptional.

EMTs are very different from physicians. Their fathering routinely
emphasized private fathering and more intensive involvement in caregiv-
ing. This difference can be explained by the structure of their paid work
as well as gendered relations at home.

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 175

EMTS AND PRIVATE FATHERING: “STEALING TIME”

While the physician fathers were likely to do what they could to attend
public events with their children, EMT fathers were much more likely to
participate in the daily care of their kids. The EMTs emphasized private
fathering in ways that the physicians did not. They talked about routine
involvement in the lives of their children—picking them up from day care
or school, feeding them dinner, or staying home with them when they got
sick. One stated,

My son’s out of school at 2:30 in the afternoon. That means that I have to
leave here about 2:15 to make sure I’m at the school to pick him up.

Another remarked,

Last year I took three out of my five sick days to stay home when one of
the smaller ones was sick. So I’ll use them more for that than for anything
else.

One went further and put it succinctly:

I will totally refuse the overtime. Family comes first for me.

To explain their fathering, we turn first to their jobs and then to their
homes.

THE DEMANDS OF EMTS’ PAID WORK

In the survey, EMT fathers reported working an average of 45 hours per
week, but EMTs worked closer to 60 hours when including the hours
devoted to second jobs. More than two-thirds of the EMT fathers reported
having a second job; only 9 percent of the doctors did. In their second
jobs, however, many EMTs worked per diem, which allowed them to
choose if and when to work. Moreover, when the EMTs went home, they
left their jobs behind: They did not have paperwork, nor were they on call.
Thus, it is not primarily the number of hours that explains the differences
in parenting. Although they resembled the physicians in long, often
exhausting hours, the boundaries between work and family were much
clearer for EMTs.

Even more than the number of hours, the shifts they work are conse-
quential for their family lives. Many of the EMT fathers in our study work

176 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

rotating shifts, nights, weekend, and holidays, and in some sense, they had
little control over these schedules. At the beginning of each year, manage-
ment handed them a booklet with their shifts for the next 12 months.
Compared to physicians, EMTs were much more likely to report working
two or more weekends in the previous 30 days (almost all of the EMT
fathers compared to only half of the physicians). But EMTs were able to
leave at the conclusion of their shifts, while physicians stayed after their
shifts ended. Moreover, unlike physicians who were often unavailable to
their families during key hours of their days, EMTs often worked during
the hours that their families were sleeping.

In addition to the structure of shifts, relations with coworkers were
important in shaping the way these two groups of men organized father-
hood. In contrast to the physicians, EMTs used swaps to create flexibility
in their seemingly inflexible, nonstandard schedules. Often with the sup-
port of management, EMTs would switch shifts with another EMT or
cover for each other for a few hours. Swaps were a useful means of acquir-
ing “off” time without using their limited vacation or sick days. These
exchanges were used in response to family needs; the EMTs in some
sense “stole” time to be available for family. One EMT often asked some-
one to cover for him for a few hours at the end or beginning of his shifts
so that he could attend his teenage sons’ sporting events. Swaps were not
just used to attend athletic events. Others would swap when they had to
take their kids to medical appointments or pick them up from school.
Some of the older or childless EMT men covered for those with younger
children. As EMTs highlighted, reciprocity—utilized over the short as
well as the long term—was key to swapping, even for a few hours. One
EMT had often been on the receiving end of swaps; now that his daughter
is older, he happily returns the favor, saying his daughter “is just older and
it’s nice to have that flexibility to give back to other people that was given
to you, to be able to do things like that. I don’t mind doing it.”

While both occupations offer round-the-clock services, the doctors
have to be personally available because one doctor is often not a suitable
substitute for another (due to specialized skills or a special relationship
with a patient). In contrast, EMTs’ skill levels, work requirements, and
relationships to patients were more similar to one another; because they
were interchangeable, they could practice such “swaps,” collectively mak-
ing possible more daily sharing of fatherhood.

Income played an important role as well, but one that depended on the
father’s orientation to consumption as well as family demands. In contrast
to physicians, overtime (with time-and-a-half pay) is financially important

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 177

for EMTs. Due to their small staff, overtime was a significant part of the
fire department’s ability to function; they relied on a callback system to
remain fully staffed at all times. Thus, EMTs were “called back” to the
station when the ambulance went out to answer a call. Returning to work
could generate a lot of overtime pay for those who answered callbacks, but
it was voluntary, and the EMT fathers consciously limited their overtime.
The key to this decision was often their sense that they needed to partici-
pate in the labor of the home. One EMT made his decision making clear:

I kind of pick and choose [laughs]. Most of the time actually . . . like . . .
during their school hours, I come in a lot during the day. Weekends pretty
much—this is a rarity for me, coming in on Saturday or Sunday unless it’s
later in the night, and early mornings. I’ll come in early mornings, from
midnight on.

While physicians considered the time-money trade-off very carefully,
and a few said they would give up some time and reduce their incomes,
EMTs—who made considerably less money—routinely turned down over-
time in exchange for time with their families. This is not to say that the EMT
fathers were always happy to give up the overtime. Many refused it because
they were solely responsible for their children at the time they received the
call to come in for overtime. In these decisions, EMTs discussed both their
worries about pay and their guilt in having to “choose” between spending
time with their families and going to work. For one EMT father, the guilt he
feels results from wanting or needing to go in for financial reasons but also
believing his daughters are “only this age once” and “entitled to their
father.” When we interviewed another EMT, it was clear that he felt guilty
when saying no to the extra hours: “It’s not fair to her [his wife] or the kids
[that] it takes my time like that. I have a hard time drawing the line a lot of
the times between family and my moral obligation to the job.”

In the interviews, differences between physicians and EMTs in the
importance of training also became clear. While the latter were dedicated
to patient care, they were not trained in a schema that routinely prioritized
work over all other areas of life.

DEMANDS OF FAMILY: THE ROLE OF WIVES
AND EXTENDED KIN

Differences in their wives’ employment and responses to their hus-
bands’ employment were critical to understanding the different styles of

178 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

fathering. According to the survey data, a large majority (86 percent) of
EMT wives were employed, whereas fewer than half of the physicians’
wives had jobs. Moreover, EMT wives contributed much more to the fam-
ily income: The gap between mothers’ and fathers’ mean income was
significantly smaller in the EMT families ($32,000) than in the physi-
cians’ families ($177,000) (t = 4.69, p < .00). EMTs’ wives who worked for pay, worked substantially more hours than the physicians’ wives. Thus, the wives’ work hours in concert with explicit demands on their husbands’ schedules shaped how much time the men devoted to work and how much they devoted to family.

Like other working-class men, many of the EMT fathers alternated
shifts with their wives. But the difference did not simply reside in the
structure of jobs. After their children were born, EMTs’ wives often
insisted that their husbands alternate shifts as well as reduce their paid
work hours so they could contribute to daily family care. Their wives had,
and used, their power in the relationships. Wives played a key role in call-
back responses because of their own work schedules and because they
wanted (and often insisted) their husbands to be home. An EMT father of
two young girls reported that he loves working on the ambulance and
would like to answer more callbacks but has learned to accept his wife’s
signals about accepting overtime:

The phone will ring and we have the caller ID, she’ll look at it and she’ll
be like, “It’s the Fire Department, what do you want me to do?” So some-
times we just let it ring. And that’s our agreement. I’m able to read her now;
I know where she’s “Don’t do this to us.” But there’ll be times where she’s
like, “Hey, It’s the Fire Department—do you want me to get it?” She’ll let
me know she’s okay with it.

The wives’ influence ranged from subtle signals to outright demands. One
EMT kept his pager off and his cell phone on silent at night because his
wife told him that callbacks interrupt her sleep and she did not like him
going in at night. In another exchange, while eating lunch in the fire sta-
tion, one EMT responded to the question, “Do your families ever ask you
to not come in?” by laughing and saying, “No, they tell you: You’re not
going in.” The other EMTs sitting around joined in the laughter and nod-
ded in agreement.

To be sure, given the demands of two jobs in these families, the EMTs
and their wives often had to rely on other people to help take care of their
children. Unlike the physicians, however, they often relied on extended
family rather than paid child care. One EMT said that he had “definitely

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 179

roped in” his mother or brother with last-minute child care dilemmas. When
another EMT was unable to pick up his son from school on his two daytime
shifts, his mother would be there. They relied on kin care because they
trusted their relatives and found such help less expensive and more flexible
than hired help.

Importantly, EMT fathers did not manipulate their schedules begrudg-
ingly. Like many of the working-class fathers in Francine Deutsch’s (1999)
study, many of the EMTs seemed happy with their schedules because they
allowed the EMTs to participate in childcare. While most of the fathers
reported being happy with their current schedules (91 percent) on the sur-
vey, it was in the interviews that the EMTs discussed their families as a key
reason for that happiness. As one remarked, “I love the fact that I can be
home with my kids a lot, because it’s long hours at times, but honestly, I
get four days off in a row with my kids. How many people get that much?”
These working-class men exhibit a model of masculinity—based both at
home and on the job—that provides valued involvement in their children’s
daily lives.

CONCLUSION: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE FATHERS

Much has been written about the way gender shapes participation in
family and work, but much of that literature focuses on women. In con-
trast, we focus on men and the ways that their class location shapes gen-
der, family, and work. We argue that class shapes the gendered relations
and processes rooted in jobs and the domestic division of labor, which in
turn shape the ways men behave as fathers. Illustrating that masculinity is
neither unitary nor homogeneous, our findings emphasize the “multiple
masculinities—some subordinate, some dominant—which are created by
differences in . . . class and occupation” (Cooper 2000, 7). Class locations
are major contributors to the construction of masculinities because of their
role in shaping fatherhood. Class location sometimes sustains but some-
times refashions the gender order (and the social relations constituting it).
Our data accords with the few qualitative pieces that suggest that fathers
who are least likely to ideologically endorse gender equality (the working-
class) are the most likely to engage in equitable actions (e.g., Deutsch
1999; Pyke 1996; Williams 2000).

We selected these two groups of men because of variation in their char-
acteristics tied to class. Putting breadwinning first, the physicians—both
by constraint and choice—were much more likely to emphasize their
involvement in the special events in their children’s lives over the tasks of

180 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

daily care. These upper-middle-class fathers fit the daily demands of
fatherhood on the edges of their jobs; they contribute significantly to the
material well-being of their families but are otherwise engaged primarily
in public activities with their kids. Physicians stay on the job, resist par-
ticipation in the familial division of labor, and distance themselves from
the daily demands of their children. To be sure, this choice comes with a
cost that a small number of physicians discussed: missing out on close
relationships with their children. No EMTs expressed this sentiment. In
contrast, the EMTs weave together work and family (see Garey 1999 for
a discussion of the “weaving metaphor” to describe the way women do
mothering). These working-class men do not prioritize work over family,
nor do they simply balance the two. Instead, they value and are deeply
involved with both. In contrast to the physicians, the EMTs emphasized
not only the special, public events they attended but also the more routine
tasks of daily parenting that sometimes pull them home and sometimes
push them into alternate schedules on the job. Consequently, a far greater
share of the daily work of parenting falls to the wives of physicians than
to the wives of the EMTs. As Connell (1992, 1995) insists, the practices
of masculinities are tied to the relational character of the gender order—
not only are the relationships between men in each of these occupations
important, but their relationships with their wives are essential compo-
nents of their performance of masculinity. As such, the physicians rein-
force the gender order while the EMTs redo it.

By comparing these two groups of men, we can specify the particular
class-based strategies and conditions found in both job and families that
contribute to variations in masculinity, the gender order, and fatherhood.
Numerous aspects of their jobs were important in shaping the way EMTs
practiced fatherhood. While physicians spent long hours on one job,
EMTs often worked more than one job and used alternative schedules (a
difference found by others in comparisons of the working and middle
class; for example, see Presser 2003). In addition, as Acker (2006, 449)
suggests in her discussion of class, lower-level jobs tend to have less
scheduling flexibility than professionals, but she also notes that these dif-
ferences are “created and renewed through organizational practices . . .
and are also reproduced in everyday interactions.” Indeed, in some sense,
while the doctors could exert a fair amount of control over their schedules,
the EMTs had little control over their rigid schedules, which they received
from management a year in advance. But the EMTs could alter these obli-
gations by relying on their relationships with other men at work: These
fathers could turn to coworkers for swaps because of the skill similarity

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 181

and the tight bonds they formed on the job. This helped them create flex-
ibility in their job schedules. Despite the fact that many workplaces tend
to be unresponsive to family demands, and though emergency medical
services has typically been seen as a hypermasculine culture (Chetkovich
1997), the EMTs in our study managed to create workplaces responsive to
the responsibilities associated with working-class fatherhood.

Not just their jobs were important; their gender relations at home—also
similar in a number of ways to other working-class men—mattered as well.
They did not only rely on extended kin for help in fathering; EMTs were
responsive to their wives’ and their children’s needs when accepting or
declining overtime. Some of them turned down promotions or found new
jobs in response to their families. They struggled with these decisions and
were often strongly influenced by their wives. Their wives’ employment—
their hours, shifts, pay—typically shaped the involvement of the EMT
fathers as they were more likely to swap alternative schedules with their
wives. And as Deutsch (1999) reports as characteristic of other working-
class men, their wives’ agency also affected their fatherhood: EMT wives
often insisted their husbands be available. Although subject to the power
and control of others both on the job and at home, many of these fathers
appreciated their jobs and families because they allowed daily involvement
with their children. Most EMT fathers not only related the requirements
but also the pleasures of private fathering. We did not hear protests from
them about threats to their masculinity. Perhaps this is because they work
in highly masculine jobs and do not need to use family relations to shore
up their identity as men. Whatever the cause, these working-class men are
“undoing gender” in their interactions at home. These analyses respond to
Deutsch’s (2007, 127) clarion call to examine when and how interactions
become less gendered, for, as she writes, “Gendered institutions can be
changed, and the social interactions that support them can be undone.”

Physicians, on the other hand, participated less in the daily care of their
children. Without much resistance from physicians, their organizations
continued to practice as “inequality regimes” (Acker 2006), less respon-
sive to the daily needs of these men’s families. With gendered subjectivi-
ties, most physicians were silent in the face of conflicts between work and
parenting. Though they had some control over their hours, the physicians
talked of time constraints. They could change an appointment (as they
sometimes did to attend a child’s game) or trade money for more time
with their children (as a few did). But for a variety of reasons ranging from
the identities they formed in residency to intense patient demands to
consumption patterns, most did not do so. In addition, physicians earn

182 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2009

significantly more money than EMTs; this made it easier to pay for the
kind of public activities entailed in “concerted cultivation” that Lareau
(2003) finds at the center of parenting in middle-class families. But it was
not just the characteristics of jobs and organizations that made such
inequalities in parenting possible: The physicians’ wives rarely insisted
that they share more fully in the daily hands-on care of their children.
Whether because of their own ideological attachment to the importance of
their husbands’ career or the pleasure gained in the lifestyle it allowed or
for a combination of these and other reasons, the physicians’ wives were
much less likely to make demands on their husbands’ time. Moreover,
when the wives had jobs, these families paid for child care. Their bargain
entails exchange: relatively high income (and perhaps prestige) garnered
by the fathers in exchange for the mothers’ (and “her” helpers’) family
care. Because of the conditions and relations located both in paid work
and families, the physicians can perform public fathering.

Public fathering demands less time than private fathering, but it is more
visible. Garey (1999) argues that nurses often choose night shifts so that
their mothering, which occurs during the day, is visible to the community.
In a similar vein, these doctors choose a kind of fathering that gives them
visibility and likely garnishes praise from community members (whose
support their medical practices are dependent upon; Fowlkes 1980). There
is another implication of this paternal visibility: As Hochschild (1989/2003)
argued, when families see other families sharing housework, that may
help revise the gendered norms of domestic life. This creates a paradox:
At the same time as this type of fathering sustains gender inequality
within families, its visibility may contribute to the appearance of norms of
gender equality to outsiders who observe them.

We have argued here that for these two groups of men, class shapes
fathering. We do not, however, mean to argue that physicians represent all
middle-class professionals or that EMTs represent all working-class men.
There is too much variation across class to make such an argument. In
some sense, the findings we report here are most clearly occupational and
organizational differences—important components of class but not the
only ones. Given the size and character of our sample, we cannot specify
the effects of these particular occupational differences, nor can we gener-
alize to other professional groups (like lawyers or academics) or other
working-class groups (like factory workers or janitors). In addition, the
limits of our sample restrict our ability to generalize to different types of
families that may occur even within each of these two groups.

Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 183

Instead of claiming generalizability, we hope our findings can and will
be used in future research to further specify the relationships of social class
to masculinity and parenting. We only have the views of the men about
their wives; interviews with the wives themselves would further illuminate
the role of class and gender in these families. Does class create the same
multiplicity of gender for women as it does for men? What about women
in each of our occupations? In the case of women physicians, how do such
women respond to the push and pull of families and jobs in traditionally
male-dominated professions? Recent research suggests that among physi-
cians, far more women are demanding part-time work. Cull et al. (2002)
find that female residents are far more likely than male residents to con-
sider or accept reduced-hours positions. But the consequences associated
with such schedules—such as the loss of income; reduction in job benefits;
difficulty in loan repayment; and even, as Barnett and Gareis (2002) sug-
gest, lowered marital quality—complicate these choices. Given our focus
on work hours and schedules, we did not ask participants directly about
threats to masculinity that either form of parenting might entail. Future
research should elaborate on this theme to capture these data more directly.
Finally, we have examined masculinities and fatherhood rooted in class;
due to the limits of our data, we have omitted any discussion of race. Yet
our own research (Sarkisian and Gerstel 2004), like that of a growing num-
ber of scholars (Anderson and Collins 2007; Browne and Misra 2003),
suggests that race, class, and gender will intersect to produce variations in
the meaning and experience of fatherhood. Further research should exam-
ine these intersections in employment and parenting.

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Shows, Gerstel / FATHERING, CLASS, AND GENDER 187

Carla Shows is a coordinator in the Sponsored Program Office at Daytona
State College. She has worked as a research assistant at the Disaster
Research Center and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her
primary research interests are in the areas of gender, work, and family.

Naomi Gerstel, professor of sociology, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, published articles recently on marriage as a greedy institution,
race, class, gender and caregiving, the FMLA, and work hours (currently
funded by NSF and the Sloan Foundation). A past chair of the ASA family
section, she is coeditor of the Families in Focus book series.

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