Work Wednesday
It's the time of the year for the media's annual news roundups, and 2011 will certainly be remembered for its headlines about fascinating, emotional, and world-changing events - from the Arab Spring to the Japanese earthquake/tsunami to the deaths of Steve Jobs and Osama bin Laden and the marriage of Kate and William. (Check out this 60-second video from Reuters or this more in-depth year-end special report from The Altantic for a flavor of this yearly rite.)
Over here at Work Wednesday, though, 2011 will be remembered as the year of the working mom study headlines - and the year I finally succumbed to working mom study fatigue.
Just this month, there have been hundreds of headlines about a study, published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Family Psychology, which found that working moms tend to be healthier and happier than moms who stay at home (at least during their children's infancy and pre-school years). And hundreds more about another study, published in the American Sociological Society Review, which concluded that working moms are more stressed out by multitasking than working dads. If you've somehow missed all this, just google "working mom study December 2011" and you'll see what I mean. (Here's a sample.) There are more articles, blogs, opinion pieces, video clips, and radio stories reporting on, analyzing, praising, and criticizing these studies than I can count!
These December studies are just the latest in this year's seemingly endless spate of studies about working moms. To be sure, there's been a raft of reassuring and positive studies about the benefits of working motherhood for women and children's emotional health and development. (I liked them.) But there's also been a big bunch of negative and alarmist ones trumpeting higher risks of obesity, illness, and a host of other dangers for working moms' kids. (I didn't like them so much.) I've blogged about the implications and limitations of some of these studies here, here, and here. But, although I'll admit to a slight addiction to abstracts, I think I've finally reached working mom study overload. I'm swearing off working mom studies for 2012!
I know it's heresy to suggest that there are too many studies about working moms, especially when they've provided me with great raw material for my blog posts. But I do sometimes wonder what these studies - and the somewhat simplistic and sensational headlines they generate in the media- really accomplish.
Many of the studies, even if well-intentioned, seem mainly to perpetuate the perception that working mothers are somehow different, a curious phenomenon to be analyzed and explored. Very few of them include comparable data about working dads. Some of them even (gasp!) contradict each other and leave working moms concerned and confused. Others leave out critical variables such as a working mother's economic status or come to broad, sweeping, conclusions that don't seem to square with the data. (And don't get me started on the way that that attention-grabbing headlines often skew study results.) With very few exceptions (such as the excellent research released earlier this year by the Working Mother Research Institute, titled What Moms Choose), many of the working-mom focused studies I've looked at this year don't actually provide helpful information and insights for working moms, their employers, or policy makers about the issues working moms face in their lives.
So, for now, I'm going to give in to my working mother study fatigue and stop writing about the studies. Except, of course, when I have a looming blogging deadline and there's an interesting study making the headlines!
Have a wonderful holiday season and see you in 2012!
Graph by Sean MacEntee via Flickr.com.
Comments