Just as the news breaks that women are getting squeezed on maternity leave benefits due to changes in corporate insurance programs, I am reminded of the dealing so many women in my office did to maximize their six week paid leave with banked vacation and sick days. The women were usually able to take eight weeks of paid time off but tipped close to the brink of the corporate culture in attempting to take another month of unpaid leave. Usually they simply returned to work a little sad at 8 weeks.

What this evokes in me, however, is the memory of the shared work arrangement my husband and I agreed to and several of my peers tried to negotiate as well when looking down the face of the calendar and childcare for a new baby. We built what we called a new model -- one that only our modern generation understood the need for. We were planning to be parenting and household partners with an equal distribution of work and homework hours. As Lisa Belkin once again hits the bulls eye in her June 15, 2008 article for the New York Times: When Mom and Dad Share It All, modern women still do more of the housework and care taking at a ratio of two to one. Class doesn't matter -- and our family has been multiple classes over our 16 years of child rearing. Working class, middle class, upper class, the ratio is still two to one in division of labor in families.

What really needs a flashlight focused on it, however, is the issue of why women continue to put up with this lopsided division of labor in the first place. Even in families where the woman works full time and the husband stays at home and you would expect a reversal in this division, you find the wife doing the majority of the housework. And childcare is measured separately from housework in the University of Wisconsin National Survey of Families and Households. The division of labor in childcare is (are you sitting down?) 5:1! There is no rational explanation for these out of whack proportions. I understand that social norms (however outdated) play a part in the way work is fashioned. What I cannot understand is why women put up with it.

Well, actually, I do know why. It is another type of making a deal much like negotiating maternity leave. Many of us know the women who put her foot down on the unfair division of labor and found themselves on food stamps and living in an 800 square foot apartment. I am always a bit aghast when I witness women who continue to work themselves to the bone raising wonderful children, managing their relationship and often working a full time job too. What shocks me is the women's perspective that they have a pretty good arrangement. I have seen their husbands go from golf course, to tv remote to a brief try at catch or homework and heard them applaud their men. The survey I would like to see the sociologists conduct is the one that measures the economic value of maintaining this 2:1 and 5:1 division of labor in order to keep the family intact and the concomitant value for the growing child.