A majority of families – a record 52% – now have two parents working full-time, up 6% from a decade ago, according to a Pew Research Center report released recently.
Mothers with bachelor’s or postgraduate degrees are driving the shift, with more choosing full-time over part-time work in 2025 than they were in 2000, according to the report, which analysed data from the Current Population Survey.
In an accompanying opinion poll, Pew found that 83% of partners who were both employed full-time saw this situation as a clear financial positive, and 49% said it had a positive impact on the well-being of their children.
An increasingly educated cohort of young women have been transforming the workforce and changing family dynamics.
Women now earn the majority of bachelor’s and graduate-level degrees conferred each year.
While men still earn higher salaries on average than women, the gap in earnings between them has narrowed, especially among the youngest workers.
Changing responsibilities
Those shifts have correlated with changing responsibilities at home, particularly for well-educated workers.
Recent research has also found that fathers with college degrees are increasingly trading paid time at the office for parenting and chore.
Pew’s study suggests that an equal split in parenting is also more gratifying: 65% of mums and 71% of dads who said they divide duties about equally with their partner said they were satisfied, while just 22% of mums and 44% of dads who reported the woman does more said the same.
Nonetheless, beliefs about who carries the burden of such unpaid work differ sharply along gender lines. Some 63% of mothers told researchers that they’re responsible for the lion’s share of parenting tasks and household chores; among fathers, just four in ten said women do more parenting and only a quarter said women do more household chores, the Pew survey found.
Still, Pew’s data offers evidence that family dynamics vary sharply across income and educational lines. Mothers without a college degree are less likely to be in a dual-income household than they were 25 years ago.
Those mothers are also more likely than their higher-educated counterparts to be in arrangements where the dad works full-time and the mom is not employed.
Lower income workers also said their employers were the least likely to offer flexibility or benefits that would help them care for children.
Almost a third of lower-income respondents said they’d be extremely or very worried about losing their job if they had to take a day off of work to care for a sick child; just 12% of middle-income and 5% of higher-income respondents said the same. – Bloomberg
