I’m one of those children of the 70s/80s who grew up thinking I should “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan,” and never let my man forget he’s a man. We were supposed to strive to be “Supermoms” who were able to do it all.

And, according to the recent Advertising Age white paper “The New Female Consumer: The Rise of the Real Mom,” most of us do “do it all.” Their research showed that “…women with children still handle the bulk of the household and child-care responsibilities, the so-called ’second shift’ — whether they are working full time, staying at home or something in between.”

This is in an age when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports both parents were employed in 62 percent of the 24.6 million families made up of a married couple with children under 18. And, in the 2006-2007 academic year, the U.S. Department of Education noted women earned a majority of higher-education degrees.

The full report embedded here is filled with many more such statistics, including a 48-year comparison on education, purchasing power, and wages. But, the “real mom” to which its title makes reference is what they are really making a case for in the paper.

They posit that “the second half of this decade has brought a backlash against the mythical Supermom — that hyperactive type-A personality who whips up perfect cookies and perfect children — and an embrace of the likable, more relatable real mom, who doesn’t obsess over the little things.”

The case is made that millennial women (born between 1980 and 1995) are leading this change in attitude. They are apparently not as “conflicted” as my generation — Generation X. While I grew up being told I was equal to men, what I saw was my own mother doing an unequal amount of work to keep our family running - that “second shift” we women are apparently still working.

“[Millennials] grew up with seeing a lot of moms working, being outside the home a lot, and decided ‘Hey, this isn’t what I want,’” Aliza Freud, founder and CEO of SheSpeaks said in the AdAge report. “So they may be at peace more with their not working or working.”

Nearly have of the women surveyed for the report said finding balance between family and career is “a joke” for working women and I will certainly agree with that. The tagline for this blog used to say that it wasn’t about balance, but about juggling.

As one journalist put it: “While no longer striving to be supermoms doing everything for everyone, mothers are looking toward being pragmatic and good enough, and making a real impact in the areas that matter most for them and their children.”

This AdAge report implies that marketers should help empower women to delegate responsibilities to spouses, children and even brands so that they will have “more time to be who they want to be.”

As Carroll Trosclair on Suite101.com rightly points out, “marketers have been helping women delegate work to products, services and brands for decades. But delegating work to husbands and children may be a new and controversial challenge for advertisers.”

Interesting Side Note:
While researching for this post, I came across a blog that mentions one of the ways information was gathered for the whitepaper. Kitchen Table Conversations, “a new user-generated video research service revolutionizing how qualitative research is conducted” was used to gather information on grocery shopping habits. If you’re interested in qualitative research methods, check it out.

The #10 book on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of June 21 was one titled “Womenomics.” I haven’t read the book because, well, about the only time I ever get to read is when I’m on a plane by myself and I haven’t had the opportunity to travel in six months.

But, this news article on “Womenomics” has been an open tab in my Firefox browser for nearly a month now, as my own blending of work and life has prevented me from writing about it.

What made that article really jump out at me was that it mentions “a legendary ad sold working women on the idea they could have it all” and I have to believe the writer was thinking of this one that had so much influence on me growing up:

I grew up with images like that, and terms like “supermom” being thrown around, and I know it shaped me. I watched my own mother work part-time, then go back to college and begin working full-time - all the while doing the bulk of raising three kids and pretty much all of the the housework. And that shaped me, too. Reality looked a lot harder than the media messages I saw, and I became convinced that marriage and kids were not in my future.

My how things change as we grow older, huh? Toward the end of college I started to wonder what all that career success I anticipated would be like if I didn’t have someone with which to share it. And later, after several years of happy marriage, I saw another reality where someone I worked with really did seem to be living that supermom-career-woman life of perfume commercials.

So, I ventured into parenthood - and was reminded of my mother’s reality again. And, a few years later I watched that supermom-career-woman mentor leave a successful corporate career path for something this book now says we shouldn’t have it leave it to have - flexibility.

The Wall Street Journal’s Juggle blog says the message of “Womenomics,” by ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman and BBC World News America newswoman Katty Kay, is that skilled female workers have earned far more leverage at work than they’re using, by virtue of their educational credentials, experience and proven value in management.

I know I’m extremly lucky to have a job that affords me much flexibility without my need to push for it. I work online with teams around the globe, so much gets done over e-mail, IM and conference calls - all of which can be done from anywhere. And, I work for a manager that understands that and doesn’t require “face time” in the office as long as what needs to be done gets done. That sort of work schedule is not just something that women want, however.

When Shipman and Kay spent 90 minutes with Families and Work Institute (FWI) staff and Corporate Leadership Council members, they heard of FWI’s latest research that shows men are also making work/family choices. Men are making changes to take family responsibilities. The FWI National Study of the Changing Workforce shows that men and women are both less likely now to embrace traditional gender roles. Only 41 percent of employees in 2008 believe it is better “if the man earns the money and the woman takes care of the home and children,” down from 64 percent in 1977.

You can see it online in the DadLabs motto of “taking back paternity,” in the posts from the fathers that have joined us here on This Mommy Gig, and many of the other fathers who blog at places like Dad-o-Matic.

We’re experiencing it ourselves as my husband has recently made the decision to leave the workforce to stay home with our daughter over the summer. And whenever he re-enters the workforce, he plans to make flexibility a main priority, so he can continue to spend time actively parenting.

I think it is great, and it certainly makes it that much easier for me to not have to worry about the logistics of summer camps. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some adjustments we’re having to make as traditional gender roles get a little blurry.

Sure I want to bring home the bacon, but what happens when someone else frys it up in the pan?  I wonder if anything like that is covered in the “Womenomics” book? If you’ve read it, let me know. And, if you’ve got any tips for transitioning from two working parents to one, please share those, too!

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From a very interesting article in BusinessWeek titled “MBA Moms Most Likely to Opt Out” -

Williams said she believes that what has been termed the “opt-out revolution,” the notion that working women choose parenting over building their careers, is more complicated than meets the eye. Men who are in the upper ranks of their profession with stay-at-home-wives earn 30% more than men who are married to women who work, she said. Those men who want to reach the highest rungs of their career and earn the most money often need a stay-at-home wife to take care of all other aspects of their life, including raising a family, Williams said. “And since many women in business school marry those men, they end up being stay-at-home wives, regardless of their own vision of what they wanted from their careers,” Williams said.

Wow.

Full article: MBA Moms Most Likely to Opt Out by Alison Damast - BusinessWeek, August 21, 2008

“The truth is despite the hard work and juggling required to keep the different facets of the frantic life afloat, the ’superwoman’ has one marvelous compensation. Being busy and being seen to be busy lets you off the hook. Buys you a way out of all aspects of your many roles you secretly despise … like cleaning cupboards … or entertaining your husband’s business friends. When you combine wife, mother, career and all, each role become the perfect excuse for avoiding the worst aspects of the other.” -Bettina Arndt

My parents had two very different philosophies regarding time and money. Dad was a career engineer for General Electric. His job required a lot of traveling - my younger nephew called him “Poppa Airplane” to distinguish him from a more stationary maternal grandfather. Time at home was for family and local politics, not yard work or snow shoveling. Whatever his three children couldn’t handle was contracted out. Household repairs were left to the experts.

Mom took the opposite view. She hated to spend money on things she could do herself, like repainting the ceilings and walls. As a stay-at-home mother, she filled her days with meaningful tasks, taking pride in her sparkling windows and homemade desserts.

Comments on Twitter this morning reminded me of these opposing viewpoints. Jokes about cleaning and cobwebs made me smile, but I sensed some underlying guilt, as if the women making these remarks felt the need to apologize for their lack of housewifely skills.

It is a given that all mothers are working mothers. Time is one of our most precious commodities, not to be squandered on meaningless tasks. If you enjoy cleaning, then by all means factor it into your schedule. But if these “obligations” are sapping your energy and cutting into family time, take a minute to reevaluate your priorities.

Clean laundry and sanitary counter tops matter to me: gleaming floors and dust-free furniture do not. I don’t advocate living in squalor, but I’m not willing to squander the weekend dealing with what are, to me, non-essential matters. Time away from work is for fun and family.

I can’t eat off my floors, but I never planned on doing that anyway. I’m with you Dad: I work hard to earn the money to buy my freedom. And I don’t feel guilty at all.