This article uses recent data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (N = 5,220) to explore gender differences in the extent to which adults in their 50s and 60s provide informal help to their adult children, elderly parents, and friends. We find that both men and women report very high levels of helping kin and nonkin alike, although women do more…

American families and workplaces have both changed dramatically over the past half-century. Paid work by women has increased sharply, as has family instability. Education-related inequality in work hours and income has grown. These changes, says Suzanne Bianchi, pose differing work-life issues for parents at different points along the income…

The term "second shift" from Hochschild's (1989) classic volume is commonly used by scholars to mean that employed mothers face an unequal load of household labor and thus a "double day" of work. We use two representative samples of contemporary U.S. parents with preschoolers to test how mothers employed fulltime and married to a full-time worker…