The Downside for Female Breadwinners: Losing Your Kids

A fascinating article in Working Mother magazine spans the quickly shifting landscape of primary custody battles in divorce cases.

Working women, the piece points out, are in the midst of a watershed tradeoff -- as they advance in numbers as family breadwinners, they are losing primary custody of children in divorce cases. More women are losing primary custody because one in four married women now out-earns her husband -- a tidbit not all women will view as advancement. These working women are spending more time at work than at home, and judges are noticing. The sad part is that much of the role reversal in women's earnings is a side effect of the recession, which has produced the highest percentage of job losses in industries where men are in the majority: finance and construction, for example.

So the Working Mother piece starts out as a "woe is me" (sorry, sistas) tale, spotlighting hard-working Boston business owner Julie Michaud who busted you-know-what to support a stay-at-home dad and their two children. The father hadn't worked in five years, even though Julie "begged him to get a job." They both sought primary custody of the kids, which he won in court, much to her surprise and dismay, in addition to a whopping $1,300-a-week in child support and alimony. All she got was "Wednesdays, Fridays and every other Saturday" with the kids, at least on a temporary basis.

This is obviously a nightmare scenario for a mother and business owner. No one can argue that point. But there are some positive glimmers penetrating the massive cumulonimbus of funk. I'll get to those in a moment, but first the facts.

"There are about 2.2 million moms in this country like Julie, moms who don't have primary physical custody of their children. And the number of working moms who lose primary custody has been rising steadily."

Julia Michaud is, unwittingly, a front-line warrior for women's advancement in the workplace and in society. She and other mothers like her are the first ones overboard as judges grapple with societal reformation of gender roles and expectations.

The change in the assumption that women always should have primary custody is a heart-breaker for these women. But it's also a needed change of outmoded stereotypes that women are by nature the preferred parent. The fact is some men are better parents than some women. And it's to women's overall advantage in the workplace and as ambitious, would-be high- wage earners that society starts viewing childrearing and homemaking as gender-neutral occupations.

Can men give birth? Can men breast-feed? Of course not. But that does not mean they cannot parent as well as women and in some instances, even better. No. Until employers understand that a young man is as likely as a young woman to get married and start a family, the wage gap will persist as an ugly adherent to women's careers. American women still only earn 77.1 percent as much as their men, well beyond the point at which many of us thought we'd be close to parity.

But what many people don't realize is that two equally well-qualified PhDs, one male and one female, get hired at almost the exact same salaries right out of school. She will earn 98 percent of what he earns. The wage gap sets in as she heads toward marriage and child-bearing, and employers begin to view her as likely to take time off from work to raise her children, or to leave the workforce entirely. By the time she's 50 and he's 50, even if she never got married or had children, the wage gap is quite pronounced.

Only when employers see that their male employees are just as likely to take family leave as their female employees will that nagging gender pay gap start to close. In recent years, the female-to-male earnings percentage has stagnated in the mid-70s range and even rose a bit last year.

The custody trend in the courtroom is real, but it must be put in perspective by other data which show the percentage of father-headed households is rising, but overall it is still quite small:

"The 2000 census found: In 2.2 million households, fathers raise their children without a mother. That's about one household in 45 (even though) the number of single-father households rose 62 percent in 10 years."

So fathers winning custody battles is a sea change, but perhaps one tantamount to a large current as opposed to the tidal wave one might otherwise be led to believe it to be.

The article ends on a somewhat positive note, which is where it should have started. It warns working mothers not to allow custody disputes to go to court -- they suggest women do much better in mediation than in court. Children, too, fare better when parents don't wage costly, emotion-ridden, drawn-out custody battles.

It also hints, as I have stated, that fathers can parent just as well as mothers, and children need involved fathers in their lives:

"Mental health experts reinforce the importance of two loving parents in a child's life. New research from Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe shows that kids brought up with shared custody or spending equal time with both divorced parents are physically healthier as adults than those living primarily with one."

The sooner society drops gender stereotypes, the better off both genders will be.