The Paradox of High Earning Parents

A recent NYT column made mention of "the paradox of high earning parents" - suggesting that in wealthy households, parents pay more lip service to equality, but in fact they act in more traditional ways when it comes to roles within the home. The reference cited for this is a book from 2014 about the schedules of physicians, nurses, EMTs, and CNAs, called Unequal Time. Without being able to look inside the book, it's hard to refute this argument, but it is hard to see how the NYT article can draw conclusions about all wealthy households based on the literature related to doctors who are, according to the book blurb, "largely male" and reportedly have the flexibility to fulfill traditional roles as breadwinners by leaning on their wives and domestic workers. Although I haven't conducted research on the subject, I do have a great deal of life experience as a physician mother who is highly networked via social media with other physician mothers, and I can easily say anecdotally that physician moms also fulfill the breadwinner role by leaning on family members and domestic workers for childcare. The book also claims that largely male physicians work long hours "because they gain respect from colleagues for doing so", while the largely female CNAs also work long hours but mainly because the penalties imposed for not doing so are very high for them. Try surveying physician moms and I very much doubt that you'll find the top reason for working long hours to be gaining respect from colleagues. In fact, I've never heard a colleague of mine admit to working long hours for any reason other than actually enjoying their work, or money.

Back to the "Upshot" article, entitled "Where Boys Outperform Girls in Math: Rich, White, and Suburban Districts." It's relevant to the so-called paradox of high earning parents because this article describes a Stanford study, the results of which are quite succinctly explained in its title. The study was not designed to investigate the reasons behind this phenomenon, however it speculates that in areas where men tend to have more high powered science and math based jobs, boys may receive the message that they should also aim to succeed in math and science. It would be very interesting to hear more about what effect having a mother in a science or math based career may have on children in high earning families. In another fascinating snippet, the authors cite a study done on data from about 20 years ago showing that high earning families enroll children in more stereotypical extracurricular activities. I'm currently conducting an informal poll in a group of 71,000 physician moms to see what they say about this. Based on what I've seen of how children's media and toys have changed in the past 20 years, I believe that norms have significantly shifted in that time, even though most people probably don't feel there have been great strides made in increasing gender equality since the year 2000.