Working parent

This was shown by the range of work opportunities each parent was able to take and was expected to do, to fluctuations in wages, benefits, and time available to spend with children.

Men went to work to earn money to pay bills and support his family, and women were expected to stay home as housewives and child care givers.

The gender inequalities that are reflective of this idealized family structure result from the beliefs that women are less capable of separating from the children they are predisposed to bear.

[2] This belief is combated by the increasing amount of documentation that both men and women who stay at home perform more household work than their partners.

If he is white, middle class and has a stable home life with a wife and children, he is viewed as the most appropriately masculine man available to earn a raise.

[2] The motherhood penalty or "mommy tax", is one that hurts women's financial opportunities, especially in making poverty a majorly feminine status whereas success is masculinised.

These hurdles, among others, present mothers with possibilities in their career while simultaneously putting permanent barriers preventing them from succeeding, a concept known as the glass ceiling.

Gay Gaddis, company owner of T3, implemented a system where new parents could bring their child to work during the critical stages of child-parent bonding.

[19] Although mothers have flourished in paid labor environments, they still face gender inequalities that affect their ability to maintain a healthy home-work life.

The added pressures of working mothers rests on the stereotypical, gendered assumptions that women are the prime care takers of children.

This is often reflected in disparities of privileges and advantages in the work place between men and women, where the disadvantages of the motherhood penalty, the wage gap, and the second shift come into play.

[27] In contrast to the mid-20th century Western Europe, Communist countries such as USSR and Mainland China encouraged married women to keep working after they had given birth.

[31][32][33] In Japan, according to data collected by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, 70.8% of total employed women are mothers whose children under the age of 18.

Leslie Morgan Steiner wrote that, as women struggle to come to terms with their own choices in parenting against society's standards, they engage in this warfare that does nothing to promote self-acceptance, acceptance of others, or balance within their individual lives.

"[38] The Harvard Business Review blog and Pew Research Center have both reported the results of a study, published in May 2013, that suggests that mothers are the "sole or primary source of income" in approximately 40 percent of U.S. households with children.