Women Have Come a Long Way. The Family Picture Is Less Bright.

It's bad out there. That we know. But amid the economic wreckage, there is a bright spot for women. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act -- enabling women and other workers to sue for wage discrimination -- was the first piece of legislation President Obama signed. And a parsing of the grim economic statistics shows that recent layoffs have disproportionately hit male-dominated industries. We have reached a milestone of sorts: Women may be poised to outnumber men in the labor force.

Sure, it took a deep recession to achieve this measure of employment parity. Now, second-generation Ledbetters are much better off than when Ledbetter herself first became a supervisor at Goodyear in 1979 and gradually fell behind her male counterparts in earnings. But as the treatment that Ledbetter endured becomes less and less common, a more persistent kind of inequality is growing: the gap between households at the top and the bottom of the income scale.

To understand the unfair treatment Ledbetter received and how it intersects with the changing gender composition of the workforce, we have to look all the way back to the early 20th century, when Henry Ford offered all his male workers a "family wage" -- about $5 per week at the time -- that was meant to be enough to support an entire family on a single paycheck, thereby preserving the homebound "cult of domesticity" around his wife. (Spouses of male Ford employees were, in fact, not allowed to work.) Women who did work were not entitled to this pay rate based on the notion that they were secondary earners taking home "pin" money rather than shouldering the main expenses of a household. Never mind that even widows and single women who were, in fact, primary breadwinners also did not receive the "family wage."

During the 1950s "Leave it to Beaver" yesteryear, only 17 percent of mothers with children 18 or younger worked outside the home, and most of those were low-wage workers who either did not have another adult earner in the household or whose husband's wages were too low to support the family. Even by 1975 -- at the height of the feminist drive for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment -- barely one-third of moms worked. That is, Lilly Ledbetter was still an exception. By 2000, however, about 70 percent of women with children held jobs. In other words, until recently, the norm in America was that mothers did not work. Now the situation is completely reversed.

While this change has fundamentally altered family life -- think of the increased use of day care, the expansion of after-school activities for children and the rising rates of eating out -- women in the workforce have also affected our society and economy in more subtle, indirect ways. Most notable has been the increasing gap between household incomes at the very top of the scale and those at the very bottom.

Over the past 40 years, individual earnings have become more and more unequal -- as the effects of education on wages increased with technological change, unions declined, labor went overseas, and the minimum wage failed to keep up with inflation. The difference between the earnings of middle-class families and those on the bottom rung has remained flat, while disparities on the top end of society's ladder have grown, with the distance between the middle and the top expanding by 72 percent since 1967. But individual earnings are only part of the story when it comes to rising differences in family incomes. When we look at total household income inequality, the role of women as breadwinners is key.

In the "Father Knows Best" era, a janitor earned less than a doctor, but that disparity was likely to be the only source of difference in their respective families' standards of living. Neither man was likely to have a wife who worked. Now, with media-fed, ever-increasing consumer desires, what wage would be considered an adequate "family wage"? The more we make, the more we want. Furthermore, for those in the professional class, both men and women, work is seen as a central part of identity. Hence the "need" for two workers among the affluent. And among the less well-off, the increasing pressures put on the marketplace by the rich -- bidding up the price of housing and education, for example -- means that most middle-class couples probably need two incomes also, even just to keep a roof over their heads. Today, housing expenses represent more than half of household budgets among the bottom third of earners, and families cannot even rise above the poverty line ($21,300 last year for a family of four) with a single full-time worker at the minimum wage.

The result is that today both spouses are likely to be working. What's more, there has been an increase in what sociologists call assortative mating -- that is, like marrying like. The old story of the boss marrying the secretary (and her quitting her job) might have been fairly common back in the days of Ward and June Cleaver; today the manager is more likely to marry the manager. (In fact, doctors have the highest rate of occupational intermarriage of any profession, and they are all likely to keep working -- at least part time.)

Another factor is that in the old days it was the spouse of the lower-income man who was more likely to be employed, but that correlation has flipped and today the upper-income wife is more likely to be working. After all, if you pull down $9 an hour and child care costs half that, there's not much incentive to go to a miserable job, leaving your kids behind. But if your hourly rate is $50, that's another story entirely. In fact, about 40 percent of the rise in family income inequality since the 1960s can be attributed to these dynamics, according to demographer Christine Schwartz.

There are secondary effects, too. When high-wage women aren't able to prepare meals as often, they hire low-wage women (and men) to do it for them by eating out or ordering in. The result is that -- as economists Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane point out -- the fastest growing low-skill occupational category is food service and preparation. In fact, the number one profession for women without a college education is waitressing.

What to do about this situation? I am not pining for the days of Donna Reed in the kitchen and the "family wage" paradigm. But we can't fully celebrate the Ledbetter Act or the strength of women in the workforce unless we also take steps to address the widening income gap among families. We need to help fathers work less outside the home (and more inside it) and reduce wage inequality.

Of course, we don't want to accomplish either of these through economic catastrophe but rather through thoughtful social policies around parental leave, marginal tax rates and so on. These are tall tasks, but if we don't do something to cushion the effects of the social sorting taking place across households, families will continue to face more and more stress. We must come to terms with the fact that the workplace and family life are not what they were in the 1950s (or 1979 for that matter), so our social policy shouldn't be stuck in the days of Eisenhower either.

conley@nyu.edu

Dalton Conley is acting dean of social science at New York University and the author of "Elsewhere U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Age of Affluence to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety."