Dual-earner couples might seem to have new-millennium marriages. But for the great majority, strategies to manage work and family demands turn out to be, in fact, a variant of the traditional breadwinner/homemaker gender division. Except, the new version includes two careers but only one on the front burner.

This "neotraditional" model helps couples in their effort to "have a life" in a world in which the organization of work and career paths presumes that workers have no family responsibilities. And it's still the husbands' career that is given priority, says a new Cornell University study.

Working couples have few options, says Phyllis Moen, director of the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute, because of the lag in employment policies and practices that are predicated on lock-step career patterns established early in the 20th century. Caught in a vicious cycle, couples tend to reinforce this template with wives cutting back at work in the face of couples' work-family demands. But this short-term strategy might have long-term negative consequences for women's job security, seniority, rewards and advancement opportunities.

"Contemporary working couples are traversing an uncharted terrain, changing both the composition of the workforce and the division of family labor," says Moen, who also is a professor of sociology and human development at Cornell. "However, with few institutional mechanisms to help dual-earner couples manage their joint work and domestic responsibilities, typical couples choose strategies that free the wives to do most of the domestic work, including child and elder care."

Contemporary couples typically have egalitarian values but find themselves playing more traditional roles. But unlike middle-class couples in the 1950s, genders are differentiated not by whether couples work outside the home but by how much they work. The vast majority put in long hours, although women work fewer hours. This reflects not what contemporary couples want but the absence of realistic options for building a life around shared work and family responsibilities. "Both opportunities and costs come prepackaged in ways that force choices of sets of arrangements," Moen says.

The best off are those in "new-millennium" marriages in which both spouses put in about the same amount of time on their jobs and neither works long hours, says Moen. "Still, only about 24 percent of workers in dual-earner couples follow this strategy. Again, this is because policies and practices at work lag behind current workplace realities; most workers are married to other workers, but career paths still presume one career per couple," she says.

Moen's study, conducted with Yan Yu, an assistant professor of anthropology/sociology at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Mich., was published in the journal Social Problems (August 2000). The researchers analyzed data from 824 men and 844 women in dual-earner households from the 1992 National Study of the Changing Workforce.

Among their findings:

• Households in which both spouses work regular hours (39-45 hours a week) rate their life quality highest, compared with couples in other work-hour arrangements. Workers putting in long hours or preferring to work less than they currently do score lowest.
• Women in dual-earner households tend to report that their husbands' jobs are more important than theirs.
• Women in nonprofessional jobs married to professionals tend to score highest on various life-quality measures.
• In general, women in dual-earner households tend to report more stress and overload, as well as less control of their lives than do men in such couples.
• Measures of life quality are largely related to whether individuals are working their "ideal" number of hours. Those who want to work fewer hours tend to experience more work/life conflict, more stress, more overload, and less coping/mastery. The largest gap is between men's actual and preferred hours.
• Quality of life tends to be lower for both men and women in dual-earner households who have demanding or insecure jobs. Having a supportive supervisor is linked to higher life quality.

The study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of the research of the Cornell Careers Institute. Moen is currently a Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Public Policy Center for the 2000-2001 academic year.