The results of a study of 184 assistant professors, both men and women, who were seeking tenure while rearing young children show that while majorities of both male (55 percent) and female (75 percent) professors agreed that husbands and wives should "share equally" in matters of employment, domestic chores, and childcare, the practices of the total sample in caring for their children under the age of two actually were anything but equal.

Whereas 67 percent of eligible female faculty took medical leave after childbirth, only 12 percent of male faculty did so. Furthermore, the female faculty performed all 25 tasks that the researchers identified with childcare far more often than did the male faculty. In fact, the fathers taking leave did less childcare tasks than mothers who stayed on the job. Less than three percent of the husbands reported doing more childcare than their spouses, whereas 96 percent of the wives said they did more.

These patterns held true even when limiting the sample to faculty expressing egalitarian gender attitudes. None of the men who reported taking leave after the birth of a child, who expressed commitment to gender equity, and who were married to women with full- time jobs did as much as 50 percent of the childcare.

Nor were the female faculty members adverse to the situation, as they enjoyed doing 24 of the 25 childcare tasks more than the male faculty; among 16 of these tasks, the gender gap was substantial. Among the 72 percent of mothers who breastfed their children, 71 percent liked it

"The likelihood that college-educated women will drop out of the labor force because of having children declined by half from 1984 to 2004.  And among all mothers with children under 6, the most highly educated are the least likely to leave their jobs, with that likelihood declining with each level of educational attainment."

 Some sociologists believe that maternal employment represents a plus for daughters, giving them a "positive"" role model for female self-reliance. Yet Jacqueline Scott of the University of Cambridge discovered in a study of British families that maternal employment did not deliver the goods to daughters when it comes to educational achievement that she had anticipated.

Crunching data from the 1994 through 1999 versions of the British Household Panel Study, an annual survey of 5,000 households, the professor of social and political science examined how family structure, parental education, maternal employment, parenting practices, and youth characteristics related to educational achievement. That achievement was measured by two variables: the attainment, at age 16, of at least five "passes" on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GSCE) and, at age 19, of at least two A-level passes.

As Scott expected, family structure was significantly related to educational attainment, as adolescents who grew up in households with both biological parents were more than twice as likely to achieve the five passes on the GSCE as well as the two A-level passes than their peers from other households, including single or stepfamily situations (Odds Ratio 2.09, p<.001 for GSCE; Odds Ratio 2.29, p<.001 for A-level).

Findings related to maternal employment, however, was not what she fully expected. Children, and especially boys, whose mothers worked full-time (at least 30 hours per week) when they were 11 to 15 were less likely to attain five or more GCSE passes at age 16 than children with stay-at-home mothers (Odds Ratio .37, p<.01). However, full-time maternal employment yielded a positive effect upon girls--but not boys-at the A-level, although this effect lost its statistical significance in multivariate analysis that controlled for factors such as family income, parental education, and home ownership. Scott also found that part-time maternal employment did not hurt but enhanced educational attainment on the GSCE, especially among daughters, but the effects were not statistically significant.

Scott suggests that these effects of maternal employment on the academic achievement of girls, limited as they are, nonetheless reflect a trend. But she fails to ponder what these correlations might mean-even if they were statistically significant-in light of her very clear finding that girls are more than twice as likely as boys to succeed academically (p<.05 at both levels; Odds Ratios 2.15 for GCSE and 2.01 for A-level). If she did, perhaps she would issue a call, in keeping with her devotion to equality, for more mothers to stay at home in order to boost their sons academic pursuits and therefore help close this gender achievement gap.