herefore, in a majority of married couples with children (70 percent) both the husband and the wife worked. Only 21 percent were "traditional" families, where the husband worked year-round full time and the wife did not work.
The educational attainment of parents (whether married or not) increased greatly between 1960 and 1990. For instance, in 1990, only 25 percent of single mothers had less than a high school degree, down from 62 percent in 1960. Between 1947 and 1973, the median family income doubled. However, from 1973 to 1990, despite rising educational attainment and married women's increasing labor force participation, adjusted family income rose just six percent (to $35,353). Though the large increase in one-parent families tended to slow the increase in the overall median family income, married couple families saw their adjusted income rise only 11 percent between 1973 and 1990 (to $39,895).
Women in the work force experience more job-related stress than men, with single mothers among the most stressed group. The three top sources of job stress, according to a survey of working women, were a major job change in the past year, work overload (such as more than can possibly be finished in an ordinary day), and pay inequality.
Women, especially minority women, feel the effects of a structural plateau far more keenly than do their white male counterparts. The U.S. Department of Labor states that women hold only 6.6 percent of executive positions. This phenomenon is often called the "glass ceiling." At worst, women are not given the crucial early training that would make promotion a possibility.
The proportion of births to ever-married women that were unwanted increased in the latter half of the 1980s, the first such increase since the introduction of oral contraceptives. For instance, levels of unwanted childbearing among black women and white women, which had been converging, diverged between 1982 and ...