By Faye S. Wolfe

Big or small, extended or blended, single-parent or dual-earner, families are hard-pressed to come up with enough time to get everything done. And for most, work heads the list. Naomi Gerstel, a sociology professor at UMass Amherst who has studied the interface between work and family for many years, calls marriage the “greedy institution,” but “work is greedy, too,” she says.

Are people working more than ever? It depends on which people you’re talking about. Professionals and managers are working more hours. Businessweek reported in 2005 that nearly a third of college educated male workers regularly log 50 or more hours a week. The average length of the work week, though, is about the same as in 1970. What has changed since then is that the amount of time a family gives over to paid work has grown radically. Women are working outside the home in higher-than-ever numbers. Tasks they once accomplished throughout the week now get squeezed into evenings and weekends delegated to other family members or paid help, put off, or abandoned.

Chores aren’t the only things being squeezed. New moms and dads trade off work so that someone’s always bringing up the baby. In families with two working parents, sniffly kids go to school because no one can stay home with them. When Grammy develops a terminal illness, her children perform a calculus of how many sick days they can take to be with her—and still have a day or two for the funeral. School PTOs go begging, and the Y comes up short for youth basketball coaches.

In some countries, people have more vacation time and paid leave time to spend with their families. Their bosses don’t expect them to work weekends in addition to their work week, or take calls at the beach during holidays, or make a practice of working late. Even the Japanese, famous for their work ethic, log fewer hours than Americans. A recent study indicated that out of 173 countries surveyed, the United States was among only five—Liberia and Papua New Guinea were two others—that did not guarantee some form of paid maternity leave.

Yet Gerstel says the theories that “Americans are type A personalities,” addicted to work, or prefer the office to home, don’t bear out. “Do women prefer to be at work?” she says, referring to a study that suggested so. “When the idea was proposed, it caused an enormous stir, but a different study indicates it’s not true.” She adds that even if some prefer jobs to home, we don’t really know yet what that means. “We’ve just started asking questions about the hard work to be done at home. What is being rejected: being with your child or cleaning the toilet?”

As a society, we’ve given the upper hand to work. Family-leave policies and laws on the books haven’t had as much impact as their advocates hoped. “There are time regulations and guidelines, but many workers don’t quite know what they are,” says Gerstel. “One example is the Family and Medical Leave Act, for which people fought so hard.” Her research has found that 13 years after its enactment, “few people know its content.”

Why hasn’t it had more impact? Gerstel says part of the answer lies in the fact that it compels employers only to give unpaid leave. “FMLA has become an option only for the affluent, people who can afford to take unpaid leave,” says Gerstel. “But who takes it is determined not by any one aspect, that is, gender, class, or race. For instance, black and white women are the most likely to use it, white men least likely. And the group most likely to use it is white women with money.”

Black and Latina women are motivated, Gerstel’s research suggests, by a strong tradition of caring for others. Today they give more care to parents, sisters, and brothers than do white women. In a white family where the husband and wife both work, the man is likely to make more money, so the wife takes the time off. Corporate culture by and large still looks askance at people absenting themselves for months, much less years, to raise children. Women who do may never quite catch up to those who don’t in earning power, so many keep working and keep their family lives on track with Post-It reminders, kitchen calendars, palm pilots, and cell phones.

“Women talk about time all the time,” says Gerstel, who has the interviews to prove it. If most people want more time with their families, why doesn’t public policy reflect that? Is it like that old joke about the weather: Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it?

“People’s sense of time is shaped by policy and by experience,” Gerstel says, “and the attitudes of co-workers, supervisors, family members, administrators.” Instead of seeing problems of tardiness or missed shifts as stemming from systemic sources—inflexible work schedules, for instance—workers perceive them as personal. “Workers will blame other workers, someone who won’t come in to do a shift.”

It’s human nature to look for the closest scapegoat; it’s also part of the American ethos to emphasize, for better and worse, individual responsibility. If you can’t make it to work or, more broadly, must struggle to support your family, that’s a personal failure of will. Yet picture-book families where Dad goes to work and Mom stays home and tends the children have become less and less economically feasible. Fixed expenses for basics like housing, health insurance, and transportation take a big chunk out of paychecks—and wages have not kept pace. Says Gerstel, “We may be reaching the point where we can’t afford families.”

Key to why the workplace is not friendlier to families is that they lack the power to compel change. One group that does have clout is nurses. Gerstel has lately been studying them and physicians, EMTs, and certified nursing assistants. “The demands hospitals face put them on the cutting edge,” says Gerstel. On the one hand, health care administrators must provide quality care, 24-7, 365 days of the year. On the other, there’s a shortage of nurses. To get the nurses they need, those administrators have to offer flexible schedules.

“Nurses have a smorgasbord of shifts. They have forced administrations to give them a choice of shifts that suit their lives,” says Gerstel, adding, “You don’t find that flexibility in schedules of physicians or nurses aides.” Most nurses are women, and many have families—which for Gerstel goes a long way to explaining why nurses have pushed particularly hard for that flexibility. As Gerstel puts it: “Nurses ‘get’ it.”

“I believe progress is being made” on the work/family front, Gerstel says. She also knows that realistically, “Policies that support the middle class are the most likely to get passed.”

“A lot of talk about supporting family is metaphorical,” Gerstel believes. “‘The Family’ is an ideology, not a practice. The family doesn’t exist in the way we often think of it: two kids and the picket fence. How to ‘save’ families? I’d rather recast the question in terms of what people need most, to look for policies that benefit a range of family types.”