Millennial Money: Bust gender bias and balance work at home

No matter how modern opposite-sex couples can be in their views on equality, old habits die hard. The COVID-19 pandemic has made this abundantly clear to parents who already struggled to find balance.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, mothers and fathers both left the workforce earlier in the pandemic in April 2020, but nearly all fathers eventually returned to work, while many mothers stayed home . And a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that recessions typically lead to a gender wage gap growth of 2 percentage points, but a recession caused by a pandemic grows the gap by 5 percentage points.

This leaves a generation of career-driven women facing many of the same obstacles that kept previous generations of women underpaid or out of the workforce entirely. Working through these issues comes down to exploring your biases, modeling the behavior you’d like to see other families adopt and treating your partner with empathy.

COMPARE YOUR STATED VALUES WITH YOUR INGRAINED VALUES

Ed Coambs, a financial therapist in Charlotte, North Carolina , asks clients to tell him about how money and work were viewed in their families growing up. He finds that while your stated values may include equality, the values of your family and community influence your views, too, and those values may not match.

Coambs can relate. When he met his wife, she was in dental school and he was working as a firefighter. Once she graduated, she would earn more than him. At first, Coambs was in full support.

“Then we got into the reality of living life together,” he says. “It exposed insecurities about not being the breadwinning partner and not conforming to my internalized gender roles and expectations.” In Coambs’ case, his father was the...