In the last one hundred years women have been progressively getting more and more independent. Now more than ever women are leaving their domestic roles and having careers. However, there is still a lot of opposing viewpoints about women with careers. Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of, "Why Women Still Can't Have it All," and Steven Marche, author of, "Home Economics: The Link Between Work-Life and Balance and Income Equality," differ on the role of mothers and fathers in any given American household, why some women or men choose to stay home instead of working, and how to end gender inequality.
Slaughter and Marche disagree on the role of women in the American household. Slaughter repeatedly mentions how great her husband is for staying home and spending more time with her children than she does. However, she still believes that she should be the one spending more time with them. She claims that "the proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children" (Slaughter 10) and she finds that is very rarely the case. She seems to think that men have more right to a career than women do, that a woman working relies on a man willing to stay home and be with the kids instead of the other way around. Other than that, men are largely ignored in her analysis of working women. Marche believes that men have a much larger role in families than Slaughter believes. He asserts that when men are not part of the conversation "key realities about the relationship between work and family are elided" (Marche 2). He understands that the decision of who stays home and who works is an equal decision. .
Slaughter and Marche also disagree on the reason that men and women stay home instead of going to work.