Younger Mothers (and Probably Older Ones Too) Just as Ambitious as Men - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Two-thirds of working men and women under age 29 in the US say they desire more responsibility on the job, a new survey finds.

• The figure is the same as in 2002 for men and just a slight increase for women without children.

• But for young mothers, the difference is significant, with 69% of mothers in this age group saying they want to move up on the job, 8 percentage points more than women without children — and up from 48% of young working mothers in 2002.

• Women in dual-income households now bring home an average 44% of family earnings, and 31% of the women surveyed said that their husbands do at least half of childcare, up from 21% in 1992. They also report that men do more cooking and cleaning, though no figures were reported, probably because they would be just too painful to read.

• But there probably is something to the talk of shared duties, as more men than women reported work-family conflicts in the 2009 report. Of course, women may just be used to the problem, while men who take on greater responsibilities are discovering how hard it is to establish such a balance.

• The study of about 3,500 wage, salaried and self-employed workers and small-business owners by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute has asked similar questions of Americans since 1977.

The Wall Street Journal report on the survey