An interesting investigation is taking place in daycare settings in two northern locations. It is sure to have something useful to tell us about how decisions are made in the domestic domain.
The National Day Nurseries Association is providing the locales, and Demos the research, on parenting of young children as a key moment in decision-making within households. It is a moment when the genders diverge, when the everyday life of men and women is polarised.
Since the 1960s, when permissive legislation was passed on abortion, divorce and homosexuality, and the 1970s, when equality legislation was introduced, bans and proscriptions restraining women's opportunities have ebbed.
This has not produced equality, of course, as this week's Women and Work Commission on pay disparity confirms. What it has done is signal that the era of partriarchy is losing its legitimacy.
However, the aspirations of girls and young women still hit a misty shroud once they become parents. The workplace has remained robustly resistant to the imperatives of parenthood, among both men and women.
We already know from Arlie Russell Hochschild's illuminating books, The Second Shift and The Time Bind, that the assumption that fathers will want to spend less time at work to be with their children has been confounded by the evidence. She found that even in family-friendly firms, presenteeism - as opposed to absenteeism - prevails.
Clearly, any inquiry needs to investigate the nooks and crannies of class, power and gender to discover why there has been no time movement to reduce the working day, and why so few fathers take advantage of family-friendly arrangements.
Demos is aware that when researchers talk to men and women together, the men are nervous and the women are keen to reassure that their division of labour is chosen and mutual.
So, Demos is interviewing mothers in the north-east and fathers in the north-west. Unfortunately, they won't be comparable - the regional cultures are markedly different, and fathers who appear at nursery may not be typical of fathers in general. That's a shame. But anything that helps us understand what pressures, personal and public, bear upon parents will help us to know whether there is a movement out there to reform, or re-instate, the traditional division of labour.
