The article's summary of Stephanie Coontz is distorted. The author claims: Family historian Stephanie Coontz writes that today’s workforce is so demanding that

The article's summary of Stephanie Coontz is distorted. The author claims: Family historian Stephanie Coontz writes that today’s workforce is so demanding that families can only handle having one person in the workforce. She shows how the average work week does not allow for people to take care of children, which means that one partner needs to drop out of the workforce and take care of kids. This is not Coontz's point at all. Coontz considers the status quo to be about "bad working conditions," and concludes (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/why-gender-equality-stalled.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/why-gender-...): Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders. In other words, the the status quo is hard on people; the problem is in the nature of work. My bet is that Coontz would have a lot of issues with Mayer's order.