Dads in Study Regret Small Families More Than Moms

(Sept. 5) -- It's fairly well documented that women with children are unhappier than men at work. A new study confirms that, too, but offers its own twist: Male scientists who said their careers kept them from having more children regretted their sparsely populated households more than their female counterparts.

The finding is the work of Rice University's Elaine Howard Ecklund and Southern Methodist University's Anne Lincoln. They presented their paper at the recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The work was funded, Lincoln tells AOL News, by the National Science Foundation, which is why it concerns scientists. The takeaway is that while 45 percent of female scientists say they had fewer kids than they wanted because of their careers, as opposed to 24 percent of men, on a scale that rated unhappiness, men who wanted more plentiful homes were far and away worse off than women.

"Men take it harder," Lincoln told AOL News. "Maybe they feel like they haven't been successful in that regard, that there's some paternalistic thing going on. We don't know yet."

She doesn't know yet because this working paper was the quantitative end of the study. Ecklund is working on the qualitative end and should be done by next summer.

But maybe men have a new sensitivity for domestic matters. Another recent study found that relationship problems bother men more than women.

Dude, women really are the new men.