Despite an attempt to renegotiate the division of labour in the home over the past twenty years, family responsibilities still fall disproportionately on women. This paper illustrates the flow of social exchanges between the family and the market and the family and the state, particularly in relation to some aspects of domestic labour. The author examines how family responsibilities affect the life changes of men and women and determines that family responsibilities do not harm the careers of men but have a negative impact on those of women. He questions how to best bring about a change in this situation and discusses the following means of altering the undesirable effects of family responsibilities: renegotiating responsibilities within households leading to a more equitable division of labour between men and women; outsourcing some of the domestic labour to the marketplace, thereby reducing the burden of unpaid work faced by women; and the state absorbing some of the responsibilities formerly performed by households, such as government sponsored child care centres.