A survey in Great Britain suggests that partnered working moms are happier when they have a paid part-time job.

The Job Satisfaction and Family Happiness survey also found that job satisfaction for women with partners is greater when they work part-time, irrespective of how small or large these jobs are.

It points out that women overall may be working as many hours as men, when the time spent on household tasks like cooking and childcare is taken into account, but a smaller proportion of their time is spent in paid work.

The report says that more effort should be put into improving the quality of part-time jobs, where women often suffer career disadvantage.

And it argues that lowering the cost of child care would enable more women to work part-time, increasing their overall satisfaction.

And, of course, other research presents somewhat conflicting results:

Another report, conducted by the Centre for Policy Studies in 2003, said nearly half of working mothers would prefer to stay at home with their children if not for money worries.

And a 2006 government survey found that more mothers said the desire to spend more time with their children was stopping them from working longer hours.

Since I’ve presented the summaries, there is a lot of room for questioning here, but suffice it to so that one solution does not work for all and what many moms will say that they want are options and flexibility.