Parenthood by Proxy: Or, Why Men Might Like Motherhood

[WOW this sounds so familiar...]

Calling Mr. Mom?
By LISA BELKIN

You could easily compile statistics to make the case that women — at least Western women — are already empowered. In the United States, we are 50 percent of the workplace (and 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs). We receive three college degrees for every two earned by men (along with 60 percent of all master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees and 43 percent of M.B.A.’s). Working wives are coming close to bringing in nearly half the household income. Single, childless urban women under 30 actually earn 8 percent more than their male peers.

But all this evidence isn’t particularly persuasive to the one group that should know: women. After all, you could compile a whole other set of figures that show just how far from empowered we are. Start with the Government Accountability Office study last month, which found that professional women still make 81 cents for every dollar a man makes in a similar job. Then count the women in the corner suites and the highest-paying professions. (It won’t take you long: women currently make up only 3 percent of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s.) And women still perform twice the housework and three times the child care that men do, even in homes where women are the primary breadwinners.

Telling women they have reached parity is like telling an unemployed worker the recession is over. It isn’t true until it feels true. That’s because measuring women’s power by looking only at women — and by looking mostly at the workplace — paints a false picture.

Men today are at the turning point women reached several decades ago, when the joint demands of work and home first intensified. In her new book, “Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter,” Joan C. Williams describes how men find themselves caught between meeting cultural expectations and a growing dissatisfaction with the constricted roles shaped by those expectations. “You have to ask why, if women are asking men to change, and if men say they want change, it hasn’t happened,” she says. “Either they are all lazy, or they are under tremendous gender pressures of their own.”

The life-work dilemma for women has long been that “the workplace has changed in their favor, but home hasn’t,” she says. Men, however, “have the opposite problem. More is expected of them at home, but expectations have not shifted at work.” Which explains why the percentage of fathers in dual-income households who say they suffer work-family conflict has risen to 59 percent from 35 percent since 1977.

Younger couples say they want and expect parity in their relationships. But many women still carry a chip on their shoulders, chiseled in part by years of keeping all those to-do lists in their heads. And if men can find no relief from the pressures of work, they are not going to be able to fit into the revamped economy of home.

How then to inch toward change? Can we make it “manly” (or even better, “gender neutral”) to spend a day with a child, or earn less money but have more family time, or be the only parent at a parent-teacher conference because your wife has a meeting? “If long hours are really about proving ‘whose is bigger,’ you can have flex policies until the sun sets and men won’t use them,” Williams says.

Indeed, where flex policies are offered, American men don’t use them as much as American women do. In California, one of two states in the country to provide paid parental leave (or “bonding leave”) for both parents, 74 percent of new mothers took the new benefit compared with 26 percent of new fathers. This is, to be sure, an improvement over the 17 percent who took it when the program was first introduced in 2004-2005. (It is also significantly higher than the percentage of French men who take time off. French law allows both parents to take a leave or to work reduced hours until their child is 3, but 97 percent of those who do so are women.) It’s better than it used to be, but it’s far from equal.

There are some practical reasons for these discrepancies. Biology dictates that many women will take pauses during the prime career-building years that men don’t need to take. Similarly, breast-feeding during the first month to year of life means a child necessarily spends more time with the mother. Often, though, what look like causes are really effects — we make assumptions about sex roles and then reinforce them with our behavior. If you challenge those assumptions, it follows that you can change behavior. Which explains what happened in Sweden.

Today the Swedes have one of the world’s most forward-thinking parental leave policies, but it took years of tweaking before men took substantial time off to care for children. Starting in 1974, couples were given six months of paid leave to divide in any way they chose. Women consistently used more of the time than men; in fact, only 4 percent of fathers took any leave at all. In 1995, however, a month of fathers-only leave was introduced, and in 2002, another month of “daddy leave” was added, bringing the total to 480 days. If men don’t take the leave before their child turns 8, they lose the days. Now about 80 percent of Swedish dads take at least some time off.

By steering men toward a particular path, Sweden redefined the nature of choice. Parental leave was transformed from a way to escape the world of work into a way to maximize the benefits available to families; from an emotional decision to a financial one; from something mothers do to something every parent does. Would that same kind of redefinition — of the relationship between work and home, of the roles of men and women — work on this side of the Atlantic? In at least one case, it already has.

Four years ago, the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers wanted a flextime policy but worried about the mommy-track stigma attached. They looked for a way to make flextime gender neutral by giving it a clear business purpose. Workers were asked to participate in a pilot program to create a telecommuting infrastructure in case a terrorist attack or natural disaster crippled its Manhattan headquarters. Men who didn’t stay home to take care of children began to do so when it became a matter of national security.

Empowering American women can no longer focus only on women — on leveling playing fields or offering mothers “on-ramps” and “offramps” or shattering ceilings one at a time. All those efforts must continue, yes. But none will succeed if we don’t change our expectations for men. Or, more accurately, men’s expectations for themselves.

Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer and the author of the Motherlode blog.