by Liz Plank
This intentional emphasis on expanding the role of men as fathers doesn’t just offer relief for mothers, it also happens to be associated with a more positive definition of manhood. For instance, research has shown that Danish men, especially those who have more education, have become less likely to subscribe to more patriarchal or traditional male gender norms. Given how central men’s role as caretakers is in Danish society, it’s not surprising that research on Danish dads shows that when men talk about fatherhood, they emphasize their role as caregivers rather than the financial support they give. “I think that being there for your children is the most masculine thing I can think of,” one subject in the study said. Denmark’s commitment to blurring the divisions of labor around gendered lines appears to have a direct impact on men’s perceptions of their role as men.
Expanding parental leave doesn’t just mean that more men end up taking it; it also means their role as men fundamentally changes and that they are free from the stigma imposed by constrictive masculinity norms like working over being inside the home. This became clear to me when I started asking my male friends if they’d be discouraged from taking parental leave, and the most interesting answer came from Tobiass Naess, a Norwegian man I met while I was speaking at a conference in Bergen. “In my company, they look at you funny if you don’t,” he told me. In other words, instead of being stigmatized for taking daddy leave, he knew he would be stigmatized if he didn’t. A nation’s paternity leave for fathers sets the tone; it changes the default and the impact on behavior is huge.
When I asked Tobiass if he identified as a provider, he didn’t even really get the question. “I’m not sure I’m one hundred percent get what you mean with ‘identify as providers,’” he (adorably) said. This wasn’t a language barrier; it was a cultural one. When I explained that it meant providing financially, he said parents didn’t really use gender to determine their role inside their families. “Speaking for myself and my social circle—and I guess it’s representative-ish for a fair part of Norway—after the first months, parenthood is parenthood. There are really no father tasks and mother tasks,” he said. “It’s seen as just a normal thing to do to take care of your kids. It’s not masculine nor feminine. It’s just parenting.” After his wife went through a double mastectomy and their third child had to be bottle-fed, Tobiass loved being able to participate in the act of feeding him. “Being part of that feeding ritual of the tiny toddler—that was new. And nice. But I never thought of it as ‘feminine,’” he said. “It certainly does not challenge any part of my masculinity, and I struggle to see how it could.” Living inside his logic even for a few minutes felt really nice.
Tobiass explained that the men who couldn’t take the leave they wanted existed, but they were a minority. “Not taking paternity leave is seen as a little silly/backwards,” he explained. “In some industries, male-dominated ones in particular like finance, there is still some adversity to paternity leave. It’s a recurring debate. But the debate here is very different from what you have in the United States. Paternity leave is the norm. What’s probably interesting is that the paternity leave is supported across the political spectrum, from far left to far right. The difference lies in how much should be mandatory.”
The Scandinavian model is dreamy, but the United States is still very far from it. In fact, it’s the only industrialized nation without any guaranteed paid parental leave. Very few American companies voluntarily offer time off for their employees, because the government lets them. The vast majority of Americans do not receive any paid time off to care for their children after they are born. In fact, only 14 percent of the companies in the United States offer paid parental leave, for either mothers or fathers. The average American father barely takes any time off after the birth of a child. According to a 2011 Boston College study, three out of four men took a week or less after the birth of their child. That means I have a carton of oat milk that’s lasted longer than the average American man’s paternity leave. The lack of parental leave for men is a consequence but also the cause of the unfinished gender revolution.
Despite the reservations that millennial men have about the parenting abilities of working moms, it’s not women who are reporting not seeing their children enough; it’s men. According to Pew, although fathers are spending more time with their kids than ever (they used to spend about 2.5 hours with their kids per week in 1965; they now spend on average 7.3 hours with them), fathers much more than mothers report feeling like they don’t see their kids enough. Despite the stereotype of the overworked busy mom who accidentally puts her baby in a briefcase, women are spending, in the grand scheme of things, quite a lot of time inside the home. In other words, men’s fear and anxieties about their role as men in the family are real, but women spending even more time in the home won’t necessarily solve anything. It’s strange that when we talk about work-life balance, we often frame the problem as women not being able to find enough time to see their kids, when the data shows that women spend more time with their children today than they used to, not less. Looking at these data points presents a different solution to the problem of work-life balance: instead of focusing on how much time women are able to spend in the home, perhaps we should be focusing on how much time men can.
While fathers in the United States aren’t taking nearly as much time off to care for their kids as they would want, some are starting to challenge the very norms and assumptions about them that justify that imbalance in the first place. A small group of men are starting to bravely question the gendered falsehoods about caretaking and the policies that they end up creating. Their activism is pointing out the way archaic masculinity scripts can lead to gender discrimination against men. In the same way that women created meaningful change by challenging unfair laws that don’t guarantee equal treatment in the workplace, men have started fighting unjust laws that prevent them from being equal partners in the home.
I had the pleasure to speak to one of them, Derek Rotondo. The 31-year-old millennial dad lives in Ohio. As a fraud investigator at JPMorgan Chase who was expecting his second child, he was excited to hear that his company had just expanded parental leave for expecting parents. “Once our policy had been updated, I was excited to spend time with my new son. But then I learned that I couldn’t.” Although JPMorgan had increased its parental leave to sixteen weeks, Derek was denied when he asked for it because he’s a man. The company told him he could only receive two weeks off because the longer parental leave was only for the “primary caretaker,” which was assumed to only be a woman. He was told that a man could not be the primary caregiver unless he could prove the biological mother had gone back to work or that she was “medically incapable of any care of the child.” Under the current company’s policy, men are automatically considered “non-primary” parents. “I wanted to spend as much time with my second one when he was new, because there is so much bonding and trust that occurs so early.” Gobsmacked by what he learned, he decided to take on the giant corporation with a lawsuit claiming sex discrimination. The ACLU has joined the case, arguing that the “policy is outdated and discriminates against both moms and dads by reinforcing the stereotype that raising children is women’s work, and that men’s work is to be the breadwinner.” Cases like these are what expose how policies that codify gender roles really benefit no one.
When I spoke to Derek about his ideals of being a man, they were multifaceted. Being a good dad wasn’t a political position or a partisan decision. Derek didn’t fit the stereotype: he didn’t seem particularly progressive. All he wanted was to simply be there for his children. His version of masculinity was tied to being a present father, but Derek also subscribed to numerous other ideals tied to more traditional masculinity. Identifying with more traditional or “manly stuff” didn’t stop him from wanting to also be taken seriously as a nurturer and caretaker:
I try to be really good at everything that I do. I am not a big guy, but I can hold my own in a fight.… I am an excellent r
ifle shot and pretty good pistol shot. I’m the cook in my house. I run the finances and wonder why my friends our age are broke. Why should being a dad be any different? I choose to excel at everything that I possibly can. Being the best dad I can be is part of that, and being around is necessary to facilitate that goal.
At the time that this book was written, Derek’s lawsuit was still being litigated. When I asked him about backlash he faced because of the lawsuit, he said it primarily was coming from men who thought he should be grateful for getting any time off. “Any negative feedback I get is mostly from older men,” he said. Frankly, they didn’t know what he was complaining about. “You should be thankful you get two weeks; we only had two days,” was the typical response he got.
Despite being marginalized by other men, Derek is not the first to question corporate America’s stigma against working dads. I got the chance to speak with Josh Levs, a former CNN correspondent who fought a legal battle against Time Warner’s parental leave policy in 2015. After his wife had to have an emergency delivery and his daughter was born prematurely, he was told he couldn’t take more than two weeks off. Had he been a woman, he would have had access to more time off—ten weeks to be exact. “I’m home caring for my four-pound preemie, my sick wife, and my two boys,” Josh told me. “I message work asking whether I have to go back to work right then or whether I can get the ten paid weeks. That’s when they said no.” He ended up suing his employer and receiving a settlement. He’s now an advocate fighting to end the stigma against men taking parental leave. He says it’s not just about workplaces giving dads more time off but also about ensuring that they aren’t shamed when they take the time. “I grew up with gender equality, but the workplace didn’t,” he explained to me over the phone. “An overwhelming amount of paternity leave is not used and the number-one reason is stigma.” “When men take paternity leave, they are demoted and fired for asking for it. I’ve spoken to many men who were told they simply could not take paternity leave.”
And nowhere is the injustice of offering men less paid leave than women clearer than for gay men. Although both Josh and Derek have female partners who could take some time off, the habit of offering less parental leave to men disproportionately impacts same-sex families. Many gay fathers end up simply combining their sick days (if they have any) to piece together even the smallest amount of time to bond with their child.
Although some skeptics will say that a cultural shift isn’t possible in a place like the United States because Scandinavian countries are fundamentally different, we’ve seen cultural shifts happen at the state level on much smaller scales. In California, for instance, when it became the first state to ever institute paid parental leave in 2004 and then began expanding its daddy leave policy in 2005, men were 46 percent more likely to take time off and took it for longer amounts of time. Men taking daddy leave rose by almost 50 percent and were more likely to spend time with the child while the mother was back at work, which increased the overall amount of time that babies in the state spent with at least one parent present inside the home. In other words, when we make policy changes to parental leave, men like it. When parental leave is available, it shifts male attitudes toward their role as men in their families.
But the unfinished gender revolution is not just about the division of labor when it comes to who takes care of the kids; it’s also about the division of labor when it comes to who takes care of the house. The fact that domestic tasks remain still so gender segregated for straight couples is a direct consequence of this incomplete gender revolution. While women have taken more roles inside the workplace, they still perform most of the work inside the home. The housework gender gap exists in every country across the world. Even in gender equality utopic countries like Denmark, men spend an hour less on domestic chores than women per day. In the United States, women still do 40 percent more housework than men. One survey even found that women admitted to preferring to ask their children rather than their husbands to do certain tasks. Sure, men in the United States do more domestic work than any other generation of men prior to them, but they overestimate how much they do and how equal it is with what their partners do. And although the stereotype is that working mothers are more likely to neglect to spend time with their children because they have full-time jobs, the modern working woman actually spends as much time with her children as midcentury mothers who spent all their time at home did in America. And they didn’t even have robot vacuums back then!
But again, the message to men is that real men don’t clean, cook or change diapers. This lie is often peddled in conversations about heterosexual marriages. It was repeated by author Susan Patton, nicknamed Princeton Mom after she wrote a viral op-ed in the Princeton newspaper instructing college women to “find a husband on campus before you graduate.” In a debate titled “Feminism vs. Family” I had with her in 2014, she argued that if (straight?) women were focused on their careers they wouldn’t be able to find husbands until their thirties, which means they would be competing with more attractive and younger women in their twenties. Her argument was rooted in biological differences between men and women and was based on the idea that women had a “shelf life” (and of course that men didn’t). Suddenly doubling up as an expert on female libido, Patton also claimed that men shouldn’t take up more responsibilities in the home because women are not attracted to men who clean up after themselves. “The idea of a man wearing a little apron and dusting in the house,” she said. “That’s not a turn-on, is it; that’s just not a turn-on.” She’s right. If you’re going to sleep with a woman at least have the decency to trash her place first.
If straight women are less attracted to their partner when he participates in housework, it’s worth asking if it’s because they are really just aroused by slobs or if it’s because society arbitrarily assigning certain tasks to one gender and not the other. I like to think it’s the latter.
Besides, shockingly, the data doesn’t indicate that women run away from a guy who does the dishes. Research shows that more egalitarian distribution of jobs and responsibilities around the house doesn’t just benefit fathers and their children; it’s been shown to enhance the men’s romantic relationships with their partners, too. When roles are linked rather than ranked and tasks inside and outside the home are better distributed, people in those relationships enjoy something else: a more exciting sex life. Although idealized masculinity encourages us not to think of men as contributors inside the home, when they go against this stereotype, not only do they enjoy more egalitarian relationships, they also seem to have more sex. Researchers who analyzed data from 2006 found that straight couples who shared housework had sex 7.74 times a month. This means that a man taking responsibility for housework is literally a turn-on. Interestingly, the study did suggest a bell curve effect, because when men do the bulk of the housework, the amount of sexy time suddenly goes down. This signals that there is a lot of work to do to normalize these kinds of family arrangements.
Judging by the data, when you take traditionally ingrained gender roles away, you end up with more egalitarian divisions of labor and more satisfied partners. According to a 2015 survey by the Families and Work Institute that looked at same-sex and straight partners, there is a clear difference between the two sets of couples. While straight couples tend to follow more traditional separations of labor with men doing more outdoor and time-consuming chores, same-sex couples divided tasks up based on preference and skill, something that feels like a pretty great way to do that. Same-sex couples tend to split the childcare and the handling of sick kids evenly, while for straight couples, women were more likely to take on those tasks. What was the secret to this chore utopia? Talking. Apparently, when gender isn’t a determining factor, couples are forced to (gasp!) discuss (gasp!) what works best instead of relying on obsolete gender stereotypes that we’ve kept around for no good apparent reason. Not falling into expected gender roles guarantees more freedom to all partners regardless of their gender. Th
at’s why we see same-sex couples consistently split housework more equitably than straight couples and are happier as a result.
Although it’s tempting to blame individual men for not contributing to work inside the household, it’s crucial to look at the way laws and the policy environment collectively encourages them not to. Although ensuring that men can take parental leave has a plethora of benefits, many countries still don’t have proper laws to guarantee that men can. Women may be asking men to do more, but our policies are sending them a different message. Danish men are not differently wired than American men. There isn’t something in the water that makes them more feminist or tricks them into equality. In fact, the data seems to suggest that the easier way to nudge men into doing more housework is to give them more of one simple thing: time off.