That male silence is widespread, at least in public. But it is changing. Roughly 15 to 20 percent of the responses to my article that I have personally received have been from men—the same percentage of men that I find in my audiences when I give speeches. And more and more men are taking to the blogosphere and the pages of periodicals to insist that the debate about relations between men and women not be conducted almost entirely among women. They want to be heard and they have very clear ideas about what they want to say.
A Supreme Court Clerk Stays Home
IN THE FALL OF 2014, The Atlantic published another article that sparked widespread debate among men and women. This one was called “What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Taught Me About Being a Stay-at-Home Dad,” by a hotshot young lawyer—a former clerk for Justice Ginsburg—named Ryan Park. Ginsburg is famous for her own battles on behalf of women’s equality as a lawyer in the 1970s and as a woman navigating her own difficulties fitting her family and career together. She told her clerks, “If you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.” In that spirit, Park decided to support his wife, who is a doctor, by spending a year as the primary caregiver for their toddler daughter, Caitlyn.
Park writes that the time at home with his daughter reminded him “of the time I’d spent living in a foreign country. There was the same perpetual novelty, that intense awareness that elevates even the most ordinary moments.” He asks himself,
Did I miss the thrill and challenge of debating knotty legal questions with a Supreme Court justice? Well, let’s just say that most of the books I was reading now came with pictures of panda bears and barn animals. But every night, even after the most pedestrian of days, I sat and reflected on the beauty of the moments that had passed.
Park is also refreshingly candid about society’s prejudices regarding men. He describes the “good-natured skepticism” that people often express when he discusses what he calls his “struggle to manage my competing commitments to family and career.” He encounters an “underlying assumption that women and men have different visions of what matters in life—or, to be blunt about it, that men don’t find child-rearing all that rewarding, whereas women regard it as integral to the human experience.”
I could not have said it better. As a woman, I object to the presumption that I am somehow more domestic and nurturing than my male colleagues are. That may be true in any individual case, but it should not be assumed because I am a woman. But why then should we impose the opposite stereotype on men, assuming that they automatically want to invest more in work than in their relationships with their families? Park says, “I do not think this assumption is true, generally speaking. I am certain it is not true for me.”
Change Is Coming
RYAN PARK IS NOT ALONE. Evidence of a profound shift in the ways men are thinking about themselves and their lives is glimmering on the horizon. Wharton School professor Stewart Friedman reports that for the first time ever, one of his eighteen-year-old male students, when asked what he wanted to do after college, replied that he planned to be a “stay-at-home dad.” Kunal Modi, then co-president of the Harvard Business School Student Association, wrote an article in which he urged his fellow male students to “man up” for economic and egalitarian reasons. “Raising children and running a household are not ‘women’s’ roles,” he wrote, and “treating them as such is counterproductive to your own family’s economic well-being.” And at Harvard Law School, Dean Martha Minow says that the one change she has observed over thirty years of teaching law is that today the questions about how on earth these prospective lawyers are going to manage work and life are coming from young men as well as young women.
Even professional athletes, who are under so much pressure to be seen as traditionally masculine, are now bragging about their infant-wrangling skills. The Mets’ second baseman Daniel Murphy was criticized for taking three days of paternity leave; he responded not by buckling to the flack, but by telling reporters about changing his son’s diaper in the middle of the night.
One of the best indicators of changing norms is, as always, Madison Avenue. The ad men (and women) learned quickly what not to do. In 2012 Kimberly-Clark, manufacturer of Huggies, created a series of ads filled with fathers watching their babies at home, which they thought would be cute and appealing to parents of both genders. The ads included a female voiceover saying, almost condescendingly, “To prove Huggies diapers and wipes can handle anything, we put them to the toughest test imaginable: dads, alone with their babies, in one house, for five days, while we gave moms some well-deserved time off. How did Huggies products hold up to daddyhood?”
Many fathers reacted furiously to the message of presumed paternal incompetence. A stay-at-home father from Oregon named Chris Routly started a Change.org petition called “We’re Dads, Huggies. Not Dummies.” It got more than 1,300 signatures. Huggies eventually pulled the ad and apologized, repeatedly, and in person, at a dad blogger convention called Dad 2.0.
It hasn’t taken the advertising industry long to learn from its mistakes. In the 2013 World Series, Chevrolet aired an ad for its Malibu sedan that had a gentle male voice talking about the importance of family over material wealth. “We don’t jump at the sound of the opening bell, because we’re trying to make the school bell,” the voiceover intones, as a dad corrals his son into the car, adding, “Corner booth beats corner office any day.” The 2015 Super Bowl ads continued the trend, featuring an ad for Dove Men+Care that depicted children, young and old, calling out to their fathers from a highchair all the way to the dance floor at a wedding reception. In case viewers missed the connection, the tagline asked, “What makes a man stronger?” Answer: “Showing that he cares.”
The companies making these commercials spend millions of dollars on consumer research. They are plugging into something their customers want before they fully understand that they want it. The statistics tell the tale. The 2013 Pew Research study that found roughly equal stress levels among mothers and fathers was subtitled “Roles of Moms and Dads Converge as They Balance Work and Family.” Mothers are still spending more time with their children than fathers are, but almost half the fathers surveyed would like to be spending more time with their kids, as opposed to just over a fifth of mothers.
EXPANDING CHOICES FOR ALL MEN
SO FAR, SO GOOD. NOTHING particularly jaw-dropping about the idea that fathers who are equal caregivers with mothers should have the same options as those mothers and should merit an equal presumption of competence. But dads are only the beginning. Men—all men—need and deserve the same revolution in their lives and circumstances that the majority of women in the United States and many other parts of the world have experienced since the late 1950s.
Here again, it is not hard to find signs of change. Writer and co-founder of the Fatherhood Institute Jack O’Sullivan wrote in 2013 that though the debate about men is oftentimes “overwhelmingly negative,” men are actually on the brink of an “extraordinary transformation.” Like women, men “are belatedly escaping what we now recognise to be the confines of our gender. Many of us are enjoying a massively increased engagement with children….We are changing our relationships with women and with each other.” Organizations like the Good Men Project, a media company and social platform that describes itself as “a glimpse of what enlightened masculinity might look like in the 21st century,” are encouraging a new conversation.
The most poetic description of the changing definition of manhood I have seen comes from a Dartmouth alumna, Betsy Bury ’87, who canvassed her classmates and wrote up her impressions for their twenty-fifth reunion book. Dartmouth men, she wrote, are “starting to feel this pull of multiple directions; quietly they have started being promised more too. Came a little later for them maybe, but it is no longer just whispers that they do not need to feel consigned exclusively to grey flannel suits, the emotional range of John Wayne or parenthood dominated by only a few tossed balls or late arrivals at school plays.”
For at least two decades we have been telling girls, “You can do anything boys can do, as well as what girls have traditionally done. You can be a mother, a daughter, a sister, and a wife, and you can be anything you want to be professionally. Indeed, you are part of a historic cause, with plenty of glass ceilings left to break.”
Raise children with a mission, a sense of their own destiny, and watch them thrive. Immigrant children, for instance, often grow up with a mission to fulfill their parents’ hopes for them in a new country that offers opportunities and possibilities that would have been denied them in the old. Girls and young women are still immigrants on the shores of a world led and dominated by men. They have a world to conquer, and judging by the ways they are outpacing boys in elementary school, high school, and college, they are out to succeed.
Contrast the messages we send to our sons. Upper-middle-class white parents may expect our sons to become successful professionals but see no special achievement in it the way we still do for girls. They will not be making history, just repeating it—hardly inspiring or motivating. On top of that, boys still get very traditional messages of what is masculine and what is not. As one of the men I work with at New America puts it, “My daughter can go to the park in jeans, roll around in the mud, drop-kick another kid…and no one bats an eye. My son comes to school with his nails painted…and his class erupts.”
Because of our unspoken but still very real view that caregiving is unmanly, we are reinforcing a much narrower set of choices for our sons. We are still telling them, fundamentally, that they have to be breadwinners. Their wives can also be breadwinners, but I am fairly confident in saying that few mothers out there, and probably fewer fathers, are really giving their sons the message that being a full-time or part-time father or caregiver is just as much an option as it is for our daughters.
At the same time, at least among white upper-middle-class parents, expectations for boys versus girls have shifted sharply. Many feminists who are mothers of sons are living in a split universe. In our professional lives we still very often live in a largely male world, certainly in the higher reaches. We mentor younger women to lean in, sit at the table, speak up, and put themselves forward. But at home we face a different gender balance: the steady rise of girls, or, as many parenting books and articles describe it, “the boy crisis.” Michael Kimmel, author of Manhood in America, summarizes the problem: “Girls are surpassing boys in college attendance (about 60 percent of entering first-year students [in 2013] are female); achievement (girls have caught up in science and math, and far outpace boys in English and language); and behaviors (boys are far more likely to be retained, suspended, diagnosed with ADHD and get into fights).”
The academic and popular literature on why we see these patterns and what we should do about our boys is vast and growing, as is awareness among parents. In Princeton we have a parent group for mothers of boys. And I’ve had countless conversations with other parents in which someone will say, “My kids get themselves up in the morning” or “My child has taken on fifteen extracurricular activities and organizes them all,” and another parent will respond, “You have girls, right?” Indeed, we women who fight so furiously to avoid any discussion of essentialist differences with respect to men and women openly debate them with respect to boys and girls.
I often tell the story of my bemusement and mild consternation when my oldest son, then in elementary school, offered, matter-of-factly, “Girls are smarter than boys” as a reason why he should not be expected to be at the top of his class. The feminist in me applauded the progress we have made from an era in which girls just assumed that boys were smarter than they were; the mother in me said no way!
Still, it’s easy to overdramatize here. Sociologists Claudia Buchmann and Thomas DiPrete point out that girls have actually done better than boys in school grades for more than a century, but that for most of that time women felt pressured to choose between getting an education or having a family, or else getting an education to be able to be a better mother. Only in the last forty years or so have girls been able to see a clear link between how well they do in school and how well they will do in life, so that instead of hiding their smarts, they have every incentive to embrace their intelligence and achievements. Moreover, upper-middle-class boys are still doing fine relative to the rest of the population of Americans, men and women.
The real crisis in the United States is among poorer boys from minority communities. Of the four major demographic groups in the United States (whites, Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans), blacks and Hispanics have the lowest rates of graduation, and black males are one of the only subgroups whose graduation rate decreased between 2007 and 2009. It’s not just getting African American boys to the finish line in their caps and gowns; the problems are far more systemic and begin in elementary school. A report called A Call for Change from the Council of the Great City Schools explains that “only 12 percent of Black fourth-grade boys in large city schools are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of White boys in the nation, and only 12 percent of Black eighth-grade boys in large city schools are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of White boys in the nation.”
As Michael Kimmel again points out, drawing on ethnographic work by psychologist Wayne Martino, in middle and early high school even boys in well-educated communities get the message “It’s not cool for guys to do well in school.” And although Buchmann and DiPrete found that girls have long outperformed boys in school, they nevertheless agree that many boys are studying and engaging less and denigrating the importance of good grades. Particularly for working-class boys, if their schools, parents, or peers have a dominant male culture that “opposes academic achievement” and emphasizes narrow masculine ideals, it can exacerbate the gender gap. Boys’ success depends on what answer they are hearing, consciously or subconsciously, to the question “What makes a good man?”
Suppose we were to tell our boys that they have the opportunity in their lifetimes to expand the social and economic roles for men in the same way their mothers and sisters expanded the roles for women? That they could take the definition of masculinity into their own hands and bend it in whatever direction they chose? The biggest unconquered world open to men is the world of caring for others. If we tell boys that they can break down centuries-old barriers and be pioneers of social change, suddenly they have a mission, an inspiration, and a new kind of role model to emulate—a new definition of a good man.
BEATING BIOLOGY
ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO I taught a seminar with a terrific group of secondary school history and social studies teachers assembled by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. One of the participants, a middle-aged man from South Carolina whom I will call Jim has stayed in touch with me on foreign policy and, more recently, work and family issues. He wrote to me after my Atlantic article came out to say that my account of juggling work and family captured his wife’s experience as she worked her way up the corporate ladder of a large global medical equipment company while also raising their daughter.
Jim went on to talk about his own experience, pointing out that the husbands of women in corporate or professional careers inevitably face challenges of their own. “To begin,” Jim writes, “there is something subtly if not overtly that our society attaches to a husband whose wife’s income is obviously much greater than his.” He says that he has “enjoyed a wonderful professional career as a high school teacher and coach,” a choice he has never regretted, and that he has brought in extra income in a number of ways. Still, his wife is a businesswoman whose salary “naturally exceeds that of an educator.”
In
Jim’s view, even with the best will in the world, “It is far too idealistic to pretend that there are times when this is not a difficult position for a married man to find himself in. In social settings, it is politely ignored, but I think it fair to say that it is something that a married man knows others are thinking about.” Jim went on to wonder whether his feelings were “an archaic standard of a past that no longer fits, or an instinctual, primal urge.”
I received a similar email after I gave a commencement address at Tufts advising the young men in the graduating class to think about how they were going to fit work and family together—the kind of advice speakers usually give young women. A parent in the audience wrote to say he had been married for twenty years to a woman he loved and with whom he had two wonderful children. When his wife received a great business opportunity he decided to move for her, but his own career suffered as a result, even as hers surged. The resulting conflict led to divorce. He was honest enough to say that the “resentment towards my wife ran deeper than jealousy and existed in spite of the conscious knowledge that I made the right pragmatic decision; rather it was a very deep feeling of failure to be a real father.”
Whereas Jim wondered about his “primal urge,” my Tufts correspondent believes that our ape ancestors evolved into monogamous relationships in which the mother and child are vulnerable for long periods of time, leading “to very high level of positive selection for males that protected and provided for their mates and offspring. I believe this is one of the core components of why men love. If a man cannot protect or provide, he probably will not or cannot love.”
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