mums Archives - insideMAN

Is the idea that men should have the same choices as women when it comes to balancing career and family the last remaining taboo in the gender revolution? Glen Poole examines the evidence.

What’s the biggest remaining taboo when it comes to male and female gender roles in 21^st Century Britain? Is it women being soldiers or men being midwives? No, it’s neither, because while 11% of people think women shouldn’t be soldiers and 16% think men shouldn’t be midwives, there is ZERO per cent support amongst the British public for mums working more than their male partners.

That’s correct ZERO per cent.

And this statistic doesn’t come from a straw-poll taken down my local pub or a Mickey Mouse survey of 100 shoppers in the Milton Keynes branch of Mothercare last Tuesday—this comes from the 30^thBritish Social Attitudes survey, which is described as “a critical gauge of public opinion [which is] used by the Government, journalists, opinion formers and academics”.

So this isn’t a survey that makes a passing contribution to the public discourse on gender once a year, it’s a highly influential survey that informs the Government policies which shape our everyday lives as men and women. According to the survey’s authors, the “gender role revolution”, which took off if the second half of the 20^thCentury has been matched by a marked change in public attitudes since they began collecting data in the early Eighties.

In 1984, for example, 45 per cent of men and 41 per cent of women agreed with this statement: “A man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after the home and family”. By 2012 only 13 per cent of men and 12 per cent of women agreed.

So is the sexual revolution complete?

If you think that the sexual revolution is all about transforming women’s roles and opportunities, then the job is all but done when it comes to public attitudes. Only 13% of people agree with the man-hunt-woman-cook approach to gender and it’s a belief that’s fading fast with each passing generation. In total, while 28% of those over 65 support the gendered division of labour, only 4% of 18-25 year olds share this view.

But before we chaps throw our bowler hats in the hair and join our womenfolk in a chorus of Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves, what about the question of gender that is so taboo, that is doesn’t even warrant a passing mention in the narrative of the British Social Attitudes survey? I’m talking about the radical idea that dads might earn less than their partners.

You see, the idea that women take sole responsibility for home and family may well have disappeared and yet women, on average, still take prime responsibility for the home. This idea is covered quite extensively in the survey under the heading “attitudes have changed but have behaviours?” which provides the following factoids:

6 in 10 women consider they do more than their fair share of the household work
Both men and women agree, that women spend much more time a week on average, both on household work and looking after family members

Is this the last big gender taboo?

But nowhere in the survey does anyone ask if women do their fair share of paid work. In fact the survey simply accepts the culturally held given that when it comes to family life, men will always be the primary breadwinners.

So while there has been a seismic shift away from the belief that women should be solely responsible for taking care of home and family—any movement away from the belief that women should the primary homemakers, while men should be the main breadwinners, is imperceptible.

This shows up in two key questions in the report. Firstly in questions about attitudes towards parental leave, which asked how mums and dads should share this entitlement. What they discovered was that 59% of us think women should take all or most of the parental leave entitlement, while 22% think it should be shared equally. The rest of us either haven’t got an opinion or think that nobody should be entitled to parental leave. But what about, dads taking all or most of the parental leave, well:

ZERO percent thought dads should take all or most parental leave

The second area of the survey that reveals a total lack of support amongst the British public for the idea that mums should “lean in” and take primary responsibility for paid work while dads “lean out” and take primary responsibility for the home and kids, is found in the answers to this question:

“What is the best and least desirable way for a family with child under school age to organise family and work life by sex.”

What this question reveals is possibly the most deeply ingrained, sexist belief, that is held by both men and women and impacts the life choices available to every young man and woman in the country.

In 21^st Century Britain this is how we still think about gender roles:

69% of us think dad should be the primary earner
9% of us think mum and dad should share the earning responsibility equally
19% of us are undecided
ZERO percent think mum should be the primary earner

There is very little difference between men’s and women’s attitudes on this question:

71% of men and 68% of women think dad should be the primary earner
9% of men and 10% of women think think mum and dad should share the earning responsibility equally
ZERO percent of men and women think mum should be the primary earner

What choice do men have?

What’s striking about this survey (apart from the fact that it fails to even question these ingrained beliefs that men should be the primary earner), is the lack of choice available to men, compared with women.

For women, there is fairly even support for the three main options of motherhood, which are to stay at home, to work part time or to work full time. As the survey reveals:

33% of us think mums should stay at home until the children start school
43% think mums should work part time until the children start school
28% think mums should work full time once the kids start school

This range of choices simply isn’t available for most men, so much so, that the question of whether dads should stay at home, work part-time or work full-time isn’t even asked in the survey. What we can read from other questions in the survey is that:

73% of us think dads should work full time
5% of us think dads should work part time
ZERO percent of us think dads should stay at home full time

When you take this into account, it’s little wonder that there’s a “gender pay gap”; that dads get sidelined from their children’s lives when parents are separated and that men don’t do their “fair share” of unpaid work.

So how do we respond to this? Do we demand equal opportunities and choices for men? Do we demand that women start to do their fair share of paid work? Or do we simply accept that men and women have different and unequal desires when it comes prioritising career and family? We’d love to hear your views…….

—Photo credit: Flickr/Antony Pranata

If you liked this article and want to read more, follow us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

Also on insideMAN:

Dads in the UK are not treated as “equally valuable parents”, a new report on Fatherhood by the NSPCC has claimed.

According to the child protection charity “we assume that children need their mums, yet dads are somehow different [and] this reflects the gender inequality that exists around parenting.”

The claims, made in the Dad Project report, will raise eyebrows amongst men’s rights and fathers’ rights campaigners who have long accused the charity of being anti-father. In 2006, for example, the MP Tim Loughton, who went on to become the current coalition government’s Children’s Minister, slammed an NSPCC campaign to prevent separated fathers from being given an automatic right to have contact with their children.

Loughton told the House of Commons: “The [NSPCC] briefing is alarmist, sensationalist, misleading, empirically flawed, completely irresponsible and highly reprehensible. It is not worthy of an organisation such as the NSPCC, which claims to stand up for our children.”

In its latest report on Fathers, the NSPCC has published the findings of new YouGov survey revealing the 95% of dads agree that it is important for dads to be involved in looking after their babies. However, the children’s charity acknowledges that the number of dads who remain involved in their children’s lives is much lower.

40% of children don’t see much of dad

“Research suggests that as many as four in ten children are being brought up by their mothers, with no regular contact with their fathers”, says the report. “To prevent this drifting of fathers out of their children’s lives, we must do all we can to capture and maintain their early enthusiasm right from the start – to help dads to be active parents through pregnancy, birth and beyond.”

The campaign group Fathers 4 Justice, which has staged protests at the charity’s London headquarters, alleges that the NSPCC has ignored “repeated requests” to investigate cases where separated fathers are unfairly prevented from being involved in their children’s lives.

The NSPCC report overlooks the issue of Family Law reform, focusing largely on the way health professionals, such as midwives, involve fathers in the birth of their child. According to the YouGov survey, while 76% of dads agreed that it is important for midwives to support dads as well as mums, 43% say midwives are not very good at including new dads in maternity care.

Society is biased against dads

The charity does acknowledge that the issue of undervaluing fathers isn’t confined to midwives. “It is important to be clear that it isn’t just health services that often fail to treat dads as equally important parents” says the report, “this bias exists across all of society.”

One example of “society” undervaluing fathers is the way men are treated in the media. Men’s advocates have consistently complained that the NSPCC “demonises” dads by disproportionately portraying fathers as abusers in advertising campaigns. In response, the NSPCC has been forced to acknowledge that its own research found that mothers were responsible for 49% of violent incidents against children with fathers responsible for 40%. The charity also agreed to withdraw its “all I want for Christmas is for daddy to stop hitting me” advertising campaign, after receiving numerous complaints.

In this latest report, the NSPCC points the finger at social attitudes that prevent boys playing with toys that prepare them to be involved fathers (such as dolls and tea sets); the limited paid parental leave provided by the government and the unwillingness of employers to supplement parental leave for fathers as often as they do for mothers.

“Dads are not treated as equally valuable parents,” says the NSPCC. “We need to look across the board at how we change our portrayal of, and interactions with dads. The media, marketing, social norms, public attitudes and public services all have a role to play.”