Men behaving daddily

The 1990s have been described as a decade of “men be­having badly”. Some people suggest that over the next ten years, at least in America, men may try to make amends by taking on more of the responsibilities of raising their chil­dren. Some of the issues facing these (inevitably working) men will be the same as those that faced women, 30 or more years ago, when they set out to redress what they saw as-unacceptable gender imbalances.

First and foremost, there is the guilt. For women, it was mostly about not being there for their kids; for men, it's about not maximizing their pay, about not providing “enough”. Both sides also have in common an uncomfortable feeling that they are in denial of the things that they were best designed for: the deep-seated view that men are outdoor hunter/gatherers and women are home-making suckles... and rarely the twain shall meet.

There are also social and political barriers to be surmounted before either gender is free to make the sort of choices that will transform society from one in which half of human expe­rience has been off limits to the other half of the population. The political landscape could be tilted more in favour of families, whilst in the workplace there is the unabated pressure on a man to perform as if he had no other life.

Employers are rarely as accommodating as they might be. But few of the companies which profess to be so keen on equal opportunities for women take pains to accommodate the fathers who want to be home when the equally-opportuned mums are not. Even in the home, men have to fight for equality. Women are reluctant to “relinquish the mystical powers attributed to motherhood and really share the glory as well as the housework”.

Some of the issues facing today’s superdads are quite different from those that faced yesterday’s supermums. By traditional standards, women were fighting to take a step up. By those same standards, men are often asking to take a step down. This presents problems, not so much because it’s a step down to change baby’s nappies, but because it’s a step down to earn less than baby’s mum. It makes competi­tion between the sexes continuous and on all fronts. It turns women into bread-winners and men into consumers.

Only in the United States the cohort of baby-boomer supermums has created a generation of men that want to be superdads − that want (like their mothers) to have a go at having it all. In most other parts of the world, women are still raising their boys to expect the old-style contract in which, in return for bread-winning, they gain a support structure that keeps their children at arm’s length.

Underlying the change in America is the assumption that there is little that is more rewarding for any parent than to walk hand-in-hand to school with their adoring seven-year-old and no agenda other than the walk. Some fathers have yet to be convinced of this. Even when they know they can’t have it all, they still think they’ll be better off as the chairman of General Motors.

(From Economist, March 2000)