For Employers: Modern Men
Traditional ideas of masculinity persist in the workplace, even though men are now expected to do more of the household chores – and work longer hours. Emily Bobrow investigates the trials of modern manhood.
Emily Bobrow is a regular contributor to The Economist and 1843. This article is an abridged version of her full article that was published in The Economist’s 1843 for June/July 2017. The full article can be found here.
Nathan, a successful lawyer in Manhattan, hardly seems like a candidate for sympathy. His midtown office is smart, his suit is natty and he earns a decent living negotiating contracts and intellectual-property rights for players in the city’s dynamic entertainment industry. Divorced and in his late 40s, he speaks fondly of his teenage children and is delighted with his fiancée, whom he will marry in a few weeks’ time. His life is good, he assures me, and he is thriving in his career. So it is only with some hesitation that he admits something he has never discussed before, not even with his closest friends: “In the society that I live in, as a professional in New York City, I think it is easier being a woman than being a man.”
This is not to say that being a woman is easy, Nathan hastily adds. He understands why many are frustrated by “the way they are expected to do it all, to have a career and be moms, it’s a whole contradictory bundle of things.”
Unlike his two long-term female partners, who pursued personally rewarding careers that offered enough flexibility to be available to their children, Nathan felt obliged to pursue work that offered a pay cheque large enough to support a family. “For the last 20-plus years I’ve been chained to a desk,” he says. “I’m in a profession that I’m happy to be in, but if I were a 20-year-old and told I could do anything I wanted with my life, I’m not sure I’d be doing this.” Nathan speaks enviously of female friends who decided to leave their professional careers when they became mothers. “They weren’t perceived as failures. If anything, they were told ‘That’s so great, you’re choosing to be a mom, that’s the most important thing in the world.’ That is not an option open to men.”
Because men – and especially white, professional men – occupy a uniquely privileged place in society, Nathan is reluctant to discuss his feelings openly. “I’ve never expressed this to any of the women in my life, and I think it’s best that I don’t,” he says. He is right to be wary. Most conversations about gender inequities characterise men like Nathan as part of the problem. Women around the world may be graduating from college at higher rates than men, but they have yet to achieve similar rates of success in their careers.
The uneven burdens of parenthood appear to be to blame. Although men in rich countries spend far more time cooking, cleaning and child-rearing than ever before, their efforts continue to be dwarfed by those of women. Even couples with grand plans for an egalitarian partnership typically revert to more traditional roles after the birth of a child. A new study of the time-diaries of highly educated dual-earning American couples found that new fathers enjoyed up to three-and-a-half times as much leisure as their female partners, as mothers who worked full time were still stuck with the lion’s share of unpaid labour.
In order for more mothers to flourish in paid employment, more fathers need to pick up some of the slack at home. But, as Nathan’s frustration makes plain, this is not as simple as it sounds.
Women may not be moving as fast into male-dominated worlds as feminists would like, but they have moved much faster than men have into female-dominated ones. Women who behave like their male colleagues may be disliked for being “pushy” or “bitchy”, but these penalties are offset by the fact that they are also likely to enjoy more power and greater financial rewards. When men adopt the jobs and behaviours associated with women, however, they typically experience a loss of status with fewer perks and more social sanctions, especially from other men.
Among professionals, fathers report being just as frustrated with their working hours as mothers, and are often just as distressed about not spending enough time with their children. But uncertainty over how other men will view them makes them less likely to take advantage of child-friendly policies, and far more resistant to becoming stay-at-home parents themselves. A recent survey of millennial men found that men were more inclined to use flexibility benefits when they believed their male colleagues would do the same. Other studies of paternity-leave policies have found that men take the benefit only when it is clearly meant for men and other fathers are using it too. A study in Norway, for example, found that men were far more likely to take leave if their brothers or male co-workers had taken it already.
Otherwise most men assume that even gender-neutral flexibility policies are meant for women, and that if they take advantage of them, they will incur their colleagues’ disdain. Basically, when mothers pull back from work for child-care reasons, they may earn less money but they are still seen as good women. When fathers do the same, they are often seen as lesser men.
Many jobs have grown more demanding in recent decades. Low earners often juggle just-in-time schedules that change weekly and with little notice. High-earning professionals are expected to put in longer hours than ever before, toiling in offices long into the night.
Increasingly punishing expectations at work reinforce a more gendered division of labour at home. They encourage women to shift into part-time employment, and men to rely on women to look after the children. Many employers also presume from the outset that mothers will – and should – put their families first, and that sprogs invariably deter women from climbing the corporate ladder. This helps explain why economists have found that in America having one child reduces a woman’s earnings by roughly 6%; having two depresses them by 15%. By contrast, fatherhood spurs men to work around 80 more hours a year, on average, which bumps up men’s earnings by around 6%; this bonus is largest among highly educated professionals. It hardly seems to matter that between 1965 and 2000 men doubled the time they spent changing nappies and keeping house. Mothers often work fewer hours than they would prefer, and fathers work longer hours than they would like.
Women rightly complain that they are often shunted onto a mommy track with lower wages, fewer promotions and less prestige, whether they like it or not. But many men are just as frustrated by the elusiveness of a daddy track.
Research shows that parents who take family leave or request a flexible schedule to tend to young children often face harsh penalties, like lower long-term earnings, fewer promotions and poorer performance reviews. Mothers suffer from this too, but fathers often get an extra hit for defying cultural expectations. Studies show that both men and women tend to see fathers who ask for paternity leave as weak and inadequate.
Most women think that men cling to traditional male roles because it benefits them. Certainly ascending a professional ladder offers more money, power and status than chugging along on a mommy track. But these perks come at a price. A recent 15-year survey of married American men and women between the ages of 18 and 32 found that men typically reported being in the best health during the years they split the burdens of breadwinning with their partners. As these men assumed more financial responsibility relative to their wives, their health and wellbeing declined. Often they suffered from the worst health and the most anxiety when their wives were out of the labour force entirely.
More egalitarian marriages seem to work better. A recent study of data gathered in 2006 found that couples with a more equitable approach to housework were happier with their marriages and reported having more and better sex than those who divided things along more traditional lines. Fathers who take on more caregiving responsibilities not only tend to be more content and feel closer to their partners and children, but also appear to live longer. A study of over 72,000 Swedish men who had a child between 1988 and 1989 found that fathers who took between 30 and 60 days of paternity leave had a 24% lower risk of dying by 2008 than those who took no leave. The Swedish authors speculate that fathers who were more involved at home were less inclined to engage in risky behaviour to prove their manliness.
All this suggests that men, like women, are happier in more balanced relationships. Yet they are not, by and large, getting them. Outmoded notions of how people should behave, combined with the pressure to spend long hours in the office, seem to be getting in the way. This will be no surprise to the many mothers who have long complained about the difficulty of “having it all”. But the pressures faced by fathers are a less familiar topic. Indeed, most men are wary of discussing these things publicly.
This is partly because they know their gripes are often eclipsed by those of women. But they also keep mum because complaining about the burdens of manhood breaches an unspoken code of manliness. But such talk is necessary if couples hope to defy cultural and economic expectations to forge more equal partnerships.
Originally Released On 11 July 2017