Top Quotes: “All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership” — Darcy Lockman

Introduction

“As George is leaving for the gym that morning before the trip, he stops, choosing his words with the care of the married, and says to me: “I’m going to pack for the kids, but if you can think of anything that I might forget, could you lay it on the bed?”

If you are a mother or a father, or have kept close company with a person who is a mother or a father, it probably will not surprise you to learn that George has never packed for our children. In the six and a half years since we became parents, I have done all the packing and all the other things like packing, and my husband knows — both because I have insistently brought it to his attention for the past few years and because I have deemed its occurrence nothing less than the starting point for a book — that I am no longer happy to take care of it for him.”

“Tanya explained to me, as if it all made perfect sense, that she just was not ever going to be able to meet for dinner because her husband couldn’t be alone with the baby all evening long.”

“George had been accustomed to going to the gym most nights after work, and a couple of weeks following our daughter’s birth, he wanted to resume. It was a benign enough request from his perspective — which was then and, really, to this day remains much different from mine. He had long days at the office and wanted to work out. I had long days at home with our newborn and wanted some relief. Though I can no longer remember with great clarity what was so hard about being alone with one baby (ask any mother of two or more children, she is likely to say the same thing), I do recall the frayed nerves stoked by Liv’s uninterrupted wailing each evening between four and seven o’clock in those first months. It’s called “the witching hour.” Google it along with the word “baby,” and you’ll be directed to a series of websites that advise mothers how to manage this daily period of extreme fussiness. The sites direct their reassurances to women: “Remember, you haven’t done anything wrong, you’re not a terrible mother, and this is normal.” If George came directly home after work, he arrived at five-forty-five; the gym meant seven at best.

When I explained this to my husband, he did not immediately come around to my position. George believed me unsympathetic to his need to blow off steam. He was wrong — my consideration of him simply didn’t extend so far as to obliterate my own needs in unrelenting service to his. There were a few days of mutual hostility before we managed to agree that he would go to the gym before work. His concession solved the material problem but presented with some umbrage. Despite having arrived at a solution that took both of us into account, George seemed to hold on to the idea that I was in the wrong — and also feeble (clearly) and capriciously imposing. In my mind, our very mutual and well-considered decision to start a family was now putting limits on his freedom, as it was on mine. In his mind, or so his attitude implied, those limits were not meant to be borne by him. We’d been together six years, and I’d learned to read his glances — before Liv, rife with love or good humor or the desire to be left to himself. When our daughter was born, a new category of glance: What (the fuck) was my problem? Why had I become so demanding? At great cost, I took this to heart. Maybe I should just accept my role as primary parent with grace. It wasn’t like he didn’t help at all.”

Time Inequality

“At the end of 2015, Newsweek reported on a study of two hundred couples out of Ohio State, “Men Share Housework Equally, Until the First Baby.” The study found that members of working couples each performed fifteen hours per week of housework before having kids. Once they had children, though, women added twenty-two hours of child care while men added only fourteen, the latter also compensating by eliminating five hours of house care (women maintained their fifteen).

Younger dads, who came of age in more theoretically egalitarian times, were no better. “Millennial Men Aren’t the Dads They Thought They’d Be,” wrote The New York Times in July 2015,3 citing social science research out of the University of California, Santa Barbara, that found that men eighteen to thirty have more contemporary attitudes about gender roles in marriage than their predecessors, but “struggle to achieve their goals once they start families.””

“Mothers spent four times as many hours on child care as fathers in 1965, and only twice as many hours in 2010. Cross-nationally, between 1965 and 2003, men’s portion of unpaid family work went from under 20 percent to almost 35 percent, where of course it has remained ever since.”

“Single women belonged to their fathers: The honorifics “Miss” and “Mrs.” serve to clarify whether a woman is beholden to a father or a spouse. Until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it was legal for certain classes of employers to fire or refuse to employ a married woman because she already had a job – as the “physical and emotional laborer of her family.” Only in 1980 did the U.S. Census officially stop calling every husband “the head of household.””

“When George and I moved into our first one-bedroom walk-up a few years before we got married, he soon after volunteered that he would do the vacuuming and the dusting. He liked those things, he told me, and he’d do them every week. What I didn’t say in response, because I was a woman and he was a man, was that being left to clean the bathroom and the kitchen did not float my boat. He could have dusting, which I’d never bothered with anyway, but I wanted vacuuming. If I was going to scrub the bathtub, he needed to do the kitchen floor. I thought to say these things, but time froze, and instead, I didn’t speak because wasn’t I lucky that he wanted to do anything at all. We silently agreed upon the last part. This was in the year 2005.”

“Given that there is always a nameless, faceless partner in the background whose laziness or inattentiveness is worse than your husband’s, women who appreciate their lives and their relationships feel reluctant to acknowledge their displeasure. Sociology explains this with relative-deprivation theory: Only when one feels more deprived than other members of her reference group will she feel entitled to adamant protest.”

“They’ve just started couples therapy, and she feels guilty talking about this. He’s on his phone or computer while I’m running around like a crazy person getting the kids’ stuff, doing the laundry. He has his coffee in the morning, reading his phone, while I’m packing lunches, getting our daughter’s clothes out, helping our son with his homework. He just sits there. He doesn’t do it on purpose. He has no awareness of what’s happening around him. I ask him about it, and he gets defensive. It’s the same in the evening.”

“The ratio of women to men’s free labor is smallest in the Scandinavian countries. In Norway – where, in 1993, the government earmarked a portion of paid parental leave exclusively for fathers – women spend three and a half hours a day in family work compared to men’s three. This ratio is the largest for women in underdeveloped nations.

UN Women, a branch of the United Nations focused on gender equality, estimates that the unpaid labor gap is the largest in South Asia, where women carry out 90 percent of unpaid familial care work. In India, women perform six hours of free labor a day and men only one. These tasks can be particularly grueling in the third world. A woman with a family in Uganda is likely to spend six hours each day collecting water.”

“If he has a big project at work, he’s just like, ‘Oh, I’m going to work late.’ He doesn’t have to worry about getting home so the nanny can leave in time to get back to her own kids. If something comes up for me at work, I’ve got to figure out, can my mom come, and if she can’t, how is this going to go. For him, it’s just, I’ve got to work, and someone else will take care of it. It’s a strain.”

“Today, per a range of studies, working women devote about twice as much time to family care as men.” And in case you’ve considered moving to a more progressive nation to escape the problem, even in gender-egalitarian Sweden, fathers spend only about 56 percent as much time as their female partners do caring for their kids.”

“Research out of the Gottman Institute in Seattle, Washington, where they’ve been studying families for twenty-plus years, has found that two-thirds of couples experience both a significant drop in relationship quality and a dramatic increase in conflict and hostility within three years of the birth of their first child. And as the number of children increases, so, too, does the discontent.”

“A 2008 study out of the University of Queensland, Australia, found that women increase their time spent on routine housework by about six hours a week following a first birth, “compared to the flat and static average housework hours for men.” It doesn’t get better from there. While a first child has no effect on men’s time in housework, a second leads to its reduction. The Australian researchers “find evidence that men’s time on routine housework declines as more children are born, suggesting that the gender gap in housework time widens as the demand for time on domestic work increases.” Across the life cycle, only the transition from married to widowed, divorced, or separated significantly increases a man’s time in unpaid domestic labor.”

“The stark reality is that it is only when husbands are unemployed and their wives earn all the income that ratios of mothers’ to fathers’ time in child care almost converge. The most egalitarian caregiving arrangement is between sole-breadwinner wives and unemployed husbands, though even that earnings arrangement “fails to reach parity.” In homes with stay-at-home fathers, mothers continue to take on more managerial care of their children – otherwise known as scheduling and keeping track of stuff.

Unlike housework, which goes down for women as paid work hours go up, mothers maintain their child care time almost regardless of their employment obligations. They accomplish this by cutting back on leisure time, personal care, and sleep.”

““My husband is a night person. He’ll stay up until whenever, so in the mornings, I get up with the baby. He says, ‘You don’t mind being up early! And I’m like, ‘Yes, but I like sleeping in once in a while, too!’ If I said to him, “Hey, tomorrow, when she gets up, can you take her?’ he would a hundred percent do it, but I don’t know if it’s something that would ever just occur to him.” At the time of our meeting, her daughter was ten months old, which meant that for ten months running, her husband had left it to her to get up with their daughter while he slept.”

“Female infidelity has risen 40 percent over the last three decades, and Belgian psychotherapist and author Esther Perel has said that in her extensive work treating couples in the wake of affairs, she has found that the most common reason women give for cheating on their husbands is the desire to break free from their caregiving role. Perel has said, “In truth we are not looking for another person. We are looking for another self.””

“It’s worth noting that women initiate about 70 percent of all divorce.”

“Ultimately, if couples have parsed who will do what in advance, it doesn’t matter if the labor is equally shared or not. This becomes especially clear in same-sex pairs. Gay couples also report labor imbalances. Still, they are less likely than their straight counterparts to feel angry about it, not because they are more even-tempered but, rather, because they have explicitly agreed to their respective roles. Without the double-edged sword of gendered assumptions, they are more likely to work to communicate their needs and preferences around parenting work. As obvious as it may seem, heterosexual couples often fail to do this.

In our marriage, it never occurred to us. In their book When Partners Become Parents, the Cowans expressed dismay that the couples they interviewed felt that inequality had just somehow happened upon them. They write, “It’s not just that [they] are startled by how the division of labor falls along gender lines, but they describe the change as if it were a mysterious virus they picked up when they were in the hospital having their baby. They don’t seem to view their arrangements as choices they have made.”

Here is one additional consistent finding: Greater father involvement predicts smaller declines in both partners’ marital satisfaction. Recent research has shown that a new father’s active participation minimizes overall relationship dissatisfaction in the transition to parenthood. When fathers behave like equal partners, both members of a couple say they are more satisfied with their relationship. One longitudinal study found that dads who reported the largest contributions to child care six months postpartum manifested the new-parent equivalent of a unicorn, an increase in marital satisfaction at their child’s eighteen-month mark. Their wives reported even greater increases in satisfaction during the same period.”

“For a woman, having insufficient time to attend to her family is associated with a greater likelihood of depression, which epidemiologists say may explain why employed women are more likely than employed men to become depressed. A father’s sense of well-being, in contrast, is more negatively impacted by not having enough time to himself.”

Work

“University of Indiana sociologist Youngieo Cha studies the impact of overwork on labor outcomes. She’s found that the increase in financial compensation for overwork plays a large role in maintaining the gender wage gap. She explains that if relative hourly wages for overwork had remained constant between 1979 and 2007, that gender wage gap would be about 10 percent smaller than it is today.”

“Though it’s been illegal in the U.S. to fire a woman for becoming pregnant since 1978, in 2018 The New York Times reported, “Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies.”” The story detailed pregnant women’s experiences being sidelined from work, refused accommodations, passed over for promotion, or fired for questioning all of the above. Hiring discrimination against mothers is also ubiquitous: “This commute would be too long for a woman with a young child,” an older male psychologist at a Bronx hospital informed me toward the end of a job interview in 2010 (as I cursed my own judgment for mentioning I had a kid).

In 2007, sociologists spent eighteen months sending confederate résumés to entry- and mid-level business positions available in a large northeastern city. The gender and parental status of the made-up applicants varied, but their work history and education did not. Childless women were 2.1 times more likely to be offered interviews than mothers. In contrast, fathers were slightly more likely to be called than men withou children.”

“The studys authors write, “These results show that fairness in housework does not mean sharing chores equally. Rather, both women and men appear to believe that women should do about two-thirds of household chores.” The labor force participation of mothers with infants peaked in 1995, so this finding is not an artifac of the era of separate spheres. It makes some sense, then, that the division of child care labor has stalled here, 65/35, women/men. Our culture of sexism has reaped what it has sown.”

“While 65 percent of millennial men without children endorse combined breadwinner/caretaker roles for husbands and wives, only 47 percent of their peers with children continue to do so. Idealism is well and good before one has to accommodate its burdens.”

Management

“In terms of beliefs about marital roles, fathers’ attitudes – but not mothers’ —are significantly related to their children’s attitudes regardless of the gender of those children. ‘ This seems to speak to kids’ ability to identify power, to determine whose beliefs are more valuable and worthy of internalization.’”

“Lareau told me that the dads “knew nothing about the kids’ schedules and needs.” But mothers and fathers swore otherwise. For example, one couple insisted that the dad did all the soccer. I was there one day when there was a rainout, and there were seventeen phone calls, all fielded by the mom. They didn’t even notice that she did all the snacks, the uniforms, the registration. They said, ‘Oh, no, he does all the soccer.’ It was hard to interview these people. They were so blinded by ideology. They didn’t see all the invisible labor that went into moms structuring dads’ time with the kids.””

“Studies of couples show that even when power issues are raised, they’re generally not framed in terms of how husbands need to change but, rather, how wives do – you know, she needs to be more assertive, The women I spoke with demonstrated this, offering me earfuls about what they might have done differently (and to be clear, if someone had been interviewing me, I’d have sounded exactly the same). Tracy, the domestic violence advocate, said, “Why didn’t he take on more? Because I did not force him to.””

“This attitude toward accounting was something I got used to hearing from mothers, who considered it a scourge on a generous spirit. Accounting can also be a way of taking care. Jacqueline, a married lesbian in Colorado who reports feeling like a successful co-parent to her two elementary-school-aged kids, said, “We consider and then anticipate each other’s needs. I know my wife took the kids to school and picked them up today, so I feel more responsibility to do the chores at the end of the night.” As Jacqueline exemplifies, the problem with accounting comes not when both partners are doing it in recognition of the other’s contributions but, rather, when it’s left to a mother alone, stewing in the math of a father’s apathy.”

Sex Differences

“In 2005, Hyde rounded up forty-six meta-analyses of gender difference studies whose domains included cognitive abilities, communication, social behavior, personality, and psychological well-being, to name a handful. Her goal was to determine the effect size, or statistical strength, of the variables in question. She found that the largest differences between men and women were in the domains of motor skills (like throwing velocity) and sexuality (like frequency of masturbation). But 48 percent of the variables had effect sizes in the statistically small range, and an additional 30 percent were hardly more than zero. That means that for 78 percent of the gender differences measured and remeasured and measured once again, there was actually as much of a difference within gender as between gender. Differences between two women or two men were at least as likely as differences between any female/male pair. She wrote, “This view is strikingly different from the prevailing assumptions of difference found among the general public and even among researchers.”

Too often science, which is nuanced, is a poor match for conventional wisdom, which is not. This is why John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus outsells neuroscientist Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences twenty-five hundred to one.”

“Fine rebukes Gray, writing, “Gender stereotypes are legitimated by these pseudo-scientific explanations. Suddenly, one is being modern and scientific, rather than old-fashioned and sexist.”

Based on the findings of her meta-meta-analysis, Hyde proposed “the gender similarities hypothesis,” which asserts that, distinctive reproductive systems aside, men and women are similar in more ways than not. Unless you are a gender scholar, however, you are likely less familiar with Hyde’s work than you are with Gray’s. In our current cultural climate, it is harder to absorb the less sensational, research-based propositions of Hyde or Fine or Michael Kimmel, director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masuclinities at Stony Brook University in New York, who succinctly states, “Gender difference is the product of gender inequality, not the other way around.””

“A hundred years ago, women made up only 20 percent of college students and were rare in most professions. It was the general consensus that there was a fundamental, hardwired gap in both intelligence and ambition between women and men. Not until feminists began arguing the origins of this gap – asserting that it was social norms and not biology limiting women’s potential – did things begin to change.”

“Derek, a twenty-nine-year-old stay-at-home father raising two young daughters in North Carolina, avoids friendships with other at-home men. “Even the dads who are at home full-time, when we hang out as families, the women are upstairs with the kids, and we’re in the basement talking about fishing. I’m concerned about leaving the kids upstairs – the other dads aren’t. I don’t want to just leave both of them with Caitlin while I’m doing something else by myself. That’s not fair to her. I think even those dads still have nonprogressive views on family. They don’t really acknowledge being at-home fathers. It’s more like, “I’m just in between jobs right now.” (While this attitude frustrates Derek, there’s likely some truth behind it. In 2016, only 24 percent of at-home fathers in the U.S. reported that they were there specifically to take care of their home or family.”

“Colloquially, we speak of maternal instinct, the presumably inborn, hardwired, and natural driver of the wisdom and devotion we ascribe to female parents alone. Biologists don’t use the term because it’s technically incorrect. By definition, an instinct is a behavior that does not have to be learned, shows almost no variation between members of its species, and manifests in a rigid sequence of behaviors performed in response to a stimulus. It’s also called a fixed action pattern, or an FAP. In bears and pigeons, hibernation and homing are instincts. In some species, caring for newborns is instinctive. After a rat gives birth, she removes the pup from the sac, licks the newborn, and eats the placenta. Rich with prostaglandins, it stimulates lactation and helps the uterus to contract.

A pregnant rat does not go to birthing class. From animal to animal, this behavior shows no variation based on temperament or culture. It’s programmed into her DNA. A rat has a maternal instinct. So, too, does a grayback goose, who immediately pushes any round object near her nest inside to incubate it, no matter if it is a billiard ball placed there by an impish ethologist or an actual egg. Round object (stimulus) produces rolling behavior (response). The less intelligent an animal, the more its survival depends on instinct.

In contrast, almost every aspect of primate behavior is mediated by a larger and more developed brain. Evolution has equipped us with a neocortex that requires us to learn in order to survive. With a neocortex, biology remains relevant but is no longer determinant. Natural selection ultimately favored flexibility. Animals that can rapidly adapt to shifting conditions have an advantage over those that can survive only a narrow range of circumstances.”

“After she gives birth, a human mother is without a fixed action pattern. Her social world shapes her behavior.”

“In the hunter-gatherer society of the Kung San in southern Africa, a woman gives birth alone, delivering the child into a small leaf-lined hole that she’s dug in the sand about a mile from her village. She is instructed not to shout out in pain – crying during labor is thought to signal to the gods that she does not want the baby – but, rather, to grit her teeth or bite her own hand. She cuts the cord with sticks and places the placenta next to her baby to serve as its temporary guardian before returning to the village to fetch other women to join her in a ritual welcoming ceremony.”

“The neocortex allows flexibility, but the loss of instinct also comes at a cost. Charles Snowdon, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, has spent his career studying marmosets and tamarins, cooperatively breeding New World monkeys. In most groups of tamarins, the young help to take care of babies, while in a minority of groups, they do not have this opportunity. In a field study of tamarins without prior infant-care experience, Snowdon and his team discovered that babies born to first-time parents never survived. They guessed that naive mothers and fathers didn’t know enough either to parent on their own or to accept help from more experienced kin. Later, from comparative data, his team discovered that the survival rate was much better in the groups where young siblings had helped out with babies. Across primates, infants born to inexperienced parents are at higher risk of death. Snowdon explains, “When they don’t have experience with infant-care skills, there’s a very low breeding success rate. Parenting skills are learned. They re not innate, for males and females equally. Both are clumsy parents. You have to learn to tolerate a squirming infant on your back. You have to learn to share care of your baby. First-time mothers don’t know how to position infants to nurse on the nipple. They hold them upside down.””

“Only some fish parent at all, but when they do, exclusive male care is the norm, about nine times as frequent as female solo care. These males typically court passing females who love and leave. The males release milt over the eggs, defend their territory, and otherwise tend to offspring until a day or two after the hatch. In birds, while only females lay eggs, males are just as involved thereafter. Around 90 percent of birds exhibit a 50/50 division of parenting work. That’s especially impressive when compared to the slight 3 to 5 percent of mammalian males who contribute anything whatsoever to childrearing.”

“Fathering manifested only in some taxa. Even within the same genus, there can be huge variation in father involvement. Male macaques, a type of monkey, generally have little to do with infants. The closely related Barbary macaque males, though, love babies and, if you don’t count nursing, provide as much care as the females. Males hold, carry, provision, nuzzle, and respond to cries of distress. Primatologists posit that Barbaries have lived in harsher environments, necessitating contact comfort, warmth, and protection by males for survival. There is also within-species variation. In the wild, rhesus macaques are absentee dads. In captivity, where the pressures of competition for food and mates are eliminated, they closely attend to their young. Caretaking behaviors are unisex potentials. They just don’t emerge as freely in males.”

“Men undergo their own neurobiological experience as their babies-to-be gestate. Throughout the prenatal period, men in close contact with pregnant partners are physiologically primed to care for infants. Expectant fathers experience a rise in the levels of the pregnancy-related hormones prolactin, cortisol, and estrogen in proportion to that of their baby’s mother. Additionally, testosterone, associated with competition for mates, declines. Second-time fathers produce even more prolactin and less testosterone in the company of a pregnant partner than do first-timers.”

“In North America, men in long-term relationships like marriage and fatherhood almost uniformly have lower testosterone levels than their single and childless counterparts. One five-year observation of men (twenty-one years old and single at the study’s outset) found that those who became fathers experienced a significant drop in testosterone production relative to those who did not. The study’s authors write, “Our findings suggest that human males have an evolved neuroendocrine architecture that is responsive to committed parenting, supporting a role of men as direct caretakers during hominin evolution.” As anthropologist Sarah Hray observes in Mothers and Others: “Men are physiologically altered just from spending time in intimate association with pregnant mothers and new babies. To me, this implies that care by males has been an integral part of human adaptation for a long time. Male nurturing potentials are there, encoded in the DNA of our species.”

Anthropologists also have a word for the process of becoming a male parent: “patrescence.” The New York Times has not published an article about it. It garners only 264 Google hits versus 10,400 for “matrescence.” Those with an interest in the formal study of fatherhood continue to note the relative lack of research in the field.”

“It was 1970 before psychologist Milton Kotelchuck questioned the orthodoxy of developmental psychology and asked what hard evidence existed to support the notion that children relate uniquely to their mothers. Kotelchuck used the “strange situation” research protocol – during which young children are observed as their parents enter and leave the room in the presence of a stranger – to upend then-prominent beliefs about the special and exclusive relationship between mothers and babies.

He demonstrated that six-to-twenty-one-month-olds were just as likely to be calmed by the presence of their fathers as their mothers. “It did not seem reasonable that in a world where mothers often die in childbirth that we’d have a species where children can’t adapt to other people,” Kotelchuck said.

Late in the 1970s, Michael Lamb, a pioneer in the research on the importance of men to their children, was the first to look at the physiological underpinnings of fatherhood. Lamb monitored skin conductance, blood pressure, and mood among parents watching videos of crying or smiling infants. Mothers and fathers did not differ in any measures of responsiveness to the videos. Around the same time, psychologist Ross Parke and colleagues studied fathers of newborns in maternity wards. For most of the behaviors his team measured, fathers and mothers hardly differed. Men spoke to babies in high-pitched voices and responded with sensitivity to infant cues during feeding. They also exhibited patterns similar to their wives in heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance when holding their children. The major difference Parke observed was that fathers, unlike mothers, took a step back from their child’s care in the presence of their spouse. Their assumption that a baby primarily needs his mother limited their involvement, the naturalistic fallacy in action.

Sarah Hrdy speculates that, at the outset of a child’s life, at least, the problem is not only that fathers believe they should step back but also that mothers may be slightly predisposed to step forward with more haste. In a study that measured response times and hormone levels in parents listening to infant cries, mothers and fathers were equally reactive to wails of distress (recordings of baby boys being circumcised). When the cries were fussy rather than pained, mothers’ physiological responses and then also their reaction times were a little quicker than fathers’, though fathers’ responses were quicker than those of childless adults.”

“When one parent gets into the habit of quickly responding to an infant’s needs, the other is likely to accommodate that habit by failing to respond. This pattern then calcifies over days and weeks and months and years. I heard similar themes in the musings of many of the mothers I interviewed. Erica in Portland explained, “When he’s on, he’s great. But it’s almost like I have to remind him or take myself out of the picture for it to happen. If I say I need to be out of the house, he’ll step up. But as long as I’m there, he won’t.” Emphasizes Hrdy, a mother herself who acknowledges big feelings about this issue, “A seemingly insignificant difference in thresholds for responding to infant cues gradually, insidiously, step by step, without invoking a single other cause, produces a marked division of labor by sex.””

“A handful of the mothers I interviewed referenced the former to explain why they naturally, if half-heartedly, take on more at home than their spouses. “Women are known to be better multitaskers” said Marla, a forty-three-year-old social worker in Chicago and mother of a six-year-old daughter, as she explained why she managed more of her daughter’s life than her husband.

Eliot responds, “It’s bullshit. Our brains get good at whatever we’re faced with doing. Secretaries are good multitaskers. We’re letting men turn us into secretaries.” More tellingly, even if the corpus callosum difference had held up, the conclusions popularly drawn from it align more closely with retrogressive attitudes about the sexual division of housekeeping and careers in the sciences than with actual animal research, which suggests that creatures with more lateralized brains are better at simultaneously accomplishing multiple tasks. The inferences drawn from brain-difference studies are often, to use another Fine-ism, neurononsense.”

“The researchers also found that the primary-care men, those who’d devoted as much time to their babies as the mothers, showed activation in the amygdala that was comparable to that of the women, as well as greater activation in the sociocognitive structures similar to the secondary-care fathers.

The researchers concluded that the differences between the three groups were not so much a function of biological sex or genetic relatedness to the infant (the primary-care fathers had adopted) but, rather, of how much time the subjects had spent in intimate contact with their babies. They write: “assuming the role of a committed parent and engaging in active care of the young may trigger [a] global parental caregiving network in both women and men, in biological parents; and in those genetically unrelated to the child.””

“The consequences of behavioral disparities that begin with very slight and possibly innate predispositions in the parents when the child is born grow larger as the baby does. When couples take the path of least resistance, the mother’s depth and breadth of experience eventually outpaces the reach of the father. How many parent-teacher conferences and calls from the nurse’s office and evites to birthday parties will a mother field alone before her expertise becomes unmatchable?”

Socialization

“Observational studies of toy choice among children demonstrate that three- and four-year-old boys spend 21 percent of their time playing with “girl toys” when theyre alone; that drops to 10 percent when a peer is as much as playing nearby. From the get-go, girls are less tightly policed for gender violations, and they enjoy greater relative freedom with toys. Girls pick “boy toys” 34 percent of the time when playing alone and 24 percent of the time when another kid enters the picture.”

“In studies, thirteen-month-old boys and girls act the same, but adults don’t respond to them in kind. Girls get more attention from teachers for gesturing and babbling, boys for whining and screaming. At thirteen months, kids are equally likely to grab, push, and kick. But teachers intervene to modulate girls’ aggressive behavior only 20 percent of the time. In contrast, boys’ aggression ends in teacher intervention 66 percent of the time. In learning theory terms, boys’ aggression is reinforced more than three times as often as girls. By the age of twenty-three months, the girls have become less aggressive and the boys more so. Both groups have learned to optimize the potential for adult attention by behaving in the ways that most reliably get them noticed.

Clearly, socialization contributes to gender differences in behavior. It has been shown, for one, that boys raised in egalitarian homes show the same amount of interest in babies as girls, while boys raised in traditional homes show less.”

““Masculine activities gradually acquire a superior status, initially through fathers’ reactions to boys’ choices of feminine activities and later through the disapproval of male peers… Boys were especially likely to punish their male peers for feminine choices by ridiculing them or interfering with their play physically or verbally. Boys thus learn to devalue feminine activities and to shun them in order to avoid compromising their higher status. Boys cannot risk the stigma of being girl-like.””

“Observational studies of two-year-olds in preschool classrooms demonstrate that while girls change their play behavior in response to the wishes of classmates of both sexes, boys do not allow themselves to be influenced by girls. Kids’ social behavior becomes more sophisticated around age three, when they begin to try to control their friends’ activity with increasing frequency. As attempts at influence increase with age, girls and boys begin to engage in different ways: girls with more polite suggestions and boys with more direct demands. Over time, boys become less and less responsive to gently delivered requests. And while boys continue to wield influence over all children, girls can generally influence only other girls.

Without intention or explicit direction, we do become two different sorts of people. From the age of three, half of us begin to ask politely and consider the preferences and feelings of others, while the other half assert demands and ignore friends’ wishes, especially if those friends are members of the second sex.”

“In her 2011 book Joining the Resistance, the psychologist and psychoanalyst Carol Gilligan looks at gender in middle childhood. Years after the processes described by Chodorow have been set, Gilligan sees boys’ and girls’ reproductions of masculinity and femininity in action. Boys cast off their softer parts, and girls, their more assertive ones. Those aspects of their personalities go underground. Psychologists call it dissociation, the failure to know what we know and feel what we feel. Dissociation results from traumatic experience, including intense feelings of shame. Gilligan believes it’s no coincidence that boys are prone to depression around age eight, when expressions of tenderness and vulnerability become socially unacceptable. Girls, on that longer gender leash, are most likely to become depressed as they enter adolescence, the point at which they’re expected to become young ladies, “silent in the name of feminine goodness.” Gilligan writes, “It is not surprising … that at times in development when children are initiated into the codes and scripts of patriarchal manhood and womanhood… it is not surprising that these times… are marked by psychological distress.””

“Psychologist Eleanor Maccoby and others believe that it is not exactly socialization on its own that accounts for gendered behavior but, rather, the “social relational context.” Women and men never behave so much like women and men than when they find themselves in each other’s company. Maccoby says, “Sex-linked behavior turns out to be a pervasive function of the social context in which it occurs…. The gendered aspect of an individual’s behavior is brought into play by the gender of others.”

Gilligan concurs, writing, “The good woman cared for others: she listened to their voices and responded to their needs and concerns.” What she also observes is that men, up to and including good ones, do not get this memo. Maybe you’ve noticed in living with one. At first it feels disorienting, watching another human being move through the world in this foreign way, not compelled to notice others, to anticipate their needs.”

Ideologies

“Women in two-career couples who outearn their male partners benefit not because they are able to negotiate a more equitable division of labor with their spouses but, rather, because they use their resources to hire that labor out. Per the research, as women’s income goes up, so does household spending on housekeeping services and eating out. The same cannot be said of the relationship between men’s earnings and such spending. In fact, every additional dollar earned by a wife will matter more to her housework time than every additional dollar earned by her husband.”

“Elizabeth started graduate school during a period when her husband was traveling a lot for work. She began taking more care of the home and addressed it with him posthaste. “That’s how it starts. It’s the pattern we read about, the woman happens to be at home more, and so more household things start falling to her. Neither of us wanted that. I thought we should create an Excel spreadsheet to divide the chores. He wanted it to be more organic. It wasn’t one thing that solved it, but we both kept starting that conversation often. And then before we had our daughter, we had the same level of thinking about it. Who was going to take how much time off, what were we going to do about child care, who will do drop-off, who will do pickup. It was just a constant conversation about the nitty-gritty of it.

“Ingrid and I, who’d been thinking about these things to a crazy degree since way before we were married, ended up with partners who really do their fair share, and careers that we’re trying to make work. Our friends who thought we were being too intense are really struggling.”

“In 1994, for example, when presented with the statement “It is usually better… if the man is the achiever outside of the home and the woman takes care of the home and family,” 58 percent of high school seniors disagreed. But that was domestic egalitarianism’s pinnacle. By 2014, the disagreement fell to 42 percent, back down to where it had been in the mid-1980s. Similar sentiments saw virtually the same trajectories and in other surveys as well. The University of Chicago-based General Social Survey, assessing American attitudes annually since 1972, reports that millennials remain progressive on the work front but endorse increasingly traditional attitudes about the home.

Why would this be? Writing in 2017 for the Council on Contemporary Families, sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter assert that these slippages defy expectations and can’t be accounted for by variables like race, region, religiosity, family structure, or mother’s employment and education. Instead, they hypothesize that “egalitarian essentialism” — the belief that men and women are entitled to the same opportunities but will ultimately make different life choices because of biology — is the ideology that has replaced the mandate of separate spheres. They explain, “In the 1980s and early 1990s, people seemed to be moving toward the idea that women and men could work equally well in both the public and private spheres. Yet the narrative that eventually emerged became a hybrid of … two approaches, promoting women’s choice to participate in either sphere while trying to equalize the perceived value of a home sphere that was still seen as distinctively female. The egalitarian essentialist perspective mixed values of equality (… gender discrimination is wrong) alongside beliefs about the essential nature of men and women (men are naturally… better suited to some roles and women to others).”

Since 1994, high school seniors have become increasingly likely to agree that “the husband should make all the important decisions in the family.” The dismantling of the patriarchy will not proceed in a linear fashion. Pepin and Cotter reach a conclusion that is at once obvious and startling: The rising status of women outside the home has actually increased our inclination to reinforce male dominance inside it.”

“Men who’ve engaged in this particular micropractice report social consequences from strange looks and ridicule to the refusal of relatives to attend the wedding. In 2009, California became only the seventh state in the nation to make name change after marriage as simple for men as it is for women. Six years later, Business Insider editor James Kosur (né McKinney) described the process he had to go through in Illinois to take his wife’s name after the birth of their child. Once he’d filled out paperwork and received a letter of intent from a court, he was required to take out an ad in a newspaper for three weeks to announce the proposed change (a very old law intended to preclude attempted fraud).

When no one came forward to protest his new name, he finally appeared in front of a judge. Kosur wrote, “If I was a woman who had been recently married, I would have presented my marriage license to the court, paid a name-change fee, and moved on with my life.””

“I swallowed my discomfort as an old friend, whose college-age daughter was applying to medical school, thought aloud about the family-friendly specialties her child could comfortably choose. It was a reasonable conversation but one I knew we wouldn’t be having if the matter concerned her sons. To hear my friend so breezily ceding her daughter’s options — without a second thought, and despite her obvious pride in her eldest’s accomplishments — made me despair for all the girls who came before her. None of it was any of my business, but I couldn’t help hoping that her daughter would only sigh and roll her eyes in response to maternal concerns she deemed antiquated.”

“In a study at an Ivy League university, newly admitted MBA students were asked about their job preferences. Some students were told that the information would be kept private. Among those, men, women in committed relationships, and single women answered similarly. Other students were told their answers would be public, shared with classmates. Under this circumstance, single women (but not others) reported wanting lower salaries, less work-related travel, and less demanding schedules than the other groups. They also renounced their own ambition and desire for leadership roles. During the semester that followed, while these single women performed just as well on exams and assignments, they ultimately had lower marks for class participation. Presumably under some pressure to secure a male partner, these women felt compelled to hide their extrafamilial ambitions in the name of being appropriately female.

“What individuals internalize about gender and use to make sense of their personal lives does not necessarily. support their own individual well-being,” writes sociologist Anne Rankin Mahoney.”

“As author and social activist bell hooks has noted, “All of us, female and male, have been socialized from birth on to accept sexist thought and action. As a consequence, females can be just as sexist as men.” So we are sexist against our very selves, and alongside our equally sexist husbands, we live in our families in ways that affirm and reproduce that sexism.”

Mental Work

“Carissa in Seattle told me, “One problem is all these unspoken assumptions about who’s going to deal with things. My husband will go ahead and make plans on a Friday with friends. He assumes he can do that. If I want to do something, I know I have to get him on board first, so I can have him home in the house.””

“Parental consciousness is the awareness of the needs of children accompanied by the steady process of thinking about those needs. Women have come to call it the mental load, and in those relatively egalitarian households where men share day care pickup and put away clean laundry, it’s the aspect of childrearing most likely, as Skidmore sociologist Susan Walzer has put it, to “stimulate marital tension between mothers and fathers.”

Francine Deutsch found: “Sometimes even when both parents tried to live up to principles of gender equality, mothers and fathers didn’t experience parenting the same way. That meant mothers did more. [The] mental work of parenting was all hers.” Other researchers have noted that even men who put a premium on fatherhood usually remain mothers’ assistants; their vast potential for parental consciousness lies dormant.

Molly, twenty-seven, the foster care worker in Tennessee, told me, “We can’t afford full-time child care, so we’re somewhat tag-teaming in terms of who manages the day, but when it comes to scheduling, it’s me. My husband is never going to sit down and say, Let’s look at the plans for the week! If we want something to happen, I’m going to have to be the one to take initiative. It gets exhausting. I’m the household manager. He’ll do what needs to be done, but not without some sort of prompt. If I bring it to his awareness, he’s like, ‘I get it. He sees it when I bring it up, but it’s not a continual awareness. And then he’ll be like, ‘How can I help?’ and I don’t even know how to hand it over to him.”

Christine, a forty-one-year-old accountant with a baby and a six-year-old in Illinois, said, “I can’t trust him to actually remember the minimal things I ask him to do. I have to remind him to do it. Whatever the activity is, I still feel like it’s on my list. So asking him to do things does not relieve any stress for me or any responsibility. The whole idea of just having a list to start out with … of course he doesn’t have a list. My son would not have what he needed if ever I woke up one morning and was sick or something.”

One problem with consciousness is that you cannot see it. The mental load’s relentless invisibility makes it hard to co-manage for two unequally motivated parties.”

Learned Motherhood

“One woman with reliable child care said that while she wasn’t actually worried about her baby while she was at work, she felt like she had to behave as if she were. To do otherwise would make her look — to herself and to the world — recalcitrant and immoral. Walzer writes, “Worrying was such an expected part of mothering that the absence of it might challenge one’s definition as a good mother….Fathers do not necessarily think about their children while they are at work, nor do they worry that not thinking about their child reflects on them as parents.”1 As British cultural critic Jacqueline Rose has noted, “The expectations that are laid on [mothers] are laden with “adulation and hatred, which of course so often go together.”

Worrying to no purposeful end is unfortunate, but productive worry stimulates action: the scheduling of well-child visits, the installation of outlet plugs, the introduction of solid foods.”

“Mothers and fathers butt heads in this mismatch of ideas about what makes an adequate parent. If I believe in my bones that being a good mother means thinking about my children’s needs a hairbreadth short of all of the time, and my husband does not believe in his bones that being a good father means thinking about his children’s needs a hairbreadth short of all of the time, we are reaching for different rings. I am bound to be baffled when our divergent internal pressures show their outlines — when he fails to register that spring break is approaching and we will need child care, or that the babysitter is coming and the kids will need dinner, or their teeth cleanings are months overdue. Walzer writes, “[Social] norms make it particularly difficult for mothers to feel that they are doing the right thing. I call this mother worry, and it is generated by the question: “Am I being a good mother?”

Does a father ever deign to ask that question? Is a mother ever free to let it go? The world does not conspire to lessen her concern. Sociologist Claire Kamp Dush remembers a text message received by a female friend of hers from preschool when the friend was out of town for work: “We miss you!” they wrote, above an attachment of a photo of her son dressed and dropped off by his father in wildly mismatched clothing and two different shoes. “The school did not say anything to the father. They just took a picture and texted it to my friend.” The suggestion was that it was her fault. She told me and our other friend, and we were like, “Was the kid alive and at day care? Good enough.”

“SUNY Stony Brook sociologist and gender scholar Michael Kimmel described discussions he’s had with them on the topic: “Men often tell me, ‘My wife gets on me all the time because I don’t vacuum, and I’m watching a baseball game, and she comes in and says, ‘At least you could vacuum.’ So I do, and then she comes back and tells me I didn’t do it very thoroughly. So I just figure I won’t do it anymore.” My own reluctant impulse to endorse this position runs so deep that Kimmel’s retort to these men delights me. “I say to them, ‘Well, that’s an interesting response! If I were your supervisor at work and I assigned you a report, and I wasn’t happy with what you turned in, and I told you so, would your reply be, ‘Well, then, I’ll never do that again!?””

“After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the newly formed USSR declared state-sponsored early child care an important tool for indoctrinating children, or for helping them grow into ideal Soviet citizens. In the decades following, American opposition to government-subsidized early child care often centered on the premise that only mothers, and not state-funded preschools (or — and this didn’t even warrant mentioning — fathers), could raise warm-blooded American citizens.

Lecturing across the country on egalitarianism in the 1970s, husband and wife psychologists Sandra and Daryl Bem acknowledged, “Middle class people were not open to the idea of providing child care outside the child’s own home. As hard as this may be to believe, on those few early occasions when we tried to talk about day care, even our college audiences branded it as ‘communist.” As we added “under God” to the Pledge to differentiate from the godless Soviets, we solidified society’s distaste for the collective contribution to rearing healthy kids. The indoctrination that materialized in the U.S. was subsequently aimed not at children but, rather, their mothers.”

“Penn State University labor and employment professor Sarah Damaske asked both men and women about their levels of happiness at home versus at work. When we spoke, I wondered if she’d found gender differences upon final analysis. “Yes,” said Damaske, who is herself a mother. “Women are happier at work, and men are happier at home!” She laughed uproariously for a good minute before continuing, “It makes a lot of sense. Men have less responsibility at home. It’s more of a haven for them than for their wives.” Her team also took saliva samples and measured the stress hormone cortisol. Damaske said, “People’s stress hormones decreased when they went to work. Everyone’s. We think of our homes and these wonderful family moments, but home is also the daily chores of the dishes and saying, ‘Can you pick up your toys?’ and no one thanks you for cleaning the toilet. I think when you go to work, there can be this release of some of the daily stress of that labor.””

Sexism

“I reminded him that he often forgot the things I asked him to take care of, and that having to ask in the first place was just another form of responsibility. “There’s probably something about men taking women for granted. Maybe men are much more responsible for that than they would care to think. There’s a truth to it,” he ultimately allowed.

Here is what I would have preferred to hear from my husband — unequivocally and without shame: “I am sexist.” That was the headline of a New York Times opinion piece by Emory University philosophy professor George Yancy, who took it upon himself, late in 2018, to implore men to join him “with due diligence and civic duty, and publicly claim: I am sexist,” to take responsibility for misogyny and patriarchy. Yancy’s sexism “raises its ugly head” in his own marriage. He writes, “I should be thanked when I clean the house, cook, sacrifice my time. These are the deep and troubling expectations that are shaped by male privilege…” I nearly wept in gratitude for his admission. When men deny their sexism, they gaslight their partners, compounding an already painful problem by insisting that its clear and obvious precursors are the imaginings of a hysterical mind.”

“Because of the inimical success of male resistance, copping out of drudge work remains a viable option if one is a man. This is true not only at home, in relationships based on love, but also at work, where little love is lost. In 2018, a headline in the Harvard Business Review teased, “Why Women Volunteer for Tasks That Don’t Lead to Promotion.” Here’s the answer per the research: because someone has to do them, and all the men tend not to, at least not if there are women at the fore. In a series of lab studies, economists Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, and Lise Vesterlund, along with organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart, found that women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. Women are also more likely to be asked to perform this work (no matter the sex of the requester), and then to say yes when asked.

In an interview with NPR, Versterlund explained, “The belief or expectation that women will step up to the plate is a pretty important factor in all of this…. The reason why [the women are] doing it, at least in our study, appears to be because they’re expected to. The men come into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games. They know that the women are going to volunteer. And the women look around and they see the men and they also know how we play these games. We know that the women are going to be the ones who will raise their hands.” In the all-male groups in the study, men volunteered as readily as women. It was only in the mixed-sex groups that men deferred responsibility.”

“Marla, a social worker in Chicago, told me, “When I moved in to Brian’s apartment, the moment my stuff got unpacked, I became the one responsible for everything. ‘Marla, where do we keep the blah-blah-blah?’ One day I was in the kitchen and he asked me, ‘Where’s the peanut butter?’ It’s exactly where you’ve been keeping it for the last four years! A switch goes on in a man’s brain once there’s a woman. “I’m not responsible for anything anymore.””

“Research in economics moves in parallel. There are “substantiated gender effects” in how men and women perform in the popular lab experiment known as the “dictator game.” The game involves a participant dubbed “the dictator” distributing a good, often a cash prize, between him- or herself and another unseen player — with little to no decision-making authority. Women worldwide distribute the money more fairly than men, keeping the experience of the other (less powerful) player in mind. From East Asia to the United States, women are more likely to equalize payoffs, while men keep more for themselves. Men do not pause to consider the experience of the other, or at the very least, they appear unmoved by it.

Thinking about the experience of another is called empathy. You’ve likely heard that women are innate empathizers and that men are not so much. You’ve heard that because old research in psychology seemed to attest to it, and when research findings match sexist stereotypes, they get a lot of press and then stay locked forever in our minds. Indeed, in multiple experiments, when men and women are told explicitly that they are participating in tasks measuring empathy, the men perform worse than the women. Except. Do the same experiment and change the conditions — do not say you are measuring empathy (a known female trait); call it something else. Suddenly, the men perform equally well. Or continue to call it empathy, but attach a monetary prize to stellar performance. Again men’s scores rise to match women’s. So much for the story about hardwiring and women and being born to consider others all the time.”

“Khasi is matrilineal. In the female-dominated society, women are the more competitive sex. They are literally more likely to enter competitions. Of male-dominated societies, Karpowitz and Mendelberg write, “women are socialized to be more cooperative and interdependent with others, then … may dislike situations where there is conflict or competition, or even merely a lack of cooperation. When they are in such situations, women may tend to withdraw from the interaction in order to distance themselves from the conflict. The common denominator for these preferences may be the aversion to situations where the social ties of the participants are frayed.” If women in patriarchal societies are oriented toward maintaining social bonds, and men in patriarchal societies are oriented toward winning, the two will never even cross paths. The women will try to collaborate, and the men will leave the field without a fight. Successful male resistance rules the world.”

Conclusion

“In my research, I found that equal co-parenting tended to happen under only three, often overlapping, conditions: when there was an explicitly steadfast commitment on the part of both partners to staying on top of parity; when men really enjoyed the type of regular and intimate contact that only mothers more typically have with their kids; and after fathers had taken substantial paternity leave.”

“Studying the marriage and co-habitation histories of best actress and best actor nominees and winners from 1936 to 2010, researchers at the Johns Hopkins and University of Toronto business schools determined that after the award ceremony, best actress winners remained coupled for half the amount of time as those who were nominated but didn’t win — 4.3 years as opposed to 9.5 years. Best actor winners, in contrast, stayed in their relationships for an average of 12 years, the same as the actors who’d been nominated and lost. The study’s authors write, “[The] social norm for marital relationships is that a husband’s income and occupational status exceed his wife’s. Consistent with this norm, men may eschew partners whose intelligence and ambition exceed their own … Violating this norm can cause discomfort in both partners and strain their marriage.”

A woman who wins a political race finds herself in a similar position. Research in Sweden has found that for female candidates, winning a race for government office doubles the baseline risk of subsequent divorce; campaigning and then losing does not. Whether a male candidate wins or loses an election has no direct bearing on his marital future. The same Swedish study found that married women who become CEOs are twice as likely to divorce within three years of this achievement than men who accomplish the same.

While conducting interviews for their 2003 book Women Don’t Ask, economist Lisa Babcock and journalist Sara Laschever repeatedly heard the same thing from successful women: It was important to behave deferentially and unassumingly. It is hardly deferential to win an Oscar or an election or a high-profile leadership role. Some markers of success are harder than others to disown. An experiment conducted in the early aughts at Columbia University reinforced the notion that men who date women prefer less successful mates — or, more to the point, that they feel compelled to occupy the traditional place in the social order of romantic love.”

“It would be overly cynical to propose that men intentionally keep women in their place by eschewing family (and office) busy work, but doing so certainly supports their own position at the top of the status hierarchy. Sociologist Claire Kamp Dush told me a story about an ambitious friend of hers: “My friend is a firefighter, and she was thinking about going for a promotion. The [male] firefighters were telling her she should really just be home with her kids. She was feeling guilty. I told her, ‘They want that promotion! They are not your friends!’ They were using maternal guilt to try to get her not to achieve.””

“I initially imagined that George would get Liv’s medical form. But I also knew I’d have to remind him to do it. Am I contributing to his lackluster performance with the soft bigotry of my low expectations? Is the world? In New Zealand, educational researchers have filmed teachers interacting with students as part of a study they called the Teacher Expectation Project. In watching themselves on video, teacher after teacher commented that they’d had no idea how much they were communicating with nonverbal cues: a raised eyebrow, a bored expression, a wandering gaze. A similar project at the University of Virginia trains teachers to be aware of their body language in order to help them establish more productive relationships with their students, and the students they’ve taught have shown improved performance on standardized tests. I often feel trepidation when asking George to take something on. I don’t trust him to remember. I communicate my hesitation.”

“Stereotype threat research warns that members of marginalized ability groups – in this case, let’s call them fathers – are stymied by their own knowledge of how they’re popularly perceived. The threat doesn’t even have to be explicit. Women who are especially good at math do more poorly on math tests when the ratio of men to women in the room is high. The more men relative to women taking the test, the more intense a woman’s concerns about whether she belongs among the group. The combination of familiarity with a stereotype and membership in a stigmatized group impairs performance. Even the gender of an experimenter can cue the stereotype threat, heightening anxiety and depleting cognitive resources. Imagine yourself a father in a mommy-and-me class. Imagine that class as a metaphor for the fathering life.

University of British Columbia social psychologist Toni Schmader studies stereotype threat. I asked if she thought stereotypes about fathers might get in the way of men becoming the most effective and involved parents they might be. “It’s a sensible hypothesis,” she said, before adding more dubiously, “I think we all have our areas of feigned ignorance that can help get us off the hook for certain things we don’t really want to do.””

“Forearmed with knowledge about the systematic problem, she and her husband resolved to stay on top of their biases. They didn’t have to debias anyone. Instead they made an Excel document. They took logistical charge.”

“Lahey suggested that I express the following: “If this doesn’t come through, it’s your responsibility.” She asked me, “What are the potential consequences? It would be great to bring him along there.” Had I let the situation with the form play out, Liv would not have been able to start camp on its all-important first morning. George would have had to stay home with her, upsetting both of our kids, reneging on his professional commitments, and losing a day’s worth of income.

I might have laid that out when I initially asked him to get the form. George agreed it would have helped him to remember, but he also deemed that way of speaking to him “pissy and confrontational” – though wasn’t I entitled to be both of those things?”

“It has been said that the work of feminism remains incomplete in part for paying little mind to advancing a more egalitarian masculinity. One solution to that might lie in encouraging men to fully embrace the identity of dad. In their research, University of Colorado Boulder social psychologist Bernadette Park and her colleagues have found that the cynical attitudes that rain down on men as a category do not extend to fathers. When asked to associate adjectives to the two groups, participants characterized “men” negatively but “fathers” favorably – as favorably as “women,” who in turn are viewed as favorably as “moms.”

Park suggests that the social role of dad could be leveraged to change gender stereotypes of men. She writes, “A less constrained definition of manhood and masculinity would likely afford greater flexibility in how to be a man, an outcome desirable not only for men, but as a means for decreasing rigid demarcations between the genders more broadly.” In Sweden, where ninety days of paid parental leave are specifically apportioned to fathers – who must use it or lose it – latté pappas, also known by the acronym DILFs, are lauded for their sexy, masculine swagger-with-a-stroller. Since 1995, when fathers were first encouraged by government policy to take parental leave, divorce and separation rates have also been falling in that country – in a time when they have largely risen elsewhere.

Park told me, “There’s been a fairly recent uptick in conversations around men in this country, the notion that white men in particular are feeling disenfranchised and don’t see a role for themselves. They don’t have the old traditional role of being a sole provider, the head of family. The idea is, all these problems we’re seeing now with men – health issues, lower graduation rates, higher levels of drug abuse and incarceration – they’ve lost their sense of identity and, in some ways, are trying to find a place in the world.” Park proposes fighting so-called toxic masculinity by granting men greater and deeper access to fatherhood.”

“When manhood is threatened, aggression tends to be the response. But if you could answer a threat to manhood by invoking the social role of fatherhood, that could repair the threat and ameliorate the aggressive response. Fatherhood can be an important part of your identity. It lets you feel a sense of fulfillment and purpose, allowing you to think of generative and positive ways you can affect the world.””

“Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy reports that in industrialized countries, almost half of all children lose touch with their fathers not long after their parents divorce (within ten years, that number shoots up to two thirds). The relative failure to see fatherhood as that major life development underscores all sorts of misfortune.

Education may offer a solution. The 1960s gave rise to childbirth education classes, which set out to teach women and their partners how to manage labor and delivery with minimal medical intervention. Hospitals and obstetricians rallied around the classes. By the year 2000, according to the nonprofit Childbirth Connection, 70 percent of first-time mothers who gave birth in hospitals had participated in a birthing class, most commonly alongside their partners. What to do once delivery is over, though, has been left for parents to untangle on their own.

Sociologist Anne Rankin Mahoney and psychologist Carmen Knudson-Martin have proposed that formal parenting education might help couples achieve greater parity. Their proposed curriculum includes emphasizing the fact that parenting is a gender-neutral talent, reinforcing the need for couples to talk about their plans to share responsibilities, and helping them develop ways to maintain collaboration.

The research of husband-and-wife psychologists Carolyn and Philip Cowan suggests the potential benefits of such an intervention. In a series of studies culminating in the Supporting Father Involvement Project, the Cowans have shown that couples who attended four months of weekly groups on the potential challenges of family life showed significant increases in both father involvement and relationship satisfaction. Among at-risk families referred by the child welfare system, attendance at these groups also reduced alcohol use, couple conflict and violence, and older siblings problem behaviors.

The Gottman Institute in Seattle offers the Bringing Baby Home workshop, which has likewise shown promising results. It offers a gender-neutral take on prenatal family education. This remains rare. Popular parenting books continue to emphasize the special and exclusive role of the mother. The workshop – usually given, like childbirth classes, in two-day-seminar format – prepares parents-to-be for relationship strain, offers primers on infant development and interaction skills, and stresses the equal importance of father involvement in family life. By 2018, the Gottmans had trained more than two thousand educators worldwide to teach Bringing Baby Home. In follow-up research with new parents, compared to families with no child care education, fathers who’d attended Bringing Baby Home were rated more positively in infant-father attachment, reported greater satisfaction with their domestic arrangements, demonstrated better co-parenting in a play study, showed greater responsiveness to their baby’s signals, were less likely to exhibit signs of depression and anxiety, reported more stable relationship quality, and had babies who responded more positively to their soothing. (Benefits accrued to mothers in the study as well.) The men who took part in these classes – exposed to alternatives to patriarchal privilege – saw the fruits of a reimagined fatherhood.

Michael Kimmel says, “I want to sell feminism to men. Because greater gender equality – embracing a fuller palette of traits, attitudes, and behaviors-cannot help but be good for men as well as for women. Women have shown us over the past fifty years, ‘This is really good, this works really well, see, aren’t we awesome? Aren’t we more interesting now?’ So now men need to be whole human beings. You’ve asked me, what can we offer? How can we sell this? We sell this by saying, You’ve cut yourself off from half the human experience by embracing this traditional notion of masculinity, the thing that we call toxic. You’ll have a better life if you could actually be a person.””

“In her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, she invokes the canine command (down), emphasizing that it not only controls but also soothes a dog. In 2018 Manne told Jezebel, “Misogyny can have so many different ways of putting women in their place or punishing or threatening them for subverting or violating patriarchal norms and expectations. But the playful, secondary meaning of ‘down girl’ points to how hard it is to let go of the internalized ‘down girl’ moves that we either do automatically or we take those social cues and kind of lay down on all fours. Even for a very strong-willed or feisty dog – in my case, a Corgi very much enjoying her life – sometimes the anxiety of pure freedom means that it’s actually very nice to have a command to obey. If she’s anxious, asking her to touch your hand with her nose or lay down is something that alleviates anxiety. I wanted to gesture at the way that for women to give up some of those forms of patriarchal obedience can be terrifying. It can leave us feeling devoid of meaning and requires being creative about how to fill a gap that’s often filled with “good behavior.” How might Gretchen and I be spending our time were we not organizing it around our husband’s and children’s needs?”

“The Smithsonian reports that of the estimated 5,193 public statues of historical figures in the United States, 394, or less than 8 percent, are of women. In New York City, it’s 3 percent, or 5 out of 150. And in Central Park, the most visited urban park in the U.S., there are 23 historical statues of men, while the only female representation shows up in the form of angels, Alice in Wonderland, and Mother Goose. Women, as sociologist Gaye Tuchman has noted, are also being “symbolically annihilated” in the media, where analyses of news stories have found that men are quoted three times as often as women – and no matter the gender of the journalist doing the reporting.”

“As women adopt agency, what has stopped men from embracing more communal traits – from becoming, in short, more like women? Few have shown much interest in solving for that x. In a 2015 paper, University of British Columbia social psychologist Toni Schmader and colleagues point out that while plenty of research has been devoted to understanding and mitigating “the psychological barriers that block women’s interest, performance, and advancement in male-dominated, agentic roles (e.g., science, technology, engineering, and math) … Research has not … correspondingly examined men’s underrepresentation in communal roles (e.g., careers in health care, early childhood education, and domestic roles including child care).” Such are the biases of science: Women should be encouraged to become more like men.”

“University of Bristol education professor Bruce Macfarlane attributed this “serious leak in the pipeline” to the responsibilities that female academics tend to take on at much higher rates than their male counterparts. He notes that women are overrepresented in the arena of “academic housework.” Advising, mentoring, and committee work keep university communities thriving, but those communal activities are not what lead to promotion. Empirical work has shown that women are slower to become senior lecturers and associate professors as a result. In contrast, men devote their time to the research and writing that furthers their own careers.

Women contribute more to the university community but at some cost to greater power and influence. Macfarlane suggests that women alone can solve the full-professor problem by resisting pressure to become so involved with academic citizenship work – you know, they need to be more assertive. He does not acknowledge that whatever work women choose tends to become marginalized, or that women are often penalized in professional settings for withholding altruistic behaviors. Nor does he try to persuade men to up their efforts in the communal roles they typically eschew. Such are the biases of the professions: Women should be encouraged to become more like men.”

“In lab settings, women ask for less money than men do and assert that they should work longer, harder, better, and more efficiently for their pay. This seems to carry over to their dealings with their kids: A 2018 data analysis from BusyKid, an app that lets parents pay their children online for chores, found that boys were given twice as much money per week as girls.”

“Stanford sociologist Aliya Rao studies unemployment and how middle-class, dual-earner couples navigate the challenging experience of job loss. Observing families with children in which one of the partners had been laid off, Rao found that even when it came to finding work, women behaved as if they had less right than men to family support. She tells me, “When men lose their jobs, unemployment becomes a really central aspect of family life. It’s talked about daily by husbands and wives, especially his job-searching activity. It shapes the home. In families with unemployed men, they’d create offices to facilitate the husbands’ job-searching abilities, even in a time when they have fewer resources – building a wall in the living room so he can be at home without being at home, not be disturbed by the kids. With unemployed women, this is not happening. Their unemployment is peripheral. They talk about it but don’t emphasize it. There’s no creating a space for her. One of the families, the son complained to me, ‘The one thing that’s changed since my mom has been home is she uses my desk as her work space!”

“The other thing is, with husbands, their wives offer so much encouragement in the job search. It’s a really hard process with daily rejection. Wives play an instrumental role in keeping their husbands going. With unemployed women, their husbands weren’t doing this emotion work. Women’s unemployment is not seen as a problem that needed to be rectified immediately. You can be the mom you couldn’t be before. Unemployed dads do a little more child care than when they were working, but not that much more. The reason they give is that they need to job search, and their wives agree on that. There’s no major shift. We might think Dad would pick up the kids all the time. That is not happening. My point is that couples work hard to maintain gender inequalities at a time when it would be easy to dismantle them.””

“Experiments demonstrate how members of low-status groups embrace socially desirable trait ascriptions as a trade-off for their own subordination. You can’t tell women that they’re too dumb to do anything but stay home and make sandwiches (that would be hostile), but you can point out how their loving nature makes them especially well suited for that task. Social psychology calls this “role justification,” and it “contributes to the perceived legitimacy of the status-quo by characterizing cultural divisions of labor as not only fair but perhaps even natural and inevitable,” Jost notes.”

“In one social psychology experiment at Tulane and University of California, Santa Barbara, men who read statements that supported a belief in meritocracy (“Persistence leads to success” or “Rich people deserve it”) went on to demand higher pay for work they’d completed than men who had not been similarly primed. System-justifying statements had little impact on the amount of pay women asked for. Consistent with other studies, women simply requested less than men across the board. The study’s authors concluded, “Elevated feelings of entitlement may … blind men to seeing when they are overbenefited, allow them to justify their privileged position, and lead them to regard efforts to ‘level the playing field’ as unjust. In contrast, a depressed sense of entitlement among women may prevent them from seeing when they are targets of discrimination and reduce the likelihood that they will engage in collective action to challenge the distribution of social goods.”