Want it all? Try saying "thank you"

“Having it all” has been trending for two weeks, ever since Anne-Marie Slaughter’s blockbuster essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” went online at the website of The Atlantic magazine.

“It’s time to stop fooling ourselves,” says the Princeton professor and former State Department official. “The women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed.”

Feminist commentators on her essay have been quick to say that men as a group need to pick up the slack at home. “The problem isn’t that women are trying to do too much, it’s that men aren’t doing nearly enough,” writes author and activist Jessica Valenti in The Nation, citing a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report showing that working women still do the bulk of housework and childcare.

I don’t quarrel with their arguments or their facts. But what’s missing from critiques like that one is an acknowledgement of how much men have evolved in just three generations.

“Men are changing very rapidly,” feminist historian Stephanie Coontz once told me. “In fact, as a historian, I have to say that they are changing, in a period of thirty years, in ways that took most women 150 years of thinking and activism.” According to every single study, men today do more dishes and bring more kids to school than their fathers and grandfathers ever did.

Enter the awkward concept of gratitude. It’s awkward because many women frankly resent the idea that men should be thanked for doing the work they’ve always been expected to do. The resentment is personal and it’s political. It’s personal, because every woman who comments on these issues has had a man in her life that didn’t do his fair share. And it’s political, because the debate is fundamentally about the balance of power between men and women as groups. In fact, research shows that men will withhold gratitude as an expression of power over women.

“We should be grateful for anything that makes our lives easier,” says my friend Suzanne (not her real name), who is now divorced. “But at the same time, I’d grit my teeth because he was a big hero for doing a sink full of dishes.”

All partnerships have a division of labor, but Suzanne felt as though her specific labors had been imposed on her. Millions of women feel the way she did. This creates conflict, of course, but it also interferes with practicing fundamental relationship skills like gratitude. (Other skills like forgiveness and empathy are important, too, but here I'm just focusing on gratitude.)

Why should that be a problem? Because study after study shows that gratitude is essential to marital happiness. Suzanne didn’t just resent that her husband was a big hero for doing what she did every day. The bigger problem is that her daily work was thankless, and even denigrated by her husband: “If dinner wasn’t perfect,” she added, “he’d whine about it.”

The place of gratitude in marriage was explored by none other than UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who created a concept cited in Valenti’s article: “the second shift,” which suggests that working women go home to sinks full of dirty dishes to do. Hochschild came up with another catchy phrase, “economy of gratitude,” which turns up much less often in feminist commentary. Her theory says expressing gratitude for the labor of your spouse is more important to marital happiness than the precise division of labor. It’s not just who does the dishes; it’s also who gets thanked by whom for doing the dishes.

Researchers Jess Alberts and Angela Threthewey put Hochschild's “economy of gratitude” theory to the test in a series of focus groups, interviews, and surveys of heterosexual and same-sex couples. They “found evidence that gratitude isn’t just a way to mitigate the negative effects of an unequal division of labor. Rather, a lack of gratitude may be connected to why that division of labor is so unequal to begin with," as they write in "Love, Honor, and Thank."

So when a spouse expresses gratitude to an "under-performing" partner for picking up his socks off the floor, he's reminded that it's not fair that she's usually the one who does that. "And since people who receive gifts typically feel obligated to reciprocate, this insight can lead the under-performing partner to offer 'gifts' of his own by contributing more to household tasks. In addition, the over-performing partner is likely to experience less resentment and frustration once her efforts are recognized and appreciated."



Thus expressing gratitude does not necessarily perpetuate inequality, as some fear. Instead, it can help make relationships more equal. Unfortunately, the research suggests that men are worse than women when it comes to being grateful. This makes for an emotionally lethal combination: tradition imposes housework and childcare on women, and then individual men forget to be grateful for their wives’ contributions—a habit that might have a lot to do with maintaining their own social power. As psychologist Robert Emmons notes in his essay, "Pay it Forward":

It has been argued that males in particular may resist experiencing and expressing gratefulness insomuch as it implies dependency and indebtedness. One fascinating study in the 1980s found that American men were less likely to regard gratitude positively than were German men, and to view it as less constructive and useful than their German counterparts. Gratitude presupposes so many judgments about debt and dependency that it is easy to see why supposedly self-reliant Americans would feel queasy about even discussing it.

While the research evidence for this idea is scant, it personally resonates with me. Averages don't tell us much about individuals, and certainly there are men who are better at gratitude than women. But I have struggled to weave gratitude into my life, and so do many men I know. So if American marriages need more gratitude, that change should start with men. Guys, I’m begging you: Go home tonight and thank your wife for everything she does. Be specific; the "meta-thanks" won't work, because it doesn't show that you recognize the contribution as a unique and personal thing. Here, just watch this video:



So, should women be grateful to men for doing the dishes? My own answer is yes and no. Yes, individual women should express gratitude to the men in their lives for what they do, for the sake of positive reinforcement and marital sustainability. But no, I don't think women should be thankful to men as a group for changing so much in recent decades. They could have and should have evolved earlier than they did, when women started taking jobs in large numbers.

This brings us to questions of power and how it shapes gratitude, which has been the subject of recent lab experiments.

One 2011 study by Yeri Cho and Nathanael J. Fast paired two study participants and asked them to perform a task together—designating one the supervisor and the other the subordinate. The results were fascinating, and have useful implications for marriages. They found that gratitude from supervisors made subordinates happier, of course. But they also found that supervisors who had been challenged in any way by their subordinates were more likely to turn around and insult that person.

This is a dynamic that defines many marriages. If a wife challenges her husband’s competency at home—“Don’t you know how to sweep a floor?!”—the research suggests he’ll end up denigrating her own contributions, a vicious cycle that might be depressingly familiar to some readers.

To be fair, men aren’t the only ones who forget to be grateful. It’s commonplace for full-time caregivers—usually (but not always) women—to forget to thank breadwinning spouses—usually (but not always) men—for their efforts and sacrifices. Supporting a family is hard, especially in hard economic times, and can entail intense stress and deferred dreams. Even two-income couples, whose members are theoretically facing similar stresses, can fall into the ingratitude trap: They become too busy to see or appreciate what the other is doing.

Indeed, gratitude must go both ways to be effective. It’s the role of the spouse to serve as witness to their partner’s life. Gratitude tells the spouse that they are being seen, that their sacrifices and struggles are visible and honored.

But interpersonal power imbalances are pernicious in another way: They make us cynical about others’ motivations for expressing gratitude. In a study published in January of this year, M. Ena Inesi and colleagues ran five experiments testing how power shapes gratitude. They found that people with power tended to believe others thanked them mainly to curry favor down the line, not out of authentic feeling. This cynicism, the researchers found, made power-holders less likely to express gratitude to people with less power. In marriages, this gratitude corruption also led to lower levels of marital commitment in the more powerful spouse.

The bottom line from these and similar experiments is clear: Having power makes you less grateful, which just exacerbates power differences and all the resentments that go along with them. But expressing gratitude can help break that vicious cycle and change the balance of power. For me as a man, this amounts to a persuasive feminist argument. Power inequalities cut us off from genuine and necessary human feelings like gratitude—and that can push us a little further away from the possibility of happiness. It follows that it’s in our interest to act against power imbalances.

We can do that through our votes and political activism, I believe—it’s policies like flextime and paid parental leave that will best help women advance in their careers. But we can also make a small, positive contribution in our own homes by just saying “thanks.” It might not be equity that we as men are striving for, though that should be a goal and might be a glorious byproduct of this struggle. Instead, our greatest rewards will come in the form of meaning, authenticity, and, yes, happiness in our homes.

This originally appeared on the website of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center.

Four Observations About the Bad Parent "Movement"

I got a call this morning from a journalist asking about the "bad parent" trend, wherein folks like Bad Mother author Ayelet Waldman are proudly revealing their most secret parental failures. That got me to thinking about this topic, and I thought I'd share some random observations:

1) Fathers are pretty much defined as "bad parents," as the term is being popularly used. When we talk about proud "bad parents," most of the time we're really talking about "bad mothers" who are rebelling against the idea that they must be perfect to be good. Ayelet isn't actually a "bad mother," at least as revealed by her book and in her husband's new book, Manhood for Amateurs; Bad Mother is a reaction against the unrealistic, cognitively dissonant standards to which mothers are held. Meanwhile, fathers are not held, and do not hold themselves, to the same standards. When fathers reveal their foibles and failures as parents, they do it, by and large, with a laugh. They are allowed to be human, which, I think, adds more to the pile of evidence that guys remain a privileged class in America and the world.

2) That said, I think the "bad mother" thing is also evidence of the degree to which the genders are measurably converging in attitudes and behaviors. Wide disparities remain; it's just that differences are smaller than they were ten, twenty, fifty years ago. More women expect to have careers, and many do have them; more men expect to do more housework and childcare, and they are doing more at home. Fathers and mothers are both expected to play breadwinning and caregiving roles. That's a big change. When moms like Ayelet shake their fist at "good mother" standards, in many respects they're asking to be judged by a standard that's closer to the twenty-first-century "good father"--someone who is perhaps a slob and is perhaps not always the most empathic person in the world, who perhaps carves out space for a life apart from his family, but who is still a day-to-day presence in the lives of his children and fulfilling whatever role falls to him as parent.

3) That flexibility is key; in a time of profound gender role fragmentation, that's what both mothers and fathers have asked for--the ability to be themselves and to be judged by the circumstances of their lives--as opposed by the standards of fifty years ago or by the standards of people who imagine that their own private circumstances are universal. In a dense, connected, diverse world, tolerance and openness are necessities as well as virtues. And as I think Ayelet's work reveals, acceptance of one's own failures is a pathway to accepting other people's "failures," as we perceive them. Self-compassion leads to compassion for the people in our lives as well as a more generalized social compassion.

4) I won't personally be jumping on the "bad parent" bandwagon. I've rarely felt oppressed by the judgements of others about my fatherhood--but I have been confused about what, exactly, I'm supposed to be doing as a father. For that reason, my book The Daddy Shift is not a bad parent book--it's about good fathers, and what ideals help them to be good. There are individually bad fathers, of course, just as there really are genuinely bad mothers, but fathers as a group are often judged as "bad parents" for not behaving like mothers. That's why we need a good father movement. Moms might indeed need a bad parent movement. But fathers need positive, aspirational images, and tools for negotiating roles that their fathers were never expected to adopt. And I think we need other people, particularly the women in our lives, to understand the kind of fathers we are trying to be.

Your thoughts?

Does parenthood make men more conservative and women more liberal?

A new study says that parenthood pushes men and women in opposite political directions:

"Parenthood seems to heighten the political 'gender gap,' with women becoming more liberal and men more conservative when it comes to government spending on social welfare issues," says Dr. Steven Greene, an associate professor of political science at NC State and co-author of the study. Greene and Dr. Laurel Elder of Hartwick College used data on the 2008 presidential election from the American National Election Studies to evaluate the voting behavior of men and women who have children at home. Parents who have grown children were not part of the study.

"Basically, women with children in the home were more liberal on social welfare attitudes, and attitudes about the Iraq War, than women without children at home," Greene says, "which is a very different understanding of the politics of mothers than captured by the 'Security Mom' label popular in much media coverage. But men with kids are more conservative on social welfare issues than men without kids." Men with kids did not differ from men without kids in their attitudes towards Iraq.

You can read the press release here and the whole thing here.

This is a strong study; they have a good data set, and like all good social scientists they control for variables like age and education. The results are consistent with other studies, and also easy to understand.

Response scales varied, but all ranged from a number indicating very liberal to one indicating very conservative. So, the "social welfare index" (which measured support for issues like government-sponsored, universal health care), the scale ranged from -1.37 (very liberal) to 2.07 (very conservative), based on responses to specific questions.

This is the area where the contrast between men and women was starkest. Women zoomed from -.01 childless to -.11 after having children in the social welfare index--which is statistically very significant. Meanwhile, men went from .04 childless to .14 after children. A ten point difference for both, but in opposite directions.

To which I say: Wow.

Why the difference? The researchers argue that it's women's experience with nurturing kids that pushes them a more liberal direction when it comes to weaving the social safety net. From the paper:

We argue that this long-standing liberal motherhood effect is grounded in the gendered experience of parenthood. The societal expectation as well as the reality that women play the primary role in nurturing their children and take primary responsibility for their health care, day care, and educational needs fosters an appreciation for well-funded, domestic government programs.

Moreover, with the vast majority of mothers working outside the home, mothers are required to rely on people or programs outside the nuclear family for at least part of their children’s care, which may also foster their appreciation for a supportive and generous social welfare state. The fact that the liberal effect of motherhood remains highly significant even in the regression model (Table 2) when potentially confounding variables are controlled, means that it is not simply Democratic or unmarried or poor mothers that are driving the liberal motherhood effect. Consistent with some feminist theories, there seems to be something about the experience of being a mother that leads to more liberal social welfare attitudes (Ruddick 1980, 1989; Sapiro 1983). It may be that the act of nurturing children fosters empathy and caring, thereby generating more liberal attitudes concerning the role of government in helping others.

Whereas fathers, they write, tend to "view an active social welfare state as an intrusion on their ability to provide for their families."

That sounds somewhat plausible to me--although it must be pointed out that throughout American history, many men have looked to government to support their roles as breadwinners, as with, for example, minimum wage laws. It might be more accurate to suggest that men's relatively privileged social position makes them more receptive to contemporary conservative messages, and more invested in the status quo.

Some folks, I think, will tend to see this as an essentialist argument: Women are more liberal and pacifistic because they're women, and men are just warlike jerks. But actually this research suggests politics are shaped more by social roles and day-to-day tasks than by biology. An obvious way to test this theory is to look at stay-at-home dads: Does taking care of kids push men in a more liberal direction?

I don't know of any peer-reviewed studies that have examined this question, but I explored it quite a bit in researching my book The Daddy Shift through interviews with families.

The result: It's certainly the case that many stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms feel that taking care of kids does make dads more liberal--according to these couples, they're just more conscious of the importance of access to the commons, things like playgrounds and health care. "The world would be a better place if more fathers...took care of children," said one Kansas City mom. "I think a man becomes more aware of other social issues."

Many of these couples, it must be said, were at least somewhat liberal to begin with, which makes sense--liberal values allow for the possibility of a gender-role reversal. However, there are many conservative stay-at-home dads; do their attitudes evolve? To get a firm answer to this question, you'd need to track couples' political trajectory over many years, from pregnancy to the teenage years, and control for many variables.

If the answer turns out to be yes, this suggests that men as a group should become more liberal as they spend more time with kids. And if we want to push our society in a more liberal direction, policies that encourage male caregiving--starting with paid paternity leave--are a good place to begin. If the answer is no, we'll need to look elsewhere for an explanation about why men and fathers tend to be more conservative than women and mothers.

[Originally posted to my Mothering magazine blog.]

Princess Parenting!

My newest collaboration with DadLabs.com...

Are you a princess parent? Does your baby girl have more princess paraphernalia than you can fit in your mini van? As a parent, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the inevitable onslaught of princess culture. In this episode of The Lab, Daddy Brad and Daddy Clay compare who is the bigger princess parent by adding up their daughters’ princess gear. From Disney games and Disney princess toys to princess costumes and unicorn stuffed animals, the two Dads compare who is the bigger Cinderella father. Author Jeremy Adam Smith discusses the impact that princess mania is having and the steps to maintain a healthy father daughter relationship.

In preparation for this episode, I chatted with a number of psychologists. "Many preschool girls go through a kind of princess phase," said Stephen Hinshaw, chair of the UC Berkeley psychology department and author of the new book, The Triple Bind. "At the 'right' time, this is not deleterious or promoting of narcissism. But if it becomes a preoccupation [i.e., an obsession], and if the 'princess treatment' begins to extend to the girl herself, and if it lasts beyond the 'normative' time, could be problematic." For a solid and interestingly neurotic feminist take on princess mania, see Peggy Orenstein's 2006 piece in New York Times Magazine.

Incidentally, today's USA Today mentions me and DadLabs and an all-star line-up of fatherhood researchers in a piece entitled, "New daditude: Today's fathers are hands-on, pressure off." It's well worth a read.

Thanks to Axel Hausemann for his camera and sound work here at DadLabs West!

Nick Clegg is right

It's a new media trend: Since 80 percent of people laid off in the recession have been guys, pundits and journalists are asking themselves if this will cause men to do more at home. More women as breadwinners and more men at home is "a thought to file under 'let's try to find a silver lining,' " writes Lisa Belkin at the New York Times. Slate's Emily Bazelon takes a dimmer view, imagining "a family with a husband rattling around the house, unemployed and unsettled about it, while his wife keeps working but brings home a paycheck that's less than half the income the two of them used to make together."

Over in the United Kingdom--which is experiencing the same kind of downturn as we are here--Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg triggered a firestorm of criticism for suggesting that men losing jobs should "re-invent" themselves as stay-at-home dads, and "that unemployment could have a 'liberating effect' on outdated views about what was men's work." He's been accused of emasculating British industrial workers.

Perhaps Clegg, a politician, might be criticized for having a politically tin ear, but he's absolutely correct: economic downturns can open up new possibilities for men, and this recession is likely to have a huge effect on gender relations.

During the Great Depression, unemployment would utterly destroy men, because their entire identities were based on their jobs and their ability to support families. At the same time, however, widespread unemployment had the ironic effect of allowing more caring and cooperative conceptions of fatherhood to gain a hearing. According to a study by historian Ralph LaRossa and colleagues, more books and magazine articles in the Great Depression promoted the idea of the "New Father" than at any other time before or since. "Measuring virality and manliness in ways that were independent of whether one had a job [served] to counterbalance the emasculating effects of the Depression," writes LaRossa.

And as more men were tossed out of work, more women found jobs. The number of married women working outside the home almost tripled from 1900 to the middle of the Depression; women zoomed from being less than 3 percent of clerical workers at the end of the 19th century to being more than half in the Depression. Incomes rose accordingly.

Women's employment and incomes continued to grow throughout the 40s and, yes, even the 50s--and expanded straight through the 70s and 80s, when men's economic prospects started to dim. It's no accident that the hero of the 1982 film Mr. Mom--which marked the film debut of the stay-at-home dad--was a laid-off autoworker named Jack. Had Mr. Mom been made in the 1930s, it would have been a tear-jerking melodrama: Jack would have sunk into alcoholism and domestic violence while his wife endured the humiliation of employment.

But a lot had changed in America in the decades between the Great Depression and Mr. Mom. Ultimately, Jack masters househusbandry while his wife becomes a successful ad executive. When their identities as breadwinners are destroyed by economic instability, argues Mr. Mom, men must do exactly what Nick Clegg suggests, and reinvent themselves as caregivers. Moreover, the film suggests that men ought to support their wives' career aspirations, a startling departure from the past.

In the face of today's financial disasters, women are economically stronger than ever and men's identities are much more diverse. Since 1965, according to several empirical studies, men's time with children has tripled. Since 1995, it has doubled. So has the number of stay-at-home dads. Researchers are finding that even low-income and chronically unemployed men are finding meaning and satisfaction in taking care of kids--whereas in the past, they would consciously reject those roles. As motherhood has shifted to include careers, the definition of fatherhood has shifted from pure breadwinning to one that encompasses both breadwinning and caregiving.

A bad economy is bad for mothers, fathers, and children--and, indeed, everyone. None of us can wave a magic wand and bring our jobs and a healthy economy back; for many of us, life is about to become very hard. But the history of the American family teaches us that we can grow stronger in the places where we have been broken. The key, research reveals, is for mothers and fathers to cultivate loving relationships with each other, and to prize time with children. That can be hard to do when you don't know how you're going to pay the mortgage, and yet we are even worse off when we lose each other as well as the house. No one gets paid for sniping at his or her spouse.

When journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates (author of the remarkable memoir The Beautiful Struggle) was laid off from Time magazine in 2007, he became a stay-at-home dad. "You know, getting laid off is always a difficult thing, but it gave me back time with my son," Ta-Nehisi told me in an interview for my forthcoming book, The Daddy Shift. "That's absolutely huge. I guess not making much money would trouble me, if I felt I wasn't a very good father. If you are a man who thinks that what you bring to a relationship is economic power and that's it, then I guess that would trouble you."

America can learn from Ta-Nehisi. Couples that can support each other and focus on care survive recessions; couples that don't--who allow stress and despair to take over their family lives--break apart. I would argue that the role reversals American families are experiencing can be a source of strength, and an evolutionary adaptation to a global economy that is intrinsically unstable and technology-based. When the right values are in place, families can survive economic downturns intact, and sometimes even thrive.

Gender We Can Believe In

Writer Lauren McLaughlin blogs:

The November Atlantic has a fantastic article by Hanna Rosin about transgender kids, which I read hungrily in the hope that it would add to my understanding of the topic. Sadly, it confirmed many of my worst fears. There’s a heart-rending story about 8-year-old Brandon who, from the moment he could speak, has insisted he was a girl. His bewildered parents, who live in an area where “a boy’s a boy and a girl’s a girl,” eventually wind up at a transgender conference where they meet kids and parents going through the same kinds of challenges. The article outlines in broad strokes the evolution of attitudes on the subject of gender identity, though I’m not sure “evolution” is the right word. “Pendulum” seems more appropriate since we seem to swing back and forth between the two following dogmas:

Gender is hard-wired and immune to cultural influence

vs.

Gender is entirely cultural with no biological basis

Otherwise known as Nature versus Nurture.

The fact that gender could be a mix of these two things seems not to have entered into the minds of the “experts” who treat these kids. Notably absent from interviews with them is any awareness of the fact that they may not have at their disposal all the information required to form a comprehensive theory of gender. And since all of the kids (and indeed all of the psychologists, physicians, and researchers who study them) exist within a cultural framework, it’s nearly impossible to isolate non-cultured traits. In fact, the few twin studies performed on the subject have revealed that, while sexual orientation seems to have a strong biological basis, gender identity does not.

Lauren concludes:

Is there another way? We don’t demand rigid conformity to norms in all things. Why gender? The average man is taller than the average woman, but we don’t demand that short men take human grown hormone or that tall women have their legs shortened. Is it possible that we’re demanding too much of these children and not enough from society as a whole? Shouldn’t we be better than the mother of Brandon’s former best friend who rejected him on “Christian” grounds? Perhaps if it was okay for a boy to wear make up, Brandon wouldn’t be faced with the prospect of puberty-blocking hormones. And why shouldn’t it be okay for a boy to wear make up? It doesn’t hurt anyone.

Utterly absent from this otherwise insightful article was any mention of compassion. Not once did someone suggest that Brandon might be encouraged to love his body as it is and still enjoy playing with dolls. Not once did anyone question the ethics of endorsing rigid gender boundaries despite ample evidence of the pain they cause. Perhaps when faced with a little boy like Brandon, instead of figuring out how to fix him, we should figure out how to fix ourselves.

Right on. I can only add my experience: My son likes to wear dresses once in a while (mainly at birthday parties; he thinks that dresses are more festive) and has shown more interests in ballet and figure skating than sports and hockey, but at no point has he indicated that he wants to be a girl, and he still rough houses and does the whole playing-with-trucks thing. Recently, he's started to show a bit more self-consciousness about gender roles--he actually did not request a dress for our last birthday party--which I'm pretty sure is one outcome of socialization at school. We're not pushing either way. These are his decisions, as far as we're concerned.

The rest of Lauren's entry is well worth a read. She's the author of the young adult novel, Cycler, which is about a girl named Jill who turns into a boy named Jack for four days out of the month. I'll definitely be checking that one out.

Wages of Sexism, Part II

A creative new study reveals a new dimension of the wage gap between men and women:

In previous studies, academics have looked at variables like years of education and the effects of outside forces such as nondiscrimination policies. But gender was always the constant. What if it didn't have to be? What if you could construct an experiment in which a random sample of adults unexpectedly changes sexes before work one day?

Kristen Schilt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and Matthew Wiswall, an economist at New York University, couldn't quite pull off that study. But they have come up with the first systematic analysis of the experiences of transgender people in the labor force. And what they found suggests that raw discrimination remains potent in U.S. companies.

Schilt and Wiswall found that women who become men (known as FTMs) do significantly better than men who become women (MTFs). MTFs in the study earned, on average, 32% less after they transitioned from male to female, even after the authors controlled for factors like education levels. FTMs earned an average of 1.5% more.

Mad Men vs. Mr. Moms

OK, this is kind of funny: Hey, Mr. Mom: Your Wife Wants To Bang Don Draper. (And here's the funniest reader comment: "I think you're preachin' to the converted, dude. Mr. Mom wants to fuck Don Draper, too.") C'mon. Laugh. You know it's funny.

I just started watching Mad Men, largely on the recommendation of my pal Jessica (who is getting married this weekend! yay!).

The writing and characters are gripping, but Mad Men is also a fascinating sociological and historical study of womanhood, manhood, and gender roles at a dramatic point of transition.

It made me think right away of Susan Faludi’s 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man--in fact, the parallels between the POV of both the series and Faludi’s book makes me think that Stiffed must be required reading for Mad Men’s writers.

In both, traditional masculine values like self-reliance, steadfastness, and dedication to community welfare are steadily undermined by the encroachments of a culture that prizes image and performance over principle and real accomplishment.

It's a process that pushes both the interview subjects of Faludi’s book and protagonist Don Draper of Mad Men into a state of spiritual free fall.

At the same time, however, we’re reminded by both works that we cannot go back: Thanks in part to its terrific attention to the details of its characters’ lives, Mad Men makes a sexist social order real and concrete, and reminds us of how far we’ve advanced from the “good old days” when women were prisoners in their own homes.

The wages of sexism

This is interesting:

Organizational psychologists Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston found that men who reported holding traditional views (that is, that women belong in the home, while men earn the money) earned on average $11,930 more annually for doing the same kind of work as men who held more egalitarian views. The reverse was true for women, to a much smaller degree. Female workers with more egalitarian views (that men and women should evenly divide the tasks at home and contribute equally to their shared finances) earned $1,052 more than women who did similar jobs but held more traditional views.

The effect was starkest, however, when researchers compared women's salaries to those of men, while also taking into account their gender-role biases. Men with traditional attitudes not only earned more than other men with egalitarian attitudes, but their annual salary was $14,404 greater than women with traditional attitudes, and $13,352 greater than women with egalitarian attitudes. Put differently, men with traditional attitudes made 71% more than women with traditional attitudes, while egalitarian-minded men made just 7% more than their female counterparts.

And here, to me, is the really interesting passage:

"What really surprised us was the magnitude of the difference," says Judge. "We suspected that 'traditional' gender-role attitudes would work against women. What surprised us was the degree to which that effect held, even when you start controlling for a variable that you think would make the effect go away, like how many kids you have, or how many hours you work outside the home, what type of occupation." When the researchers controlled for education, intelligence (based on the participants' IQ test scores), occupation, hours worked and even what region they lived in the United States, Judge found that "none of those really made the effect go away."

In other words, it's not that men make more than women because they work longer hours, are more highly educated or simply take higher paying jobs. Rather, the new findings suggest the wage gap may be largely attributable to gender-role attitudes. And the big winners, it seems, is men with traditional views. Why the gap persists, Judge and Livingston aren't sure, but Judge thinks it might be have something to do with the different ways men and women sign onto new jobs. Women on the whole are less effective at negotiating salaries than men, and they tend to be less aggressive about asking for bigger salaries, or they accept employers' offers without negotiating at all. And Judge suspects that tradition-bound women may be even worse at it than their more egalitarian counterparts: "I would posit that egalitarian women are not as susceptible to settling for less in the negotiating process," he says.

As for those money-making traditionally minded men, Judge theorizes that if they believe they are the family's primary breadwinner, they may show greater dedication to career and are perhaps more aggressive than other men in terms of salary negotiation. Compared with men with egalitarian attitudes, the primary breadwinner simply has more at stake. "Maybe the egalitarian guy thinks, 'Well, I don't have to go the extra mile because my wife and I share earning responsibilities equally,'" Judge says.

Another factor could be bias on the part of the employer. "We're learning that more and more aspects of organizational psychology are operating somewhat subconsciously," says Judge. "It may be that employers are more likely to take advantage of traditional gender-role women."

We are culture

From today's New York Times:

A series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But after crunching new data from 40,000 men and women on six continents, David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being revived.

The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women. Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.

To explain these differences, Dr. Schmitt and his collaborators from Austria and Estonia point to the hardships of life in poorer countries. They note that in some other species, environmental stress tends to disproportionately affect the larger sex and mute costly secondary sexual characteristics (like male birds’ displays of plumage). And, they say, there are examples of stress muting biological sex differences in humans. For instance, the average disparity in height between men and women isn’t as pronounced in poor countries as it is in rich countries, because boys’ growth is disproportionately stunted by stresses like malnutrition and disease.

Personality is more complicated than height, of course, and Dr. Schmitt suggests it’s affected by not just the physical but also the social stresses in traditional agricultural societies. These villagers have had to adapt their personalities to rules, hierarchies and gender roles more constraining than those in modern Western countries — or in clans of hunter-gatherers.

I'll be reading the study. Some preliminary points: These results are seemingly contradicted by plenty of long-term studies showing that the two genders are actually converging in both behaviors and attitudes in the Western world.

I'd suggest that the reason for this seeming contradiction is pretty straightforward: For centuries, gender differences were dramatically exaggerated in the West and constantly reinforced, through custom, ritual, law, power structures, social structures, and, more recently, the media. This created profound inequalities of power between men and women. Over the course of the past three to four decades, women have gained more power and we've regained a measure of sanity, though I would describe our culture are still being fairly sick when it comes to issues of sex and gender.

In other words, while gender differences still seem exaggerated in the Western world, and unsurprising disparities persist between that world and others, they are less so than they were fifty or a hundred years ago. And I would argue that this is the more natural state of affairs.

Still, virtually every study I've ever seen does suggest some differences. As the article points out, men are persistently more competitive, and also more violent--a trait 21st-century, Western men have in common with our counterparts in less technological cultures. The evidence for this is pretty conclusive, and it meets the sniff test of most people's experience.

It still remains the case, however, the gender roles are exquisitely sensitive to social context--as this new study reveals, yet again. Capacities for competitiveness and violence can be shaped, developed, discouraged, encouraged. “Culture and tradition are part of our flexibility, and we can, therefore, change the dictates of culture because we are culture,” writes the anthropologist Meredith Small. “This is why cultures not only evolve, they can also be forced to change, can be revolutionized.”

The Sarah Palin Chronicles, Continued

It seems that I more things to say about Sarah Palin. Weird.

There are lots and lots of mommy bloggers and mommy columnists out there saying that, as "Suburban Turmoil" puts it, it's hard "to believe that this country needs Sarah Palin more than her own children." They look at the baby with Down Syndrome and the pregnant teenager, and they think, mom is the one who needs to be there.

Whenever I read things like this, I think of the Hoffman family (not their real names). They are a family I profile in my book.

The mother, Misun, has a super-high-powered career (she was in the private sector when I interviewed them, making gobs of cash advising Fortune 500 companies; now they live in Washington, D.C. and she works in a high-level position for the Securities and Exchange Commission.) The father, Kent, is a stay-at-home dad.

Their son Clinton was born with multiple, life-threatening disabilities, at just the moment when Misun's career was taking off. In the year after Clinton was born, Misun was working 70 hour weeks and traveling 2-3 times a month. "It was very hard," Misun told me. "I remember for several weeks I would cry when I got on the plane."

But she still got on the plane. She knew her husband Kent was at home taking care of Clinton, doing what had to be done. And she was doing what she had to do, providing for the family.

She never doubted her choice, and neither did Kent. The burdens he carried were terrible--Clinton demanded 24-hour care--but he took them on willingly. To Misun, making money was a part of mothering; to Kent, caring for his child was a part of fathering.

“Her career got a major boost as a result of me staying at home,” said Kent. “When she goes away, she doesn’t have to worry about the kids or juggling anything. She’s been able to do what it takes and focus on her job.”

It's a waste of time to judge Misun as a bad mother for not being the one to take care of Clinton or judge Kent as a bad father for not serving as the breadwinner, because they don't care what you think. Here's the only thing that matters: When I interviewed them, Clinton was starting Kindergarten, and he was a happy, healthy little dude.

I have no idea what kind of person Palin's husband is. I don't know who does what in their family, but I suspect that there's a lot of responsibility falling on his shoulders right now.

And you know what? As a father, he can do it; there's nothing in his biological sex or even his socially constructed gender that will prevent him from serving as a caregiver. He can be the one to take care of the baby. He can be the parent who is there for his daughter. The mother doesn't have to be the one to do it. And it's not for us to judge a mother like her.

Techno Dad

I liked this: "10 Signs that Parenting is More Equal than it Used to be."

And I thought this was interesting:

Achieving a work-family balance doesn’t seem as foreign to fathers these days as it once did. Technology advances are giving fathers the freedom to focus on their family life while maintaining their workplace responsibilities…or so it seems.

A recent survey by human resources consulting firm Adecco USA found that 81% of fathers were somewhat likely to send work-related emails late at night. The evolution of technology has allowed fathers to take a more prominent role in the family. Email and devices like blackberries have made it easier for fathers to get their work done at home after the kids have gone to bed.

However, some might argue that all of these technological advancements have caused work to overflow into family life. Countless phone calls, emails, and text messages on blackberries and I-phones can cause unwanted disruptions during family time. In a recent Monster survey, 75% of dads said they believed bringing work home interferes with a parent’s relationship with their children. However, that may be the price some working fathers are willing to pay in order to have the flexibility to cater to family demands.

Speaking as someone who is indeed "somewhat likely to send work-related emails late at night" (or write blog entries!) and who brings work home, I think we're simply seeing a trade-off. My work hasn't diminished, but, as this entry suggests, I have gained the ability to do things like go to my son's doctor's appointments, read to his preschool class, and come home early when necessary.

My feeling is that this arrangement results in a net gain for my son. When I was growing up, there was no email, and yet my father always brought the stresses and preoccupations of work home with him. Email didn't create work-home imbalance. At the same time, however, my father was pretty much gone during the weekday; I have no memories of him going to my dentist's appointments or participating much in school activities. (I don't blame him for this; he was doing what had to be done.)

So if technology creates flexibility for parents (not just dads, but working moms as well--curious that the blog entry should focus on dads), that's probably a good thing overall.

I'd be curious to hear other views on this topic, from both moms and dads.

Wife Swap!

This sounds amusing:

IT'S A BATTLE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS WHEN A LIBERAL CHRISTIAN CAREER MOM WHOSE STAY-AT-HOME HUSBAND COOKS AND CLEANS SWAPS LIVES WITH A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN HOUSEWIFE WHO OBEYS HER HUSBAND'S EVERY COMMAND, ON ABC'S "WIFE SWAP"

This week on "Beckman-Heskett/Childs," a theologically liberal high powered corporate executive mother with a stay-at-home husband swaps lives with a born again Christian mom who believes women are created to be men's help-mates, on "Wife Swap."

Each week from across the country, two families with very different values are chosen to take part in a two-week long challenge. The wives from these two families exchange husbands, children and lives (but not bedrooms) to discover just what it's like to live another woman's life. It's a mind-blowing experiment that often ends up changing their lives forever.

Kim Beckman-Heskett (42) of Colorado is one of only three female vice presidents in her company. She works while her husband, Randall, stays at home and takes care of all of the chores, cooking and cleaning. A former preacher, Randall is now a self-professed modern Renaissance man, artist, poet and mystic who speaks 12 languages and possesses masters and PhD degrees in religion and theology. He is still a man of faith, but is skeptical of others he calls "bible thumpers" after 30 years of preaching and witnessing religious fundamentalism. Both Kim and Randall are devout Christians, but strongly disagree with literal interpretations of the Bible. They have a liberal approach to their faith, and Randall often incorporates humor in his beliefs and prayer. Kim doesn't believe that women should stay at home, "barefoot and pregnant," and encourages daughter Allison (12) and stepdaughter Hannah (12) to follow in her footsteps. The girls aren't required to do chores and are exposed to dating.

Kim travels to Rhode Island, where the Childs are born-again Christians who interpret the bible literally and use it as a guide for life. In the Childs' family constitution, God comes first, husband Christopher comes second. The family have to serve God at all times with a cheerful heart, and they follow the words of scripture to the letter. Lee-Ann is a stay-at-home mom who home schools her children, Laurie (18), Chrissy (18), Coburn (16), Columbia (12), Daisy (10) and Cambria (2). Christopher is an ultra traditionalist father who is head of his household and calls himself the "gatekeeper," setting the rules, enforcing discipline and expecting cheerful obedience. The children all must do a five-minute power clean before Christopher gets home from work. Mom is molding Coburn to be the man of the house so he can provide for a wife and family. As for the girls, she's training them to be stay-at-home moms who will live out God's calling in marriage and motherhood. Dating is not allowed for any of the children. Instead they pray daily for God to send them a spouse when the time is right. Lee-Ann is happy to be her husband's "help-mate," and says that women are the weaker link. The children feel it's ok to be at home as they feel safe, sheltered from the corrupting influences of the outside world.

Haven't seen the episode (don't own a TV!), but from what I've gleaned from the blogosphere, each family came away with strong feelings of disgust for the other. This reminded me of another second-hand description of Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days, which had a Christian fundamentalist mom join a household of gay fathers for a month. That's the happy trio above.

My friend Jodi (a fan of 30 Days, which, similar to Wife Swap, specializes in putting social opposites together) says that participants normally come away with newfound respect and compassion for people different from themselves. Not so with the Christian fundamentalist, according to Jodi: She left the gay dad family with her prejudice intact.

"Part of what’s so fascinating about this episode is how this woman, who is clearly neither stupid nor insane, can hold two sets of absolutely contradictory views: that foster care is terrible for kids and that Dennis and Tom are fantastic parents, but that all gay couples, including Dennis and Tom, should not be allowed to adopt, forcing more kids into foster care," writes the entertainment site AfterElton.

I know from a great deal of empirical research that evangelical families are much more flexible on the ground about gender roles that we might expect, with many stay-at-home dads among them--nothing gives me more hope that gender egalitarianism is the wave of the future.

But "evangelical" is an umbrella term that covers a lot of different traditions and variations. There is definitely a hardcore of believers who will never accept non-traditional gender roles or the gay and lesbian families in their midst, no matter how much contact they have with each other or what evidence suggests the parents are doing a good job.

Has anyone seen these episodes? Care to comment?

The Astonishing Science of Father Involvement

My esteemed colleague at the Greater Good Science Center, executive director Christine Carter, posted two very nice summaries of research into fatherhood over at her "happy kids" parenting blog, Half-Full.

The first asks: Are Dads as Essential as Moms? The answer is, Of course!

* Research shows that the love and care of fathers is equally important for the health and well-being of children as mother-love. Really.

* Children are WAY better off when their relationship with their father is sensitive, secure, and supportive as well as close, nurturing, and warm.

* One of the biggest problems with divorce is that when a father moves out, the father-child relationship frequently falters. If he stays in the game, his kids will cope far better with the divorce.

The second asks the question: How can we get dads to be more involved? Christine's answer: a mother's support, a good co-parenting relationship, and reasonable work hours.

Most of this will not be surprising to Daddy Dialectic readers. (Some, I know, will take issue with Christine's mom-centric way of framing father involvement; feel free to zip over there and leave a comment.)

Research has revealed lots of other factors that drive father involvement: a father's relationships with his own parents (did he have an involved father?) and in-laws (are they supportive of him?); timing of entry into the parental role (what pressures is he facing, especially at work?); and informal support systems such as playgroups and friendships (do other dads, as well as moms, put social pressure on him to be involved, through example or comments?); and the sex of the child. Fathers tend to be more involved with boys, which suggests to me that families with girls might try to amplify the other variables in play--for example, by setting aside special daddy-daughter time.

There's another factor that I don't think gets mentioned often enough: early involvement with infant care. When a child is born, testosterone falls dramatically in men. In fact, studies by biologist Katherine Wynne-Edwards and others show that pregnancy, childbirth, and fatherhood trigger a range of little hormonal shifts in the male body—but only if the father is in contact with the baby and the baby’s mother, a crucial point.

New fathers don’t just lose testosterone, they also gain prolactin, the hormone associated with lactation, as well as cortisol, the stress hormone that also spikes in mothers after childbirth and helps them pay attention to the baby’s needs.

In many, many ways, male and female bodies converge as the two become parents; for some men, the process is so intense that they will end up involuntarily mimicking signs of childbirth, a phenomenon called couvade. The convergence starts to end for the male only if he is separated from his family.

Interestingly, the hormonal shifts don’t diminish with second children; instead, they increase. Our bodies learn fatherhood, and fatherhood appears to be very much like learning to ride a bike.

It’s not just our hormones that change, but the very structure of our brains.

To understand the impact of fatherhood on the brain, a team of Princeton University researchers compared the brains of daddy marmoset monkeys (pictured at your left!) to their childfree fellows. Why marmosets? Because their males are the stay-at-home dads of the animal kingdom, who carry babies 70 percent of the time and give them to mothers only for nursing.

The researchers discovered that the fathers developed better neural connections in the prefrontal cortex—which is thicker in females. In other words, marmoset dads’ brains become more like females’, and it makes them smarter. The same group of researchers found that fatherhood generates new cells and connections in the hippocampus in mice, the emotion-processing center that is also somewhat bigger in the average human female.

You can’t apply this directly to humans, of course: marmosets are a different kind of primate and mice have tails and whiskers. And yet given the state of our knowledge, I think it's hard to argue with the notion that early paternal involvement will positively affect later involvement--not guarantee it, mind you, but infant care will certainly help. Babies and fathers imprint on each other, biologically and emotionally, just as babies do with moms. It forms a bond that can last a lifetime, if cultivated.

Many recent studies also show that such early father involvement is very good for children: For example, a report published in 2007 by the Equal Opportunities Commission in the United Kingdom, based on research tracking 19,000 children born in 2000 and 2001, found emotional and behavioral problems were “more common by the time youngsters reached the age of three if their fathers had not taken time off work when they were born, or had not used flexible working to have a more positive role in their upbringing.”

This research might help couples to make good personal decisions, but there is a political dimension as well: Only a very tiny number of American companies offer paternity leave.

Public and workplace policy is the final, and possibly biggest, factor that predicts paternal involvement--one that never gets mentioned in this context. Men are not all the same all over the globe: Their involvement differs from country to country.

The main things that seem to drive the difference? According to studies by Jennifer Hook and others, the first is the national level of women's employment: the more mothers employed and the more money they make, the more housework and childcare fathers do. The second factor driving national father involvement is the amount of paternal leave available. There is, in fact, a chicken-and-egg relationship between the two.

In 1974, for example, Sweden introduced paternity leave to the world, which catalyzed long-term changes in Swedish patterns of work and care.

In Sweden today, fathers are entitled to 10 days of paid leave after a child is born. Eighty percent of them take it, often combining it with vacation time. Parents get a total of 480 days off after they have a child, with 60 days reserved for mothers and 60 for fathers. The rest can be divided according to the wishes of the parents. Three hundred and ninety of those days are paid at 80 percent of the parents’ incomes, with the remaining 90 days paid at a set rate. In 2006, 20 percent of fathers took their share of extended leave.

That might not seem like a lot, but it compares very favorably to the minuscule number of American fathers who take advantage of the pathetic amount of leave available to them. And after Swedish parents go back to work, high-quality daycare is available to all parents, regardless of ability to pay.

The reforms had a sweeping impact on the culture of fatherhood in Sweden. When Swedish researcher Anna-Lena Almqvist interviewed 20 French and 35 Swedish couples in an effort to understand why fathers did or did not take advantage of parental leave and how that related to their self-images as men, she found that Swedish fathers expressed a more “child-oriented masculinity,” and actively negotiated with wives for more time with children.

“By international standards, Swedish fathers take on a good deal of the day-to-day care of their children,” writes Swedish feminist Karin Alfredsson. “Mothers still stay home longer with newborn children, but the responsibility for caring for sick children—while receiving benefits from the state—is more evenly divided between mothers and fathers. It is almost as common for fathers as it is for mothers to pick up and leave the children at pre-school and school.”

This pattern holds in other countries with similar policies.

The upshot: We know from the Northern European (and Canadian) experience that men will take more advantage of parental leave if policy, workplaces, and culture support them. In America--unlike in Sweden and elsewhere--the culture is changing in advance of workplaces and public policy, and a new generation of fathers is more willing to take advantage of leave and rebel against their workplace cultures, even at the expense of their careers.

When the American University Program on Work-Life Law studied 67 trade union arbitrations in which workers claimed to have been punished for meeting family responsibilities, they discovered that two-thirds of the cases involved men taking care of children, elders, or sick spouses.

USA Today reports in 2007 that more and more men are fighting for the right to take care of their children:

For years, women who say their employers have discriminated against them because of their care-giving roles have filed complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC has not released precise figures, but it reports that it now is seeing a shift: filings by fathers. For example, the EEOC says, some employers have wrongly denied male employees’ requests for leave for child care purposes while granting similar requests to female employees.

As a result, more and more companies, large and small, are offering family-leave benefits to men. “A few years ago, I would have told you that paternity leave wasn’t that beneficial in terms of recruiting and retaining,” Burke Stinson, a spokesperson for AT&T, tells HR magazine. “But today, I would say these 20-something men are far less burdened by the macho stereotypes and the stereotypes about the incompetent dad than their predecessors. They are more plugged in to the enrichment of their children and more comfortable taking time off to be fathers.”

It’s an observation echoed by Howard Schultz, Chairman of the Starbucks corporation, in 2007: “Men are willing to talk about these things in ways that were inconceivable less than ten years ago.”

Men are evolving, but society, business, and government still drag their collective feet. This breeds unhappiness as well as lawsuits--but perhaps one day we will have the policies that will help us to be the fathers we need and want to be.

[This entry was originally posted to the Greater Good blog, though it is drawn from a chapter from my book, now scheduled for release around Father's Day 2009.]

On the Love of Small Things

In the same year that Isaac Newton invented his own version of the differential calculus (1665), Robert Hooke published a a book illustrated with engravings of Very Small Things, including most famously the eye of a fly. The domain of the calculus was an abstract corroboration of the infinitely large and infinitely small worlds being disclosed by seventeenth century optics -- the telescope and the microscope.

Hooke wrote of the latter in his Micrographia:

...by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding ... By this the Earth it self, which lyes so near us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us, and in every little particle of its matter ... we were able before to reckon up in the whole Universe it self.

When Hooke and his colleagues at the English Royal Society beheld the symmetries, the regularities, and the fine and often beautiful forms of things invisible to the naked eye, it seemed clear that the structure of reality itself bore witness to the work of a divine creator, one who had left its hidden signature in plain sight, in the form of Very Small Things.

Questions of theology and immanence aside, there is a well established precedent from within modern science, long a most masculine pursuit, for the value and meaningfulness of the small. The later discoveries of the biological cell and the atomic particle may not have carried the same theological charge, but they continued nonetheless to expand the world of the Very Small as a realm for heroic action, and humbling contemplation.

These are some of the thoughts that occurred to me when Spot was himself Very Small. He is still small, in a way that is cute and adorable in a domesticated sense, but also in a way that is mind-boggling and edifying and escapes our ability to contain it within the modern culture of cuteness. We feed him and shelter him and keep him out of harm's way, and in the meantime a process well beyond anyone's control, asking no permission and seeking its own ends, adapts and learns and organizes itself into the form of our son.

Small is beautiful, in other words. But smallness is actually very big when you think about it, and the riddle of smallness, in the switching and clicking of DNA, is the most basic wisdom and knowledge of life itself.

For all these reasons, it is strange to me why some men should feel threatened by or uncomfortable with infants. The exoticism, foreignness, and pure neediness of the infant is often threatening to a man with a conventional understanding of manhood. After all, the world of the infant is the domain par excellence of the woman, the feminine, the domain where mothers are most assured.

Well-intentioned men have no compunction about passing off the care of infants to others. I've seen this over and over again among my friends and family. They prefer -- as both my own father and brother-in-law have admitted -- to wait until the infant has become a small person, perhaps a boy or a girl -- a miniature rather than an alien -- one with language who has likes and dislikes that can be engaged with on some level of familiarity. A creature who can reflect back something of themselves, requiring little work of translation.

The infant, rather than being a small simulacrum, is instead weak, vulnerable, and undeveloped, and can mirror these same qualities of weakness back to a man who fears them. "Men usually don't like babies when they're so small," several women assured me when Spot was 5 months old and still strapped to my chest. When the masculine ideal is independence and control, the infant makes demands which must be obeyed. There is no mistaking the resulting Master-Servant relation of the caretaker to the infant's needs. And the infant relies on a form of communication based on the body and undiluted emotion, a language that requires the work of translation.

All these things have made me uncomfortable at one point or another over the last 18 months. As Spot becomes more of a little boy and less of an infant, the issue becomes less acute, but the act of caring for small things is still an unsettled zone within the unsettled male identity. It doesn't have to be. I've drawn one example from the history of Western science to suggest that there are many ways to think about smallness that are not diminishing.

I'm sure there are many others. Somewhere between the roles of the craftsman, the tinkerer, and the shepherd, I'd like to think, are exemplars of the good that can come from long and close attention to Very Small Things.

Comment dit-on "stay-at-home dad" en français ?

I think this is real interesting:

The idea of being a stay-at-home dad is five times more popular in Quebec than in the rest of Canada, due in large part to generous parental leave programs available only in that province, a Statistics Canada report released Monday has found.

In 2001, the federal government changed its parental leave program for new parents, increasing the length of government-paid benefits to 35 weeks from 10 weeks and eliminating a second two-week unpaid waiting period for parents sharing the responsibility of staying home with children.

Five years later, Quebec introduced its own parental insurance program as a substitute for the federal program. It offered higher benefits rates and coverage for self-employed workers, eliminated unpaid waiting periods before benefits are paid out, and introduced a five-week leave solely for fathers.

As a result, Statistics Canada saw the number of Quebec men claiming parental benefits nearly double in just one year, jumping to 56 per cent in 2006 from 32 per cent in 2005.

For fathers outside Quebec, participation in the federal program remained constant over three years, at just 11 per cent

Changing Your Name

Lisa Belkin at the NY Times writes on her blog:

One surprise while writing this article [about equally shared parenting] was how most of the women had taken their husband’s last name. While that is clearly the norm in the country as a whole, I would have guessed that this subgroup, which had made equal sharing their priority, would be more likely to keep the name they were born with or create something hyphenated with their spouse.

I also found this to be true of many of the couples I interviewed for my book about reverse-traditional families--in many of them, the breadwinning mom changed her name.

I never asked why, but perhaps I should have. I suspect for many of the couples there's no "why" about it; they just did what was traditional. The fact that they later embraced a reverse-traditional arrangement as parents speaks volumes about the degree to which new gender roles are more of a response to changing social conditions than the product of a left-wing pinko conspiracy.

My wife and I gave our son an awkwardly hyphenated name--his full name is Liko Wai-Kaniela Smith-Doo. Many people consider it noteworthy that we stuck her name at the very end, and I had the impression it was important to my wife, but I just thought "Smith-Doo" sounded marginally better than "Doo-Smith." Neither of us even considered just giving him my name. We married a year after he was born (that's us, below, getting hitched) and decided to just keep our separate names. "Jeremy Adam Smith-Doo" just didn't do it for me.



One interesting nuance in this discussion: I've encountered many lesbian couples (OK, three lesbian couples) who gave the name of the non-biological mom to the child, as a way of establishing the parental relationship. This makes sense and casts a new light on the tradition of giving the father's name to a child--since the child wasn't born of his body, perhaps it's culturally important to provide a personal and social link between the two of them.

So I'm curious: How did your family come up with its last names, and why?

Yee Haw! Father's Day Media Round-Up!

Better Fathers: Courtesy of the Sexual Revolution: "Little attention has been paid to the impact that women's liberation has had on men. The unacknowledged truth is that men have been transformed too. Today, men have more freedom, flexibility and choices -- in the most meaningful ways."

When Mom and Dad Share It All: "Gender should not determine the division of labor at home. It’s a message consistent with nearly every major social trend of the past three decades — women entering the work force, equality between the sexes, the need for two incomes to pay the bills, even courts that favor shared custody after divorce. And it is what many would agree is fair, even ideal. Yet it is anything but the norm."

First-time dads have a few more gray hairs: "I've interviewed many people who became parents in their 30s and 40s who said that parenthood revealed to them how selfish and silly they had been in their teens and 20s - and I think that definitely applies to me."

When moms criticize, dads back off of baby care: "Both partners have moments of uncertainty over making the right decision for their child. But it may be that some dads need a little extra cheerleading is because, culturally, the father's role in caring for an infant isn't as well-defined as the mother's."

Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage: "A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships."

When Father's Day is a double celebration: "Devin and Geoffery, both 44, can celebrate Father’s Day on Sunday secure in the knowledge that their ranks are growing. Gay, lesbian and bisexual people across the nation are pushing for parental rights and increasingly are seen as a valuable resource by the child welfare system in dealing with the tens of thousands of American children who need foster and adoptive homes."

My life as a stay-at-home dad: "One day I noticed something different. I wasn't depressed. I wasn't bored. I was a dad. I don't know when it happened or why. Perhaps, I just needed time to adjust to the new me, the stay-at-home dad."

Obama's Father's Day Speech: "He did it in front of a black crowd, and it was the right thing to say. But reporters need to stop acting like this dude is the only civilized black man in the world." See follow-up post here: "My heroes in this business are virtually all white (how many black people are doing long-form journalism these days? I'm still stuck on Baldwin)... And yet so often, these same writers whose minds are so nimble and nuanced, go rigor mortis when it comes to black people. I don't get it."

Why Obama and Cosby comparisons are annoying: "There is no doubt that Obama’s speech was tailored for his black audience, however his lessons are not limited to them. The importance that he gives to higher expectations, increased responsibility and teaching children empathy and self-respect are lessons that all can take away—black, white or brown. Unlike Cosby whose arguments are clearly framed as a problem restricted to the black community."

Would You Marry This Man?

Here's a nice post from the blog, "Knocked Up (and in Law School)" about the benefits of co-parenting:

I have heard many women say that a father could just never love a child the way a mother does, and can't take care of them the way a mother does either. I don't believe that's true at all, and I think it's disrespectful to all the men who are spectacular parents. And I want to know why no one tries to make men feel guilty because they work outside the home? That's the real question. Why does Law School Mom state that it matters whether she or a nanny takes her kids to school, but makes no mention of her husband in that scenario? Why do we as mothers put all of the guilt on ourselves (and on other women) instead of equally between both parents? Why is his career important, not to be inconvenienced by taking care of children, but hers isn't? Why is she a bad mother for working, but he's a good father for providing for his family? These double-standards are harmful for all parents, and perhaps the work environment for all parents, not just women, would improve if society expected men to take a more active role in all aspects of parenting, instead of viewing it as an abomination. Just because I'm the one with the uterus doesn't mean all of the responsibilities of child-rearing fall on me. Having full responsibility ends at delivery.

To Husband and I, co-parenting means both of us being equally responsible for the care of our child. When Cora was born, Husband took a nine week paternity leave to take care of her. When I started back to school full time four weeks after she was born, he got up with her during the night, and cared for her during the times I was in class. I don't feel like I'm a bad mother and not bonding with my child because my husband does an equal share of the parenting, and sometimes even more than half. Since he went back to work, I'm on my own three nights a week. He takes over when he gets home from work in the morning and lets me get a little more sleep. On the days he doesn't work, he takes care of Cora during the day while I'm either in class or at work, and gets up with her at night if she wakes up. He takes her to all of her doctor's appointments, whereas I handle all the bill paying/fighting with Evil Health Insurance Company and Incompetent Medical Billing Agencies. We divide the tasks that way because those are our areas of expertise, and because that's what our schedules allow, not because any gender role dictates as such.

The Real Boy Crisis II

A follow-up from the New York Times on yesterday's post. Is a college degree overrated? asks David Leonardt. His answer is worth quoting at length:

There has been an enormous natural experiment on precisely this subject over the last few decades. In the experiment, one big group of Americans has become vastly more educated, while another group has not. The two have created an excellent case study.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s refer to the first group as “women” and the second as “men.”

From the founding of the country’s first (all-male) colleges in the 17th century until just a few decades ago, men received far more education than women. But the two sexes have now switched places in a remarkably short time.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, about one out of every three young men got a bachelor’s degree. In the years that followed, the share fell somewhat, both because Vietnam War draft deferrals were no longer an issue and because college became more expensive. In the 1980s and 1990s, the share rose again.

But the shifts have been fairly small. For the last four decades, somewhere between 30 and 35 percent of men have graduated from a four-year college by the time they turned 35 years old.

The story is quite different for women. In the 1960s, only 25 percent received a college degree. Among today’s young women almost 40 percent will end up with one. At one commencement ceremony after another this month — be it at Boston College, San Francisco State University or Colby College — women in caps and gowns outnumber men.

The relevant question is how much of a return women have gotten on their education. And the answer isn’t especially subtle. The return has been enormous.

Armed with college degrees, large numbers of women have entered fields once dominated by men. Nearly half of new doctors today are women, up from just 1 of every 10 in the early 1970s. In all, the average inflation-adjusted weekly pay of women has jumped 26 percent since 1980.

And men? Their pay has increased about as much as their college graduation rate — it’s up just 1 percent since 1980.

Education obviously isn’t the only reason. Gender discrimination has become less prevalent in recent decades, and today’s female college graduates are less likely than their mothers and grandmothers to choose modest-paying jobs, like teaching. The decline of manufacturing jobs, meanwhile, has disproportionately hurt men. But research by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn of Cornell suggests that, over the past two decades, education played the biggest role in narrowing the pay gap.

There are two statistics that I think do a particularly good job of capturing this point. The first shows that the gap between the pay of men and women with college degrees hasn’t budged over the last 15 years. Full-time female workers with a bachelor’s degree made 75 percent as much as their male counterparts in 1992 — and 75 percent as much in 2007.

Women still face discrimination, after all, and they’re still more likely than men to become teachers. More women also choose jobs that trade some pay for flexibility and reasonable hours. (Whether this is a good thing, a bad thing or neither needs to be a subject for another day.)

Yet even though the pay gap among college graduates hasn’t changed, the overall pay gap between men and women has continued to close in the last 15 years. That’s because so many more women have become college graduates and earned the pay premium that a degree really does bring. Across the whole work force, full-time women made 79 percent as much as full-time men last year, up from 75 percent in 1992.

To put it another way, women would have made almost no progress in narrowing the gender pay gap over this period if they hadn’t been so thoroughly trouncing men in the classroom.

And it’s not as if women’s gains have come at the expense of men. By becoming more educated — and able to do more productive, higher-wage jobs — women have increased the size of the economic pie. The economic growth in a country like South Korea, which has made much more educational progress than the United States, clearly demonstrates this. “If you look across countries,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, “education is the strongest predictor for how quickly the pie grows.”