Post 57.
In my work, I read about it all the time. Women go into politics less than men, and do less well, because of their unequal family responsibilities. Women’s careers bear the cost of these responsibilities, in terms of both their choice of job and their ability to advance there. Women struggle to fulfill their roles at work while also putting out more labour hours than men at home. It’s the story of many women who work, virtually everywhere in the world, both in the past and now.
It’s one thing to read about it and another to negotiate it. People, not just partners, expect women to put their children first, regardless of the cost to their careers, as if women don’t have an equal right to do well in their job while also having a family. I swear, men can both put in the time necessary and count on someone else handling it at home so that they can do better for themselves and as breadwinners.
Do men have the career-family conflicts and dilemmas so often experienced by women? Do men go into parenthood expecting to do an unequal amount of child or family care in addition to their full time jobs? Do men in vast numbers decide that their careers are just going to have to suffer for a few years because they’ve become new dads? Do they choose careers that would allow them to work, father and stay sane?
There might be some out there, but they simply don’t match the numbers of women globally. Of course, paternity provisions that allow men to take time from work without loss of pay or status would make a huge difference. So would making the work of caring not seem like a detraction from the real, paid work of the public sphere…you know, something you can’t put on your CV.
Yet, women do this everyday. They leave jobs to care for children. They take leave without pay and a personal cut to their economic autonomy and power. They up the labour hours they spend on reproductive work, despite the fact that they can’t put that on their CV. They do it because women have, largely, always recognised the value of work for family and they’ve continued to prize the joy of caring. But, they also do it because parents, in-laws, partners, friends and strangers on the street think that extra labour and those personal costs are ‘naturally’ theirs and not men’s to bear.
People have told me that women are naturally meant to spend the first years with their children. Whether that is true or not is up for debate. What’s obvious is that this ‘natural’ addition to their labour is almost completely unrecognised by workplaces and the state, who provide 14 weeks – not years – of subsidized maternity leave. So for years, it’s up to women to manage both their desires and right to work outside of the home, and the popular conception that their rightful work is actually in the home. Any dudes out there going through this too?
Somehow, women have to also account for the sacrifices their families make for their careers. Doing what you have to do, and what you used to do before family in order to do well seems like a luxury, something to be grateful for, because really it’s not something that should be expected, without guilt, as a right. Relationships and parenting are a negotiation, but how many dudes make decisions about their work duties in relation to their partner’s permission. Or their sense that if they are not there at home with the kids, they are lucky that someone is willing to fill in for and stick by them. Yet, people of all walks of life invest in these ideas.
Somehow, few people are as invested in what this means for women across classes, careers, family types and size, aspirations, ethnicity, religion and nationality. If women’s inequality, precisely because of their double burden, doesn’t appear on the horizon to you early, you can’t miss it once you have a baby or a friend, colleague or sibling has a baby. Suddenly, you see it everywhere.
With the social expectation that women must naturally, expertly and effortlessly combine their career aspirations with unequal responsibility for family, while still looking good, we are being set up to fail, even if its only in terms of properly looking after ourselves. Women do it of course. They get up at 5am to cook. They fold clothes at night. They hustle from work to hustle to take their children home to hustle to get to their class on time at UWI. Somehow, they still make it to the gym, the hairdresser as well as to church or to their community group or PTA meeting. Some men might do it too, but doubtlessly this is a women’s reality for many – even educated women, empowered women, feminist women.
If women are ‘naturally’ meant to unequally labour for their families, the entire economy should be organised around a valuing of and support for that. Otherwise, who loses? If mass numbers of women take up this responsibility although it is not ‘naturally’ theirs, this too should be seen as a social and socialisation issue, not an individual experience. Otherwise, what about women’s collective experience will remain unrecognised and invalidated? If women have to negotiate with men around these issues, how can they best be supported? And, what does a lack of real institutional, societal and structural support say about the naturalisation and acceptance of women’s inequality?
Women, with or without children, have equal right as men to work and a career. Women with both full-time jobs and children have a right to equal labour hours as men, whether in or out of the home. Women who become unequally responsible have a right to have that additional labour valued with societal and institutional support. Anything less withholds rather than shares care – and I mean care for women – and is simply not fair.
grrlscene 
May 15, 2012 at 7:16 am
Gabby,
Thanks for your detailed replies. Keep good.
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May 15, 2012 at 10:31 am
🙂
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May 14, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Gabby,
As to your points.
1. We agree
2. There was definitely a distinction in traditional gender roles. Unlike you however, I do not see it as a result of an imposed patriarchal system but rather as an evolutionary process that dealt with the specifics of existence in pre-agricultural time (which is 99.9% of human existence). As things like industrialization, security and birth control made gender specialization less necessary, women in particular have been increasingly able to throw off their traditional gender obligations. This however does not mean that men were any less obligated to fulfil their gender roles, which include hard manual labour, working in filthy conditions and the risk of injury and death.
3. As a heterosexual man with much personal and anecdotal examples of relationships with women I can tell you that status and income are extremely important for many women when choosing a mate. Its not just a matter of male ego. Women enforce traditional gender obligations on men all the time.
4. Frankly there seems to be many different types of feminist thinking.
5. I really don’t understand what you are saying here. Obviously there should be certain baseline requirements set down by law that employers must follow in terms of health, safety, environment and wage. But to argue for the state to create special benefits specifically for women seems to contradict everything feminism allegedly stands for. That is not equality, that is privilege.
Finally, while I don’t doubt your expertise in the area of feminism, I think it speaks volumes about the yawning vacuum of male representation in a field that is about them. I’m not a feminist or gay. I don’t believe men or masculinity is intrinsically threatening, nor do I believe men’s history is one of subjugation or of abusers of women. I think men and boys are in crisis and need help and we need our own solutions to solve the problem.
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May 14, 2012 at 10:34 pm
dear hollis, another quick reply! i’m giving myself 5 minutes of typing to make sure i respond 🙂
1. be careful of evolutionary explanations for gender roles…this naturalises one type of family unit and the fact that there are societies where women and men both performed caring and hunting roles suggests otherwise, certainly more flexibility than an evolutionary argument suggests….see the Aka people as an example. Shifts from industrialisation in fact sometimes created and cemented such roles through the invention of a ‘private’/female sphere vs a ‘public’/male one.
2. As stan gray writes in an excellent article you may find on-line, sharing the shop floor, men don’t always want women in these areas of work with them and neither do they want them to become safer or less risky because the job won’t be a site for defining masculinity anymore and also then women might join (and possibly “take over!”) ….really, the idea shouldn’t be that there are jobs for men and jobs for women, or jobs that cause injury or require health risk. gray suggests that men should struggle for improvements to the conditions of those jobs (including status, safety and pay) and also welcome women into them as well as decent employment options.
3. yep, both women and men reinforce patriarchal gender ideals of masculinity and femininity – we are, after all, both schooled by a sexist society…change requires both to step up to transform why we value each other as human beings, not for money or beauty, but because we are.
4. agreed.
5. i’m running out of time! just to say, equality or the same treatment and equity or fair treatment are not the same. to give an example, women should have appropriate spaces for breast-milk pumping in offices and women should be given time to pump. i had to pump three times a day at work when i started back – my baby lived solely off my body for 6 1/2 months even while i was putting in 8 hour days in my office. to ask for such time and space isn’t asking for privilege, nor ‘equality’ (as men don’t need the same treatment), but it is asking for something only fair if we want to support women’s work to raise healthy generations. just one example….
6. l don’t teach men’s history as one of abusers. i teach that they unequally benefit from patriarchy but they also lose out too, particularly subordinated groups of men. there are good reasons to transform patriarchal ideologies to improve both women’s and men’s lives.
7. People often talk about the lack of men in gender studies, presenting it as a hegemonic discipline when, ironically, it remains very much a marginal one. sort of like arguing that women are too powerful in this little area and that’s a big issue….men do desperately need to get into work in gender relations and into men’s movement building, but very few really want to, though more are more willing when it comes to re-establishing men’s rightful roles and also when the question of men as the victim (of women) is their concern. i have spent much time working with the fledgling men’s movement and i can tell you more women are willing to do that work than men….i can however, put you in touch with CARIMAN, a Caribbean men’s organisation, if you are willing to fill the gap of men in gender transforming work and the caring work of activism and organising.
8. finally, boys and men are experiencing problems, but so are women and girls. and for me certainly patriarchal privilege and hegemonic masculinity is at the heart of both. i work to support other masculinities and a non-patriarchal organisation of society, recognising that this will help women and men.
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May 13, 2012 at 8:09 pm
Gabby,
You ask a lot of questions about societies expectations of men in these circumstances but I notice you don’t ask the most important one. “Are men expected to be the primary income earner in the family”? You frame it like women have the onerous burden of choosing between family, career or an unhappy mix of both. Not realizing that at least you have a choice.
As Warren Farrell has said, for the majority of men the only choice is work, work or work. I know many women who are working right now that are fully expecting to leave their jobs and become stay at homes when they get married. How many women would accept men becoming stay at home dads while they went out and worked?
Another thing you mentioned, how it is assumed in the culture that the maternal presence is crucial for children during their early years. I agree, in fact the maternal presence is viewed as superior entirely, even by the courts. Which works in women’s favour when it comes to matters of paternity.
This is my problem with feminist thinking – the assumption that gender relationships are based on one-sided obligations imposed on women. In fact both genders have obligations and while feminism has allowed women to reassess their role, men are still expected to uphold their traditional obligations. Women fought for the right to hold an equal place in the workforce. Now that you are recognizing the downside of juggling work with motherhood society has to pay for the inconvenience it causes?
I would argue that a better solution would be to negotiate beforehand the way work and parental responsibilities are shared with your partner.
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May 14, 2012 at 12:31 pm
Dear Hollis,
Thanks for your engagement! 🙂 Let me respond really quickly to a few things – in the hope that I don’t give any mis-impressions in an appreciative but quick reply to you.
1. I guess because this is a diary, I write from the expectation in my own life – which is not that my husband is or will be the primary breadwinner. We are equal wage earners, but he’s also a musician with a home studio and i have a day job so we experience our responsibilities differently. I hear you though and fully support the idea that the question of staying at home should be equally open to both partners, if economics permits that question at all.
2. Keep in mind why women were the ones to stay home: 1. they earned less money 2. they were generally in lower-status jobs 3. they were seen as ‘natural’ nurturers vs men who were seen to derive status, identity and fulfillment of ‘natural’ roles through waged work in the public sphere. To this day, boys are not given cooking sets or tea sets or baby dolls because teaching them to labour in the care economy is seen as unnatural to their gender identity and as associating them with low status aspects of femininity. So, really changing the options for boys/men involves tearing down the lessons they get in not being feminine, like women or doing female roles/work.
I think you stereotype the courts question and don’t unfortunately have time for proper engagement (working mom that i am :)), but just to say that women often got the kids because they managed the majority of care responsibility, their partners could not give up their higher income or hours in the workforce to become dependent on women or sacrifice their careers, and women often got money from men as part of their uncounted ‘earnings’ as unwaged wives and unrecognised contributors to men’s family income. This of course will change as both women and men work and as men are encouraged to have equal responsibility for children when relationships break up….but I’d be careful to stereotype what was a valid movement to not separate women from their children because, for example, for a variety of reasons they could not as easily show the ability to support them on their own etc etc etc
3. I think increasingly, as women do better and better in schooling and employment, more will want men who can will stay home. Though these are times in flux, I think you’ll find the spectrum of women out there.
4. You entirely misunderstand ‘feminist thinking’ which has fought for men to share in housework and domestic work, to be seen as equally capable of nurturing and child care. feminists have fought to have paternity and maternity protections as part of their advocacy for family, and have fought to critique the idea of the male breadwinner and female nurturer, opened up space for women to be economically independent, and ultimately challenged a patriarchal definition of gender roles that upholds ‘traditional’ expectations for men that work for neither them nor women….especially when either or both parties want to create transformed options. I know this about feminism because I work in it and teach it. Feminists have been and continue to be at the forefront of activism to transform masculinities and femininities to create more options for both to experience fair, equal gender relations. I myself engage in this work constantly. Do you?
5. Finally, I completely disagree with this sentence: “Now that you are recognizing the downside of juggling work with motherhood society has to pay for the inconvenience it causes?”. Women, like men, have the right to work…and many women have always worked…and many work now not by choice alone. If “society” has to pay for the “inconvenience” of women working, who do you think was paying for the convenience of men working? Like men, women have the right to be able to combine their economic with their familial responsibilities, which would reflect the reality of our lives. I think this is a more productive position that one you hold.
6. “I would argue that a better solution would be to negotiate beforehand the way work and parental responsibilities are shared with your partner” : I agree.
Please feel welcome to sit in my Men and Masculinities class, held in the second semester at UWI if you wish. Just let me know.
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