Unfinished Business (14 page)

But no longer. I would advise all students fortunate enough to attend a top college or university to ensure that they will be able to use their education over the course of their lives to be able to support themselves
and
to enrich their lives and the lives of others, certainly including children. I continue to believe as an article of faith that the vast majority of people want
both:
to advance their own goals and create an identity through rewarding work, and to be able to care for their loved ones.

I believe that individual women and men land in different places on the spectrum between extremely caring and extremely
competitive. My aunt Mary falls way over on the competitive end. She was a tennis champion in the 1950s; was the first woman to win a varsity letter at the University of Virginia,
on the men's team
; and is still winning happily at golf and bridge at eighty. My hairdresser, Aziz, is highly entrepreneurial, but he is also a born nurturer. Caring for others is what makes him happy.

Moreover, the best competitors are often players who think about others enough to be able to play well on a team, subjugating their own ego to be able to make the pass that will allow another teammate to score. Similarly, the best caregivers are those who can take enough time for themselves to avoid burnout; the best managers, those who know how to get their team's competitive juices flowing but also to look out for the needs of individual team members. Valuing care can mean understanding the many ways that care and competition complement each other.

If we succeed in freeing ourselves from the competitive mystique, understanding that competition is a valuable human drive but no more valuable than care, we will no longer see the liberation of women as freedom only to compete. On the flip side, if we truly believe that care is just as valuable as competition, then we will realize that men who are only breadwinners are missing out on something deeply satisfying and self-improving. And if both men and women traded off caring and competition in more equal measure, then it would become much easier to customize both workplaces and careers to allow time for both.

Such a vision may sound utopian, but it could happen tomorrow. It just needs one thing…

There's an all-too-common story of gender discrimination in America today, one that's now as iconic as the old tales of women entering the workforce and being asked to serve coffee. It's the story of what happens when a fully competent dad meets a well-intentioned but clueless woman at the park or the grocery store. In an article titled “I Hate Being Called a Good Dad” posted on the
New York Times
blog
Motherlode
, Matt Vilano writes:

It started the way all of our twice-monthly trips to Target do—the 1-year-old in a backpack on my back, the 3-year-old leading the charge, yanking my hand like a sled dog with a view of the open trail.

We charged through the automatic doors, waving at ourselves on the video screen as always. We grabbed a shopping cart. We stopped at the complimentary sanitary wipes. Then I engaged in what my Big Girl calls “the wipedown”: A comprehensive (read: wildly neurotic) disinfecting of any part of the cart she possibly might touch.

About halfway through the ritual—let's estimate nine wipes in—I noticed a middle-aged woman watching us, smiling.

“You're a good dad,” she remarked, in a tone that implied she had just seen a Sasquatch.

For Vilano, this incident reflects a “heinous double standard,” where he is praised for behavior that in a mother would be regarded as absolutely routine. Andrew Romano, author of a
Newsweek
cover story on masculinity, calls it the “
soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Just for a moment, flip it and imagine that as a woman you're praised for writing a good report at work, a completely routine action for a man, and praised in a way that makes clear that the person who is complimenting you didn't actually expect you could do it so well. For years when Andy and I first knew each other, I would say something and he would respond, “That's really smart,” in a tone that made it clear he was slightly surprised. I would blow up, of course. But Vilano concludes on exactly this point: “The act of labeling someone ‘a good dad' suggests that most dads are, by our very nature as fathers, somehow less than ‘good.' ”

To counter these assumptions and carefully prescribed roles, men need a movement of their own. Most of the pervasive gender inequalities in our society—for both men and women—cannot be fixed unless men have the same range of choices with respect to mixing caregiving and breadwinning that women do. To make those choices real, however, men will have to be respected and rewarded for making them: for choosing to be a lead parent; to defer a promotion or work part-time to spend more time with their children, their parents, or other loved ones; to take paternity leave or to ask for flexible work hours; to reject a culture of workaholism and relentless face time.

Men need to hear this message not as admonition so much as permission: not what they should do, but what they can do. They
are free to be caregivers too, and they can be just as competent in these roles as the women in their lives. Women need to hear this message as encouragement to rethink how we imagine and value the men in our lives.

Real equality for men and women needs a men's movement to sweep away the gender roles that we continue to impose on men even as we struggle to remove them from women. To ensure that we socialize boys to believe that they can be anything they want to be, from full-time father to elementary school teacher to investment banker, on an equally valued continuum. To make providing for a family about time as much as about money. To make caregiving cool. To make being a family man just as masculine as being a he-man.

Moreover, they will have to be respected and rewarded
as men
. In a column entitled “
How Brad Pitt Brings Out the Best in Dads,”
Financial Times
columnist Simon Kuper discusses the value of seeing an undoubtedly masculine movie star “with a toddler strapped to his chest.” Pitt and his fellow baby-toting movie star dads are not actually spending their days chasing children, of course—most have an army of paid help. But the subconscious role modeling helps, Kuper argues. The images have the same impact on men that pictures of women CEOs have on women. Men are free to be caregivers too; they can be just as competent in these roles as the women in their lives; and yes, women will still be attracted to them.

For all the skeptics who shake their heads and think I'm challenging nature itself, consider just how certain men have been for centuries that the highest and best role for women was as wives and mothers, daughters and sisters, nurturing and caring for others. My eyes were opened on this score by a letter from a young man who identified himself as “
an African American male with a degree from a top 10 university and a salary of near 100k.” I'll call
him Charles. He took issue with my statement in
The Atlantic
that when choices have to be made, women seem to feel a deeper imperative to trade off work in favor of family than men do. He asked, “Couldn't you write a ‘Why Men Can't Have it All' article with the exact same statistics arguing that social pressures on men force them to put work over family and women are better off because they more often get the family part?”

Anticipating my skepticism, Charles went on: “One response might be that because we haven't really heard that from men they likely don't feel this way. However that would be to deny the larger implications of social pressures on men to be manly in general.” But of course, deep down, as a woman who has been surrounded by men all her life, I think I know what men think and want, whether I admit it or not. Charles was one step ahead of me here too. “When it was the norm that women were dutiful silent wives,” he wrote, “I'm sure many men believed women didn't want careers. As a man, I may choose a high-powered career over child rearing, and be deeply saddened by it, but I won't cry, or complain, or let on at all publicly. Instead, it remains the norm for me to have to suck it up and take it like a man.”

Check and checkmate. None of us are free from the biases we grow up with, imbibing them from the nursery on. Indeed, even in the process of writing this book, I realized that I never ask my teenage sons to clean up the kitchen the way I did as a girl, but instead to do more “boy” chores like taking out the trash, the kinds of chores my brothers did. They set the table and bus their plates, but I think that if I had daughters, I would have asked them to rinse those plates, load the dishwasher, wash the pots, and wipe down the counters long since. So we all have plenty of work to do. As men often discovered in the first couple of decades of the women's movement, it's tough to retrain yourself after years of knee-jerk thinking.

The majority of American women have demanded over the last half century that society reject and revise traditional norms about what women want and what they can do. It is time to do the same for men.

A
BOUT SIX MONTHS AFTER MY
Atlantic
article came out, I had dinner with a group of Princeton undergraduates. We talked about a number of things that were on their minds: politics in general, the presidential debates, work and family. A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then several young women asked me about the responses I received to the article. After about ten minutes of that conversation, I saw that the men in the room—roughly 50 percent of the attendees—had gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he “had been raised in a strong feminist household” and considered himself to be fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys around the table nodded in agreement.

That male silence is widespread, at least in public. But it is changing. Roughly 15 to 20 percent of the responses to my article that I have personally received have been from men—the same percentage of men that I find in my audiences when I give speeches. And more and more men are taking to the blogosphere and the pages of periodicals to insist that the debate about relations between men and women not be conducted almost entirely among women. They want to be heard and they have very clear ideas about what they want to say.

I
N THE FALL OF
2014,
The Atlantic
published another article that sparked widespread debate among men and women. This one was called “What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Taught Me About Being a Stay-at-Home Dad,” by a hotshot young lawyer—a former clerk for Justice Ginsburg—named Ryan Park. Ginsburg is famous for her own battles on behalf of women's equality as a lawyer in the 1970s and as a woman navigating her own difficulties fitting her family and career together. She told her clerks, “If you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.” In that spirit, Park decided to support his wife, who is a doctor, by spending a year as the primary caregiver for their toddler daughter, Caitlyn.

Park writes that the time at home with his daughter reminded him “of the time I'd spent living in a foreign country. There was the same perpetual novelty, that intense awareness that elevates even the most ordinary moments.” He asks himself,

Did I miss the thrill and challenge of debating knotty legal questions with a Supreme Court justice? Well, let's just say that most of the books I was reading now came with pictures of panda bears and barn animals. But every night, even after the most pedestrian of days, I sat and reflected on the beauty of the moments that had passed.

Park is also refreshingly candid about society's prejudices regarding men. He describes the “good-natured skepticism” that people often express when he discusses what he calls his “struggle to manage my competing commitments to family and career.” He encounters an “underlying assumption that women and men have
different visions of what matters in life—or, to be blunt about it, that men don't find child-rearing all that rewarding, whereas women regard it as integral to the human experience.”

I could not have said it better. As a woman, I object to the presumption that I am somehow more domestic and nurturing than my male colleagues are. That may be true in any individual case, but it should not be assumed because I am a woman. But why then should we impose the opposite stereotype on men, assuming that they automatically want to invest more in work than in their relationships with their families? Park says, “I do not think this assumption is true, generally speaking. I am certain it is not true for me.”

R
YAN
P
ARK IS NOT ALONE
. Evidence of a profound shift in the ways men are thinking about themselves and their lives is glimmering on the horizon. Wharton School professor Stewart Friedman reports that for the first time ever, one of his eighteen-year-old male students, when asked what he wanted to do after college, replied that he planned to be a “stay-at-home dad.” Kunal Modi, then co-president of the Harvard Business School Student Association, wrote an article in which he urged his fellow male students to “man up” for economic and egalitarian reasons. “
Raising children and running a household are not ‘women's' roles,” he wrote, and “treating them as such is counterproductive to your own family's economic well-being.” And at Harvard Law School,
Dean Martha Minow says that the one change she has observed over thirty years of teaching law is that today the questions about how on earth these prospective lawyers are going to manage work and life are coming from young men as well as young women.

Even professional athletes, who are under so much pressure
to be seen as traditionally masculine, are now bragging about their infant-wrangling skills. The Mets' second baseman
Daniel Murphy was criticized for taking three days of paternity leave; he responded not by buckling to the flack, but by telling reporters about changing his son's diaper in the middle of the night.

One of the best indicators of changing norms is, as always, Madison Avenue. The ad men (and women) learned quickly what not to do.
In 2012 Kimberly-Clark, manufacturer of Huggies, created a series of ads filled with fathers watching their babies at home, which they thought would be cute and appealing to parents of both genders. The ads included a female voiceover saying, almost condescendingly, “To prove Huggies diapers and wipes can handle anything, we put them to the toughest test imaginable: dads, alone with their babies, in one house, for five days, while we gave moms some well-deserved time off. How did Huggies products hold up to daddyhood?”

Many fathers reacted furiously to the message of presumed paternal incompetence.
A stay-at-home father from Oregon named Chris Routly started a
Change.org
petition called “We're Dads, Huggies. Not Dummies.” It got more than 1,300 signatures.
Huggies eventually pulled the ad and apologized, repeatedly, and in person, at a dad blogger convention called Dad 2.0.

It hasn't taken the advertising industry long to learn from its mistakes. In the 2013 World Series,
Chevrolet aired an ad for its Malibu sedan that had a gentle male voice talking about the importance of family over material wealth. “We don't jump at the sound of the opening bell, because we're trying to make the school bell,” the voiceover intones, as a dad corrals his son into the car, adding, “Corner booth beats corner office any day.” The 2015 Super Bowl ads continued the trend, featuring
an ad for Dove Men+Care that depicted children, young and old, calling out to their fathers from a highchair all the way to the dance floor
at a wedding reception. In case viewers missed the connection, the tagline asked, “What makes a man stronger?” Answer: “Showing that he cares.”

The companies making these commercials spend millions of dollars on consumer research. They are plugging into something their customers want before they fully understand that they want it. The statistics tell the tale. The 2013 Pew Research study that found roughly equal stress levels among mothers and fathers was subtitled “Roles of Moms and Dads Converge as They Balance Work and Family.”
Mothers are still spending more time with their children than fathers are, but almost half the fathers surveyed would like to be spending
more
time with their kids, as opposed to just over a fifth of mothers.