I found an article published last June by the Pew Research Center about stay-at-home dads. Researchers found that numbers of stay-at-home dads have increased since 1989, when dads were 10% of stay-at-home parents. In 2012 the amount had climbed to 16%, down a bit from 2010 when the United States was just getting over the recession.
Initially I assumed this shift was due to changing cultural expectations around the roles of men and women and childcare. It is, partly - but the majority of men indicated that they were at home as a consequence of an illness or a disability.
Only 21% of the about 2 million dads were “caring for home/family”, which makes them the smallest of the 4 categories. On the other hand, that number was 4 times higher in 2012 than it was in 1989.
Answers for why we have so few stay-at-home dads are numerous, intertwined, and part of why the phenomenon exists in the first place.
To start, women face difficulties in the working world: they could be fired in advance of legally mandated maternity leave or not hired because of it (Newman).
Yet socialization appears to play the largest role.
The scale is still tilted towards women as primary caregivers. Because women are often distracted by caregiving responsibilities, they’re less likely to meet the workplace requirements of a “good, committed employee” (Newman), and because of this are ultimately less competitive when it comes to promotion decisions. Sometimes bosses assume they won’t be able to meet these proofs-of-dedication (extra hours, business trips, professional conferences, etc) even if they don’t have children, because they’re women (Newman).
The majority of both men and women are socialized to fit roles not conducive to the existence of stay-at-home dads, but it may be masculine culture and norms that need the most drastic resocialization. Women have entered the workforce in increasing numbers over the past 50 years, and currently they outnumber men in college enrollment rates. Women have gained some form of general acceptance in the workforce and shifted their role to an extent, yet it remains imperative to a masculine identity to hold a job. An important measure of success to many men in the United States is how well they compete against other men to climb a career ladder. On top of that, Pascoe’s findings in Dude, You’re a Fag strongly suggest that another important facet of a masculine identity is a position of dominance in relation to women, a position that would be difficult to justify when the woman in a heterosexual couple is the primary earner. As a result men often fill the role of “breadwinner” in a heterosexual couple, and devote their energy to work at the expense of family time, to a surprising degree (Lareau).
If men remain largely unwilling to take the caregiver role, women will continue to be held back economically by childcare and household responsibilities. If taking care of children and making money were awarded equal value for both genders, then both would have greater choice and more equal treatment. The Pew Research data shows a baby step in this direction.
The majority of both men and women are socialized to fit roles not conducive to the existence of stay-at-home dads, but it may be masculine culture and norms that need the most drastic resocialization. Women have entered the workforce in increasing numbers over the past 50 years, and currently they outnumber men in college enrollment rates. Women have gained some form of general acceptance in the workforce and shifted their role to an extent, yet it remains imperative to a masculine identity to hold a job. An important measure of success to many men in the United States is how well they compete against other men to climb a career ladder. On top of that, Pascoe’s findings in Dude, You’re a Fag strongly suggest that another important facet of a masculine identity is a position of dominance in relation to women, a position that would be difficult to justify when the woman in a heterosexual couple is the primary earner. As a result men often fill the role of “breadwinner” in a heterosexual couple, and devote their energy to work at the expense of family time, to a surprising degree (Lareau).
If men remain largely unwilling to take the caregiver role, women will continue to be held back economically by childcare and household responsibilities. If taking care of children and making money were awarded equal value for both genders, then both would have greater choice and more equal treatment. The Pew Research data shows a baby step in this direction.
I'm glad you recognized this double-standard that comes with parenting roles in heterosexual couples. If women expect to be treated the same as men in the work force (which they should), then men should be treated the same as women when it comes to parenting. Women are assumed to be more maternal and loving and thus more fit for raising a child, but I wonder how much of that is due to feminine "nature" instead of socialization around conventional ideas of motherhood and normal parenting. Hopefully the rise of stay-at-home dads will help advance the number of women in the workforce and help them gain economic equity with men.
ReplyDelete