Caroline Zielinski
archillesStay-at-home-dads: why are they still a rarity?
May 2nd 2008 01:53
In the 21st Century, many believe that we have reached an era of ‘post feminism’, where both sexes have equal opportunities in terms of their careers, sexualities and personal lifestyles. There is talk of women becoming ‘freemales’, who are basically females strongly opposed to commitment and settling down with a husband, the two kids and a white picket fence. We also often hear about the metro-sexual man, who is savvy, fashionable yet masculine, or the sensitive, arty boys who are rebelling against the stereotypical macho- alpha male prototype. Yet it is the rising trend of the stay-at- home dad, a pioneer of equality between men and women who is happy with the role reversal which so many have scorned before him that is propagating public debate.
The concept of a traditional household has always relied on the man as the breadwinner and the woman as the stay-at-home partner and domestic/ child carer. Even with the increasing number of women entering the workforce in the mid 20th Century to our modern time, women are still the ones who usually give up their jobs either temporarily, or change to a part-time working environment. A recent article cited that for every 12,000 men who stay at home to look after the kids, about 230,000 women do the same: that comes down to 1 men for every 20 women. Now, that does not sound like equal division of gender roles to me.
The recent hype about fathers staying at home has most likely become a phenomenon simply due to its rarity, said the director of the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, Professor Barbara Pocock. She also said that this trend was not occurring within all occupations, with the males in executive positions less likely to give them up and settle for a life within the home.
I’m willing to believe that that’s true, especially given the difference between male and female executives’ pay. The new Minister for Women, Tanya Plibersek, has launched a survey to find out about employee pay, and if there is in fact any disparity between the two genders in equal roles. What she found is pretty disturbing. The survey, commissioned by the Equal Opportunity for Woman in the Workplace Agency, had a look at various statistics in terms of salary, where one section included the pay rate of Australia’s top 200 listed companies. It turns out that females in the exact same executive positions are getting paid up to 43 per cent less than their male counterparts. However, this massive and unjust salary dissimilarity does not occur only in high-powered jobs. In fact, as shown by the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics, there is a 34.9 per cent gap between men and women’s weekly pay, not to mention the higher salaries given to male graduates than to female graduates for the exact same role.
Judging by this data, women have a long time left until they catch up to men’s earnings. In terms of the positions taken by the male and the female within a familial context, especially once they begin to have children, this wage inequality begins to have a major impact on who will remain at home, and who will continue to work.
If we take the argument that the partner who earns more money should be the one to continue working, it will, in most situations, be the father. Because of this gross disparity, it makes sense economically that the partner with the lower income stays at home and looks after the family, even if both the partners agree that this is not a fair adjustment. However, to many people this still seems like a perfectly logical arraignment, as the mother is often thought to need the few years, if not more, to stay at home, establish breast feeding and ‘bond’ with her baby, cementing the special connection which can only be achieved through a conscious commitment to directly raising the child.
Although it may certainly be true that it is healthy to establish a trusting and loving relationship with the infant as early as possible, society still does not fully take into consideration the mental strain a full time mother is under. It may seem like a ‘cop-out’, an easy path when compared to a full-time, career orientated women’s job, but in fact, sitting at home all day, cleaning, cooking and looking after a person which cannot speak or technically do anything is a tedious job. In her book, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan calls it the ‘problem that has no name’: by interviewing housewives, she discovers that although they all think that it is perfectly normal for them to be giving up their lives to take care of their husbands and children, they are very unsatisfied with these roles. Friedan mentions one woman who has dedicated her whole life to her family to the point where she no longer knows who she is herself; ‘She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive.’ So even though these women aren’t out there, negotiating over business acquisitions, discovering the cure for cancer or flying off to Paris to report on the next line of trends to hit Australia, they are still busy and useful in their own way, often put in that situation due to exterior circumstances.
Feminists, on the other hand, consider being a stay-at-home mother backward thinking and a regression into traditional patriarchal dominance. They believe that women who do this are not living up to their full potential, choosing to give up their lives for the drudgery of the domestic sphere. In a sense, they have a point: if women do not continue to stand up for their rights now, when will we ever be equal? Unfortunately, it is not as black and white as that.
Considering the position of a stay-at-home mother, it will also be beneficial to evaluate the phenomenon of the stay-at-home father and its impact on society and masculinity. Men who choose to remain at home after the birth of their children are usually judged positively, considered by society to be sensitive, caring and loving people. They are also perceived to be going out of their way and congratulated for doing a job which women have had to do for centuries, without receiving recognition for their hard work. While working mothers are often stigmatised for being too concerned with their work as opposed to their family, a working father is simply seen as a natural occurrence; and a stay at home father a selfless human being!
Nevertheless, there are downsides to these arrangements. Fathers who raise their children may experience suspicion from ‘stay-at-home mothers’ groups, and perhaps kindergarten and/or primary school teachers, or they may feel emasculated by doing a ‘woman’s job’. They may feel removed from their circle of male friends, or vice versa, with their ‘mates’ not knowing how to treat or act around a man who’s given up the traditionally accepted lifestyle for his gender. Either way, it is a difficult concept and compromise for both the partners in the relationship.
And what about if both parents decide to go back to work after a suitable period of time? Although this solves the problem of whose career is deemed more important and/or financially significant, it raises ideas about morality and whether it is right to raise a child through hired help. In these situations, it is most often the mother who is judged as the irresponsible and self-absorbed parent who values her job over the relationship with her child. She is accused of having little or no maternal instinct, and faces an internal dilemma of whether she is doing the right thing by her child. Ironically, the father is never swathed within this moral sphere, allowed to carry on with his work as if nothing had happened.
Although some fathers are indeed beginning to stay at home and taking on a more active role in raising their children, Australian society still has a long way to go until men and women exist on equal footing within the home. However, the problem of gender inequality lies beyond the domestic sphere, extending to the workforce, where female employees are being severely underpaid and as a consequence forced to give up their smaller- earning jobs when faced with an economic problem of sustaining their family. Additionally, the inherent belief that a women’s maternal instincts and reproductive role will automatically bind her to her child, and thus make her want to stay at home for years, doing nothing but taking care of her family and home, is still popular in our society and culture, and until this gender role segregation begins to change, equality in the home will most likely be out of reach for a good few centuries yet.
The concept of a traditional household has always relied on the man as the breadwinner and the woman as the stay-at-home partner and domestic/ child carer. Even with the increasing number of women entering the workforce in the mid 20th Century to our modern time, women are still the ones who usually give up their jobs either temporarily, or change to a part-time working environment. A recent article cited that for every 12,000 men who stay at home to look after the kids, about 230,000 women do the same: that comes down to 1 men for every 20 women. Now, that does not sound like equal division of gender roles to me.
The recent hype about fathers staying at home has most likely become a phenomenon simply due to its rarity, said the director of the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, Professor Barbara Pocock. She also said that this trend was not occurring within all occupations, with the males in executive positions less likely to give them up and settle for a life within the home.
I’m willing to believe that that’s true, especially given the difference between male and female executives’ pay. The new Minister for Women, Tanya Plibersek, has launched a survey to find out about employee pay, and if there is in fact any disparity between the two genders in equal roles. What she found is pretty disturbing. The survey, commissioned by the Equal Opportunity for Woman in the Workplace Agency, had a look at various statistics in terms of salary, where one section included the pay rate of Australia’s top 200 listed companies. It turns out that females in the exact same executive positions are getting paid up to 43 per cent less than their male counterparts. However, this massive and unjust salary dissimilarity does not occur only in high-powered jobs. In fact, as shown by the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics, there is a 34.9 per cent gap between men and women’s weekly pay, not to mention the higher salaries given to male graduates than to female graduates for the exact same role.
Judging by this data, women have a long time left until they catch up to men’s earnings. In terms of the positions taken by the male and the female within a familial context, especially once they begin to have children, this wage inequality begins to have a major impact on who will remain at home, and who will continue to work.
If we take the argument that the partner who earns more money should be the one to continue working, it will, in most situations, be the father. Because of this gross disparity, it makes sense economically that the partner with the lower income stays at home and looks after the family, even if both the partners agree that this is not a fair adjustment. However, to many people this still seems like a perfectly logical arraignment, as the mother is often thought to need the few years, if not more, to stay at home, establish breast feeding and ‘bond’ with her baby, cementing the special connection which can only be achieved through a conscious commitment to directly raising the child.
Although it may certainly be true that it is healthy to establish a trusting and loving relationship with the infant as early as possible, society still does not fully take into consideration the mental strain a full time mother is under. It may seem like a ‘cop-out’, an easy path when compared to a full-time, career orientated women’s job, but in fact, sitting at home all day, cleaning, cooking and looking after a person which cannot speak or technically do anything is a tedious job. In her book, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan calls it the ‘problem that has no name’: by interviewing housewives, she discovers that although they all think that it is perfectly normal for them to be giving up their lives to take care of their husbands and children, they are very unsatisfied with these roles. Friedan mentions one woman who has dedicated her whole life to her family to the point where she no longer knows who she is herself; ‘She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive.’ So even though these women aren’t out there, negotiating over business acquisitions, discovering the cure for cancer or flying off to Paris to report on the next line of trends to hit Australia, they are still busy and useful in their own way, often put in that situation due to exterior circumstances.
Feminists, on the other hand, consider being a stay-at-home mother backward thinking and a regression into traditional patriarchal dominance. They believe that women who do this are not living up to their full potential, choosing to give up their lives for the drudgery of the domestic sphere. In a sense, they have a point: if women do not continue to stand up for their rights now, when will we ever be equal? Unfortunately, it is not as black and white as that.
Considering the position of a stay-at-home mother, it will also be beneficial to evaluate the phenomenon of the stay-at-home father and its impact on society and masculinity. Men who choose to remain at home after the birth of their children are usually judged positively, considered by society to be sensitive, caring and loving people. They are also perceived to be going out of their way and congratulated for doing a job which women have had to do for centuries, without receiving recognition for their hard work. While working mothers are often stigmatised for being too concerned with their work as opposed to their family, a working father is simply seen as a natural occurrence; and a stay at home father a selfless human being!
Nevertheless, there are downsides to these arrangements. Fathers who raise their children may experience suspicion from ‘stay-at-home mothers’ groups, and perhaps kindergarten and/or primary school teachers, or they may feel emasculated by doing a ‘woman’s job’. They may feel removed from their circle of male friends, or vice versa, with their ‘mates’ not knowing how to treat or act around a man who’s given up the traditionally accepted lifestyle for his gender. Either way, it is a difficult concept and compromise for both the partners in the relationship.
And what about if both parents decide to go back to work after a suitable period of time? Although this solves the problem of whose career is deemed more important and/or financially significant, it raises ideas about morality and whether it is right to raise a child through hired help. In these situations, it is most often the mother who is judged as the irresponsible and self-absorbed parent who values her job over the relationship with her child. She is accused of having little or no maternal instinct, and faces an internal dilemma of whether she is doing the right thing by her child. Ironically, the father is never swathed within this moral sphere, allowed to carry on with his work as if nothing had happened.
Although some fathers are indeed beginning to stay at home and taking on a more active role in raising their children, Australian society still has a long way to go until men and women exist on equal footing within the home. However, the problem of gender inequality lies beyond the domestic sphere, extending to the workforce, where female employees are being severely underpaid and as a consequence forced to give up their smaller- earning jobs when faced with an economic problem of sustaining their family. Additionally, the inherent belief that a women’s maternal instincts and reproductive role will automatically bind her to her child, and thus make her want to stay at home for years, doing nothing but taking care of her family and home, is still popular in our society and culture, and until this gender role segregation begins to change, equality in the home will most likely be out of reach for a good few centuries yet.
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