“Daddy Leave” and gender equality at home & work

by adoucet on July 7, 2011 in Caregiving Dads
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I was recently asked by the New York Times to participate in a debate about women and work in Europe, especially in Germany. In the end, the question that appeared  on their Opinion page is not the one I was asked to address (“How can we get men to do more at home?”), although I would have loved to address that more centrally. (Maybe next time!).

Nevertheless, I did address the larger question of gender equality and how men’s parental leave is a critical part of this issue.

Below is the first part of my response; for the full piece, click here.

The quest for greater gender equality in paid work and care work requires multiple strategies that involve both women and men. The International Herald Tribune article about women in the German work force dealt mainly with the issue of women and work. Yet, the challenges that men face, both as workers and as caregivers, must also be addressed.

One way of addressing this is to look to countries like Sweden, Norway and Canada for lessons on how parental leave policies have been used to encourage changing gender relations around paid work and care work. These are policies that recognize and build on the constant interplay between gender equality and gender differences.

In Sweden and Norway, there has been a significant shift away from the “male breadwinner/ female caregiver model” of work and family. This occurred partly through respecting a long-standing practice of long maternity leaves for women combined with affordable, accessible and high-quality child care; to this, they added parental leave policies designed to encourage men to be involved in early child care. One of the rationales for the latter was that getting fathers into the home would help to disrupt a deeply rooted pattern and social norm of women as primary care-giving experts and men as main breadwinners.

Click here to read more and to join in the debate!

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What Difference Does Difference Make? An Appreciation and Review of “Equally Shared Parenting”

by adoucet on June 3, 2011 in Book Reviews, Breadwinning Moms, Caregiving Dads
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Twenty-one years ago, my life was very focused on equally shared parenting.

I was a new doctoral student interviewing British couples who were trying to share housework and childcare (although such couples were notoriously difficult to find back then). And I was a new mother sharing parenting and housework with my husband. While we did not know it at the time, we were in fact practicing what Marc and Amy Vachon describe in their book as “Equally Shared Parenting” (ESP):

“Equally shared parenting is the purposeful practice of two parents sharing equally in the four domains of childrearing, breadwinning, housework and time for self.”

We were both students living in a small student apartment at Cambridge University. With our families back in Canada, we had no family support in England; with my scholarship as our only income, we had little money for extra childcare help. We had no car, no TV, no Internet access. We just split our days between work and childcare, housework (not much), and leisure. While breastfeeding introduced some differences in our days, my husband took on other routine domestic tasks. When our daughter started half-time daycare at the age of two, we alternated the dropping off and picking up, and we had mommy days and daddy days.

That was a long time ago.

In the last twenty one years, I have continued to research and write about the lives of couples who challenge traditional gender norms in paid work and care work (e.g. stay-at-home dads, single fathers, breadwinning mothers, fathers who take parental leave, and gay fathers). And my husband and I have raised three daughters (now 21 and 17-year-old twins) and have gone from equal breadwinners to me being the primary breadwinner. I would describe our journey as shared parenting but not equally shared parenting.

To learn more about my thoughts on the book Equally Shared Parenting by Marc and Amy Vachon, click here to read my recent guest post at PhDinparenting

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