Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
Margaret Mead1
There is an old riddle I remember from high school. It involves a terrible car accident in which a father is killed and his son injured and taken to hospital. When the boy is brought into emergency for surgery, the doctor looks at him and says, ‘I can’t operate on this patient. This is my son.’ The riddle then asks: ‘How is that possible?’
I’ve since heard multiple variations on this riddle, and people still get tripped up by it. ‘I was so cross with myself,’ one friend told me. ‘I couldn’t figure out how the boy could be the doctor’s son, when the father had died in the accident. And I was a med student at the time!’ she said.
The doctor, of course, is the boy’s mother.
It is so obvious, yet many people routinely fail to see the answer. Despite increasing numbers of female doctors, the stereotype of doctors as male remains, as does that of the woman as a full-time parent with no job outside the home, and man as full-time breadwinner and anything but a ‘hands-on’ parent. This idea, though many of us now consciously reject it, is nonetheless still consistently, if unconsciously, present in our lives.
As we saw in chapter 7, an analysis of G-rated films conducted by the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media found that between 2006 and 2009 not one female character was depicted as working in the field of medical science, as a business leader, in law, or politics. In these films, slightly more than 80 per cent of all working characters were male and slightly less than 20 per cent were female, despite the fact that in reality women are around 50 per cent of the workforce.2
But, of course, not all working women are equal. Sociologists often refer to something known as ‘the motherhood penalty’.
. . . women with children are hired 79 per cent less often than those without kids, according to a Cornell University study from 2007. Once they find employment, moms are offered starting salaries that are $11,000 less than men’s.3
Many women find themselves faced with questions by potential employers about marital status, family status and future family plans. Kiki Peppard, who is seeking intervention from the newly formed White House Council on Women and Girls, points out: ‘Employers are using [parental status] information to eliminate qualified female candidates from positions just because they either are a mother or have the potential to become a mother.’4
The assumption that when a child is born the man’s career will be unaffected but the woman will quit working outside the home has form in legislation. Prior to 1966, women in the public service in Australia had to quit work when they got married, and it wasn’t until 1972 that female teachers in all Australian states won the right to keep working once married.5 The idea was that children needed their mothers at home – rather than needing a parent (male or female) – and the law took away any choice the family might have in the matter of how they best saw fit to manage their family life and childcare. This underestimated the abilities of fathers and denied many men the opportunity to be hands-on parents, while women were forced (rather than given a choice) to assume a traditional gender-based role as stay-at-home mothers. The law also presumed that all married women would reproduce. The law has since changed, but in many ways cultural attitudes have not. Unfortunately this is abundantly clear to working women who become pregnant, and to families who do not fit the mould of mother as stay-at-home carer and father as breadwinner.
All of the lip service to motherhood still floats in the air, as insubstantial as clouds of angel dust. On the ground, where mothers live, the lack of respect and tangible recognition is still part of every mother’s experience. Most people, like infants in a crib, take female caregiving utterly for granted.
Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood6
There is, at the time of writing, not a single mother in Australia’s federal Cabinet. This is not a reflection on the abilities of those who are in Cabinet, but it does speak to a larger issue of work culture that sees mothers as less capable of devoting themselves to work outside the home, while a man’s parenthood status remains irrelevant to perceptions of his ability.
In September 2013, after Labor lost the federal election and Kevin Rudd stepped down, there was much speculation about who would take over the leadership of the ALP. Former prime minister Bob Hawke spoke of the contenders, flagging Bill Shorten as his strong favourite (he later became the new leader) in an interview with Sky News Australia’s political editor David Speers. Hawke said of another popular candidate, minister Tanya Plibersek (while gently shaking his head), ‘I don’t think she’s a candidate for leadership, she has a three-year-old child.’ He went on to say that Plibersek was ‘a very, very impressive representative . . . she’s proved herself a capable minister . . .’, however, ‘I think the most that Tanya would be interested in would be . . . deputy.’ Interestingly Shorten, whom Hawke considered the best candidate for the job, had a child of exactly the same age. Speers did not press Hawke on why a woman with a three-year-old would not be interested in leadership while a man with a three-year-old would be a perfect choice. Both men seemed to find the assumption unremarkable.7
As it happens, while there are no mothers in Cabinet, the majority of Cabinet members are fathers. The only woman in Cabinet, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, suggests that this is just the way it is: ‘. . . women can’t have it all. They can have plenty of choices, but at the end of the day, they choose something which means they can’t have something else.’8
Leaving aside the seemingly obvious fact that no one can technically ‘have it all’, in the real sense, why is it that, even now, the most powerful people in our country believe that work/life balance and the important role of parenting is simply ‘women’s business’ rather than the business of both parents?
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When I researched where to give birth to my first child, I looked for a place that would welcome my baby’s father and accommodate him. Parenting was a priority for both of us, and with each of our careers being where they were at – including the fact that I would be hosting a crime documentary series only months after the birth, and we knew I would be the primary financial contributor in the near future – Berndt’s role as a hands-on father was an important consideration. He took time off from teaching at university to welcome our child and to be there throughout her first year of life, and he came with me every day on set so she could be near and I could breastfeed. We did it together and that was our plan. It was a plan that started with the birthing classes we attended together to prepare for what was to come, and included him being in hospital when I gave birth, and while I was recovering.
When I was pregnant we found a suitable private hospital nearby and did a tour in my second trimester, as parents-to-be were encouraged to do. The hospital’s brochure promised private rooms, in-room beds for partners and an excellent level of care. We were lucky enough to meet the manager, something organised by our obstetrician. She welcomed our insistence on my husband being there in the room. Everything was set – as much as it could be, considering the variables of birth – and when I went into labour months later, right on schedule, we were calm. The birth went well, and was a truly beautiful experience. My husband was right there with me. When we arrived in our room with our tiny newborn, however, and asked about bringing in a bed for my husband, we were told that it was ‘not possible’.
We were stunned. Of course my main focus was the incredible creature in my arms, the fact that she was healthy and the fact that my body and hers were both in one piece. But the hospital we’d specifically chosen for this reason couldn’t accommodate my baby’s father? In 2011? This was, after all, when his presence was most needed – to bond with his newborn child, to hold her in his arms while I slept off the rigours of labour and birth, to talk, to share, learn and support each other, to advocate for my needs and for hers. We were a team. I needed and wanted him there, and it meant a great deal to him to be there every moment during that important time. Then he was told, within earshot of me, that the reason the hospital no longer accommodated fathers was that ‘men are hopeless’.
I was livid.
I am a writer and, as of three years ago (at the time of writing), a parent. Though my career requires some travel, usually I work from home. My husband is also a writer and a parent, and also usually works from home. We are, apart from my ability to breastfeed and, previously, my ability to carry our child to term in my womb, about equal in our various parenting abilities. (Actually, he is much better at all things relating to food, but that is another story.) Yet we are not perceived as such.
My very capable husband is often wrongly assumed to be either bad at parenting (i.e. ‘hopeless’) or to have no interest in it. When we are out he is often asked what he has been up to – a pretty normal question. But when he replies that he is busy writing a novel and being a full-time father the response is, ‘Yes, but what do you do?’ For a man, parenting isn’t perceived as a job. Meanwhile the same people will ask me, ‘How are you coping with being a working mother?’ as if I must feel terribly guilty being able to provide for my family, the word ‘coping’ so loaded that I can just picture ‘Working Mother’ having ‘Nervous Breakdown’. (That and ‘Poor Neglected Lonely Child’.)
Out on his own, running errands or seeing friends, my husband would be asked, ‘How is the baby?’ When out alone, even just getting groceries or picking up the mail minutes from the house, I would be asked, ‘Where is the baby?’ The question was, at times, quite aggressive. When she was very young, the obvious answer was that she was at home with her father, or vice versa, one benefit of being two working stay-at-home parents. But we soon learned that while a father leaving the house without his child is just a man, a woman leaving the house without her child is seen by many as a neglectful parent. To counter this, when I was asked in a particularly pointed way where my child was, I took to responding, ‘Oops! I left her in the car park at the casino again. My bad.’ After some nervous laughter, they left me alone.
We also discovered that when fathers are hands-on child carers – even seen to be changing a single nappy – it’s still common to hear terms like ‘Mr Mum’ bandied about, or for him to be called a ‘wife’. As with women in leadership roles being referred to as ‘men’, fathers involved in caring for their children are often referred to as not quite being men at all – they become mothers, female. During the book tours for the novels I have published since my daughter’s birth, I have been asked many times about how I ‘juggle’ parenting with being a writer. Berndt, who has also published a novel since our daughter’s birth, has yet to be asked such a question.
We are hardly alone in this experience. A number of fathers I know are told it is ‘so sweet that you are babysitting’ when they spend time with their own children in a public park. One father retorted, with considerable frustration, ‘It’s not babysitting to look after your own child!’
Until we can get to the point where men and women can complete the same parenting tasks and the reactions are the same, we will have problems. If you want to create a statue for me for taking care of my daughters, create one for the moms who are doing the same damn thing every day for their kids without receiving a ‘Thank you’ or an ‘Ooooh’ or ‘Ahhhh.’ These behaviors should be expected of moms and dads. No exceptions.
Doyin Richards, The Good Men Project9
‘It does often feel like the bar is very low for many dads and it’s difficult to break out of this mould that’s been formed for them,’ Murray Galbraith told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2013. ‘Much of the parenting advice is heavily geared towards women.’ (His response was to launch a group called Pretty Rad for a Dad, with the first project being a documentary on the subject.)10 I was asked many times in my daughter’s first year if I’d ‘joined a mother’s group’, while my husband was never asked about, or invited to participate in, a ‘father’s group’. The term ‘parenting group’ was never used. The implication was clear: ‘Women look after children. Men don’t belong here.’
Dr Anne Summers recalls her time in the Office of the Status of Women in the 1980s, and one small but important victory for parental equality:
As a result of OSW intervention, the place where parents could go to change their baby’s nappies was removed from the women’s toilets. This meant fathers travelling with young children could use them and, to underscore this, we ensured they were called Parents’ Change Rooms rather than the proposed Mothers’ Change Rooms. Sure, it was a small thing, but . . . a necessary facility for parents was established which, at the time, challenged the assumption that only mothers cared for small children.11
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as of 2003 there were ‘over 5.5 million families in Australia and 87% of the population lived in a family household’.12 The vast majority of men will become fathers. Statistics from the Australian government’s Workplace and Gender Equality Agency put the number at just under 80 per cent. In their recent survey of 2887 workers, the agency saw what they describe as ‘strong evidence for the gendered nature of flexibility requests’, with fewer men requesting, or successfully accessing, workplace flexibility. In particular, fathers working in male-dominated fields were less likely to request time off after the birth of their child, or to request more flexible hours, and they were also less likely to get the requested flexibility if they asked for it. It seems that in many circles, asking for time off to be a dad is not considered professionally (or socially) acceptable. The report stressed that: ‘Flexibility provides the opportunity for men to be more engaged in both caregiving and parenting. A significant number of men are seeking to be active fathers.’13
In a 2011/2012 study, Converge International and the Boston College Center for Work & Family surveyed 784 Australian fathers and 963 American fathers. They found that: ‘Australian fathers . . . showed a very large gap between their desired and current state: 65% said that both parents should provide equal amounts of care while only 34% said that this is actually the case . . .’14
Individual choices are vital, but so too is a work culture that allows for choice, as well as an attitude among health providers, in hospitals, in the general community and in extended families, that men and women have equal status as parents. If caring is seen as exclusively ‘feminine’ and fathers are not considered capable of caring for their children, that ‘very large gap between their desired and current state’ is unlikely to close. When families make decisions that are best for them, those decisions should be respected (two working parents, a stay-at-home mum or a stay-at-home dad, etc).
The subject of work/life balance is often raised in public forums, however the issue is almost invariably framed as a problem faced by mothers exclusively, and not an issue for fathers or the community in general. Can women have it all? the headlines commonly ask, clearly inferring that attempting to both care for and financially provide for one’s family is asking for ‘it all’ – even too much, as if the average family even had the choice to have one parent stay at home if they wished. Clearly work/life balance is something every person must negotiate in order to live a full life. Men can’t have it all either (though if we were to imagine what that ‘having it all’ would be, it would surely imply something more grand than simply the ability to care for and provide for their own kids, wouldn’t it?). That men would also naturally need to, or desire to, live a well-rounded life somehow doesn’t enter into the discussion.
As with so many issues relating to gender roles and pressures, legislation and policy are important, but even when laws technically allow for flexibility of individual choice, culture needs to catch up. Social pressures remain. The New Dad report of 2012 found that roughly 90 per cent of fathers expressed that they ‘would like to be remembered for the quality of care rather than size of the pay packet’.15 How curious, then, that men are less likely to be granted work flexibility in order to be active fathers, and images of the ‘ideal man’ in our culture still so consistently revolve around physical strength and material wealth (the sporting hero, the business suit, the car, the expensive watch), while mainstream male characters in entertainment still so consistently focus on the qualities of brute strength, aggression and stoic lack of emotion.
In a small win for work/life flexibility in Germany, the second most powerful person in German politics, Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, told the tabloid Bild in 2014 that he would be taking time off on Wednesday afternoons to be a dad. ‘My wife has a job, and on Wednesdays it’s my turn to pick up our daughter from nursery. And I’m looking forward to it.’ He explained that politicians needed to take time off to be parents, ‘otherwise we don’t know what normal life is like’.16
One can only hope that, in time, the issue of work/life balance will be acknowledged as a struggle that we all share to varying degrees.
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Strongly gender-typed toys might encourage attributes that aren’t ones you actually want to foster. For girls, this would include a focus on attractiveness and appearance, perhaps leading to a message that this is the most important thing – to look pretty. For boys, the emphasis on violence and aggression (weapons, fighting, and aggression) might be less than desirable in the long run.
Professor Judith Elaine Blakemore17
Researchers invariably agree that the toys our children use during their early playtime and explorations of the world are vital to their development. While, with a bit of imagination, many household objects can be used as toys (mixing spoons for magic wands, cardboard boxes for cabins, tea towels for hero capes, etc), it is a modern convention to buy ready-made toys for children, and there are many on offer. As of 2010, the children’s toy industry was estimated to be worth over US$83 billion annually.18
As most parents have no doubt noticed, many commercially available toys are aimed specifically at boys or girls in design and packaging, using themes and colours considered specific to one gender and picturing children of that gender playing with the toys in the marketing material. And this is where it gets fascinating – a large number of toys aimed at girls have fewer functions and less power.
For instance, a grey electronic toy was recently advertised as a ‘Boy’s Laptop’ with fifty functions while the ‘Girl’s Laptop’ in the same advertisement was bright pink and had twenty-five functions. The price was similar for both, despite the fact that the ‘Girl’s Laptop’ had only half the functions.19 A 2009 Toys “R” Us catalogue featured both telescopes and microscopes for kids. Cool, right? Except in both cases, the versions made for ‘girls’ (i.e. the ones which were bright pink) were the less powerful toys – 600x magnification on the pink one versus 900x for the regular version, and just 90x magnification for the pink version versus 250x or 525x respectively for the other toys.20
Numerous sociologists and commentators have noted how rarely toys marketed at girls have building components, a focus on maths, or even primary colours in their design rather than pink or pastel colours, and the number of toys ‘for girls’ aimed at enhancing physical ‘beauty’ – a ‘mermaid vanity’, a ‘fashion wardrobe’ etc. – while there are no similar toys aimed at boys. Toys aimed specifically at girls also tend to encourage caring (cuddly animal toys, babies, prams, kitchenware, tea sets), while boys’ toys rarely have a focus on looking after others.
The obvious problem with dividing up toys by gender is that such divisions commonly make certain kinds of early development exclusive to one gender. When toys marketed to boys promote maths, science, building, problem-solving and being physically active, while many toys marketed to girls promote social skills, caring and decoration, both genders miss out on the early learning skills encouraged by the toys of their opposite gender, and also come to learn that playing or exploring the world in some ways is okay for either girls or for boys, but not both.
The lessons for boys about their supposed ‘unsuitability’ for caring starts early. Where the girl is encouraged at every turn to care for stuffed animal and toy babies in prams, the boy does not get to play with dolls. The ‘dolls’ he has are action figures. These toys are created for action, and most importantly for physical violence, not for caring. They come with swords, guns, spaceships and tanks, not blankets and prams. While Barbie may at first spring to mind when we speak of dolls, it is important to remember that the most common dolls have traditionally been those of babies and small children, made for the purposes of imaginative play and dress-up, but most centrally for the development of the instinct to look after others. Like the ever-popular toy kitchen or tea set, dolls of this kind are marketed exclusively to girls, as if to indicate that boys will not naturally be inclined to – nor will find themselves needing to – care for others, not even their own families one day. Or, as implied by the lack of kitchen sets aimed at boys, they won’t even need to learn to feed themselves. By discouraging the natural human instinct to care and show emotion in boys from a young age – just as we discourage leadership, building, sport, scientific pursuits and adventurousness in many girls – we cut off the development of fundamentally important human qualities.
The sensitive boy is not ‘girly’, he is a sensitive boy. The adventurous girl is not a ‘tomboy’, she is an adventurous girl.
When I was a Girl
When I was a girl they called me tomboy
because I didn’t like princesses
I didn’t like Barbie dolls
I didn’t like skirts
When I was a girl I wanted to be Han Solo
Spiderman not Mary Jane. Superman not Lois Lane.
When I was a girl I wanted Lego.
Books.
Not Barbie.
Hot wheels.
Not hot rollers.
It seemed only fair that I should carry the whip and the blaster.
When I was a girl they called me a tomboy
but now I have a woman’s eyes
and I see a child who just wanted life
to be adventure instead of waiting
and skirts were no good for going places fast.
Jumping
fences
Climbing
trees
The most important princess in the galaxy was in chains
on Tatooine, at the fringes of the Northern Dune Sea
at the feet of Jabba the hut.
Barbie wasn’t chained up
but all the same she didn’t DO anything
She had shoes but no map. A hairbrush but no tools.
So when I won her in a kids’ running race I cried. But my
mum helped me dye the blonde hair black, cut the head off
and resew it, and stitch her cheek to make her a raven-
haired monster. FrankenVampirella.
She had adventures. She was strong.
Still, Mary Jane was busy getting saved
Wonder Woman had dropped the Wonder
and was going by ‘Diana’
having given up her superpowers to open a boutique.
(True story.)
Little wonder I settled on Han.
Spiderman.
Superman.
‘Tomboy’.
And now I am a mother
I want my girl to aspire to freedom. To adventure.
I want her to live
Fully
without being called boy.