In 2017, Pew Research found that 64 percent of Americans believe that men and women “approach parenting differently.” Of that 64 percent, just under half attribute the difference to biology. Men are more likely than women to credit nature rather than nurture, 58 to 39 percent.1 There is no biological difference between the sexes that explains my husband’s failure to download the classroom communications apps requested by our daughters’ teachers, or to chop the quartered watermelons he regularly brings home and deposits in our refrigerator like an outdoor cat with bird kill on a porch. The frustrations expressed by the mothers I interviewed—full of similar themes—likewise preclude any reasonable organic explanation. However, when asked, “Why is it still this way?” most women list nature as they do their thinking aloud. It is such a comfortable place to land. It spares us some amount of anger or self-recrimination, and it has an intuitive feel.
Nicole, fifty-three, a college administrator in Portland, Oregon, with two kids now finishing high school, remembers the years of arguing with her husband; finally, she laid down her sword. “The giving up happened when the kids were in elementary school,” she says. “My husband just didn’t quite get it. I made it a point to be around more. I thought, This is an important job, even if society doesn’t hold it on a pedestal. I want to do it right. That was the conversation I kept having in my head. Maybe he’s better at taking care of himself, and I was more willing to sacrifice. I think about how it would have worked had I pushed back more. But for a while, I was really pushing back.
“I think he saw it as more equal. I had to come to terms with it,” she continues. “Compared to my father, who left, I have a husband who is giving his kids attention, he’s good with their homework, he gives in the ways that he’s good at doing. He would push back. ‘Well, it’s pretty equal,’ he’d say, and he’d point out all the things he’d done.
“Some of my friends’ marriages seemed more equitable, but you never know. Women, I don’t know if they always talk about this, you just endure and you accept. There was grumbling. My marriage struggled. I went into it thinking we’d spend equal time tending to the kids’ needs. I was doing accounting in my head for a while. It wasn’t healthy.”
This attitude toward accounting was something I got used to hearing from mothers, who considered it a scourge on a generous spirit. Accounting can also be a way of taking care. Jacqueline, a married lesbian in Colorado who reports feeling like a successful co-parent to her two elementary-school-aged kids, said, “We consider and then anticipate each other’s needs. I know my wife took the kids to school and picked them up today, so I feel more responsibility to do the chores at the end of the night.” As Jacqueline exemplifies, the problem with accounting comes not when both partners are doing it in recognition of the other’s contributions but, rather, when it’s left to a mother alone, stewing in the math of a father’s apathy.
Not wanting to keep score, Nicole stopped instigating the “multiple spirited discussions” and accepted that women were just innately better at tuning in to the needs and concerns of others. “The multitasking and switching the brain, it’s like switching to the needs of your baby and then jumping on the computer. We’re good at that. There was a certain naturalness to it that was hard to fight. Intrinsically, women get the commitment at a deeper level. I almost think it’s genetic or hormonal. Something is driving us that isn’t driving them.”
Without naming it, Nicole nods toward gender essentialism, the idea that women share some innate essential property that differentiates them from men. It holds that intellectual, social, emotional, and psychological characteristics of human beings are related to the body, and then that biological sex directly results in gender expression.
In the twelfth century, gender essentialists were among the first Western feminist thinkers, contending that women weren’t simply inferior versions of men—a bold assertion in its time, and maybe still. In the centuries since, gender essentialism has been used both to encourage women to bring their unique experiences to the table in the public sphere, and to justify discrimination against them. Men and women are essentially different. That is how many of us understand gender in contemporary society. But as philosopher Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth explains in her book Thinking Woman, “Gender essentialists often claim that gender and sex is a natural division. But often times what seems ‘natural,’ ‘innate,’ or ‘obvious’ is actually a cultural habit.”2
Only women bear children. We know this much is true. What transpires postpartum might go any number of ways, but the logic of gender essentialism works to transform initial obligatory maternal investment into long-term exclusive maternal care. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly decried feminism as “doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature,” as feminist activist and Third Wave founder Amy Richards was experiencing “the stress of parenting much more than Peter does, and [beginning] to wonder if this is hardwired into me.”3 Despite divergent goals, both women fell similarly prey to the naturalistic fallacy, the assumption that the current state of affairs, governed by laws of nature, is the only (and the best) possibility. “What is” comes to pass for “what must be.” Under scrutiny, though, most gendered differences attributed to hardwiring are rooted in social realities that, so far, are immovable but hardly biologically preordained.
Janet Shibley Hyde, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin, is a leading academic in the field of gender studies. Gender differences are not only the focus of broad public interest (exhibit A: John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus has sold more than fifty million copies) but also a fertile area of psychological research. Name any presumed variation in emotion or cognition between men and women, and you are likely to find at least fifty studies on its validity. Hyde has counted.
In 2005, Hyde rounded up forty-six meta-analyses of gender difference studies whose domains included cognitive abilities, communication, social behavior, personality, and psychological well-being, to name a handful. Her goal was to determine the effect size, or statistical strength, of the variables in question. She found that the largest differences between men and women were in the domains of motor skills (like throwing velocity) and sexuality (like frequency of masturbation). But 48 percent of the variables had effect sizes in the statistically small range, and an additional 30 percent were hardly more than zero. That means that for 78 percent of the gender differences measured and remeasured and measured once again, there was actually as much of a difference within gender as between gender. Differences between two women or two men were at least as likely as differences between any female/male pair. She wrote, “This view is strikingly different from the prevailing assumptions of difference found among the general public and even among researchers.”4
Too often science, which is nuanced, is a poor match for conventional wisdom, which is not. This is why John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus outsells neuroscientist Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences twenty-five hundred to one. Gray reinforces popular myths about sex differences, exhorting his (millions of) readers that housework impacts oxytocin and testosterone production in ways that are salutary for women and downright dangerous for men: “to join in and share each day in her daily routines as a helper would eventually exhaust him.” Fine rebukes Gray, writing, “Gender stereotypes are legitimated by these pseudo-scientific explanations. Suddenly, one is being modern and scientific, rather than old-fashioned and sexist.”5
Based on the findings of her meta-meta-analysis, Hyde proposed “the gender similarities hypothesis,” which asserts that, distinctive reproductive systems aside, men and women are similar in more ways than not.6 Unless you are a gender scholar, however, you are likely less familiar with Hyde’s work than you are with Gray’s. In our current cultural climate, it is harder to absorb the less sensational, research-based propositions of Hyde or Fine or Michael Kimmel, director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masuclinities at Stony Brook University in New York, who succinctly states, “Gender difference is the product of gender inequality, not the other way around.”7
If what drives the parenting gap is, as Nicole postulated, genetic or hormonal, how much effort should a reasonable parent exert toward fostering its reorganization? As Brown University professor emerita Anne Fausto-Sterling, a leading expert in biology and gender development, has written, “The belief in a biological explanation for a social phenomenon suggests that efforts to change the existing situation are futile.”8
How do we know this to be true? To test the impact of encountering a difference in a novel skill between a man and a woman, social psychologists at Princeton invited undergraduates to take part in an experiment on perceptual style.9 Subjects were administered a task either alone or in a mixed-sex pair. They were asked to scan a set of slides with dots on them, and to very quickly estimate how many dots were on each slide. Everyone who completed the task was then told (fallaciously, as no one was really scoring the task) that they had one of two perceptual styles, that of “underestimator” or “overestimator.” The students who were tested alone learned their style one-on-one from the researcher. The mixed-sex pairs received their results alongside their co-participant and were told either 1) that they had different perceptual styles; or 2) that their perceptual styles were the same. Finally, the experimenter asked all participants to fill out a questionnaire to assess their beliefs about their (made-up) style: “What percentage of males do you think have your style? What percentage of females do you think have your style?”
Men and women in all three conditions guessed that members of their own biological sex category were more likely to share their perceptual style, but those tested in the mixed-sex pairs with differing outcomes reported the greatest likelihood that style was heavily influenced by sex. The presence of just one opposite-sex peer who exhibited a different style on a task not previously associated with a gender stereotype pushed them toward generalizing their own performance as being attributable to a sex-based essence.
Next, the researchers recruited additional students and told them they’d be participating in a task examining whether perceptual style was stable and consistent. In order to measure this, the students were told, they’d be administered a dot-estimation task two times. As in the first experiment, participants took the test either alone or in mixed-sex pairs. After completion of the initial dot-estimation task, students were given their (again fallacious) results alone or with their task partner. The mixed-sex pairs were told either 1) that they had different perceptual styles; or 2) that their perceptual styles were the same.
When the dot test was readministered—along with a reminder to be accurate—both the solo participants and those in the pairs with the same (made-up) perceptual style attempted to improve based on the feedback. That is, they lowered or raised their estimates according to whether they were over- or underestimators. Participants from the mixed-sex pairs with purportedly differing styles, however, did not attempt to correct for their known errors. Their belief that their style represented their sex’s tendency kept them from altering their performance even once they’d been told exactly how to improve. Their assumption that this trait was innate preempted any effort to change.
The researchers conclude, “When a woman and a man hold different opinions on an issue, a) they will be inclined to conclude that their difference of opinion is gendered, irrespective of whether or not this is true, and b) they will see the difference as entrenched, and therefore will be neither curious about one another’s thinking nor optimistic that they can change each other’s minds. When a woman describes a distinctive behavior of her male partner as a ‘guy thing,’ she is marking it as something she can accept, and perhaps even respect, but not something she can understand or hope to change.”
What to do, then, about the dominant culture of parenthood that continues to reinforce the idea that men are just like that, just that way in their bones? Here is the way we talk—a 2017 exchange from an online mothers’ group whose members live in the Midwest:
Rebecca: Mommas i just need to rant. I’m 30 weeks today and have a 20-month old. I’m finding it harder and harder to keep my cool since my husband just isn’t understanding that I need help. He literally just sits there and barely interacts and even asking for help he does bare minimum. It’s like he has blinders on and doesn’t observe what’s going around him.
Alisha: I feel your pain. I have two kids and my husband works all the time and when he is home he sits on the sofa and tunes everyone and everything out! I’m like REALLY?!!
Rebecca: This is too true!! I also work 2 jobs but he is more important I guess.
Carol: I have a voicemail saved of Bill calling me SCREAMING about the dishes while I was at work when it was his THIRD day off in a row.
Sabrina: Oh. Hell. No.
Jackie: Whenever I feel like that I start asking my husband “which” he wants to do. As in “do you want to give the kid a bath in 10 minutes or unload and re-load the dishwasher now?” I let him choose but hold him responsible for whichever. It feels so silly sometimes, but I have found that’s the only way I get the help I need.
Lauren: Ha ha! That works really well with 3 year olds too!
Brie: Ugh! My husband is horrible with timing. He’s like a teenager that I have to yell at to get out of bed.
Sabrina: This is exactly why I’m thinking about stopping at 1 kid! My husband is the same. He does work really hard and late hours, but when he’s home I still feel like I’m doing it all alone.
Nicole: Ditto!!!!! Ughhhhh. It’s extremely frustrating.
Jane: Do you ask him to get up and help (please come do the dishes, can you please help x kid with x)? Husbands need specific direction. Our job is to ask and it’s the husband’s job to do what we ask.
Carol: I’m a believer of this as well, except then I get told I’m nagging. Like . . . do it the first time then! Men are more difficult than children!
Lori: OMG, this post is the STORY OF MY LIFE. I get so tired of asking my husband to help me that I eventually do most things myself.
Charlotte: Ugh sounds like a lot of dads I know! Sorry Rebecca. You’re an amazing mama!!!!
How many conversations like this do we have to absorb before we come to believe that men are impervious to change—unable to understand, in need of direction, more difficult than children? I, for one, have participated in more of such offline chats than I’d like to admit. While there’s comfort in shared struggle, that comfort can be cold. The inferred inevitability of it all provides an (un)easy out. The familiar discourse minimizes our anger by allowing us to sink into those familiar tropes—boys will be boys and locker-room talk and guy things.
Tropes give us license to delicately petition our partners for more effort but not to confront them with our wrath. Even-keeled, we fail to communicate the stakes, and then again. Kristen, thirty-seven, a mother of two in Ann Arbor, Michigan, told me, “I read some article about training your husband like you train a dog. Reward good behavior and ignore bad behavior. So if he would do the dishes, I would be like, ‘Thank you so much!’” The tropes calcify and reproduce until we are all the undergraduate dot estimators not bothering to recalibrate our efforts.
As Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science neuroscientist Lise Eliot points out in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It, a hundred years ago, women made up only 20 percent of college students and were rare in most professions. It was the general consensus that there was a fundamental, hardwired gap in both intelligence and ambition between women and men. Not until feminists began arguing the origins of this gap—asserting that it was social norms and not biology limiting women’s potential—did things begin to change.10
I’m not suggesting that women leave their online mothers’ groups. I’m not suggesting any action at all. I am pointing out the way in which we breezily conflate men’s prerogatives with their essential nature, prerogatives that are not actually innate but are learned, and which the luckiest among us are not forced to contend with so nakedly until men are living as our partners in our homes. Then, suddenly, the outgrowth of their privilege becomes breathtaking.
Compounding ideas about nature, parents with different experiences are less public about their lives. Danielle is a thirty-eight-year-old mother to a six-year-old girl in Boston. Her grad school requirements have meant that her daughter’s father is the more involved parent. During her daughter’s infancy, Danielle could not soothe her. The baby wanted her dad. They weren’t falling back on traditional gender roles, and Danielle and her husband assumed their child’s preference was learned as opposed to biological. They actively intervened to make sure their daughter would also be responsive to Danielle.
Danielle shared her guilt about her absence at home with her classmates at the time. “One of them was like, ‘Danielle, if you were a man, you wouldn’t even be worried about this. This would just be how it was.’” Danielle agreed. She also acknowledged shutting down when her mom friends begin complaining about their husbands. “Sometimes someone will ask me directly why I’ve gotten quiet, and I’ll say, ‘I’m listening and taking in.’ Because Jeff and I are in the reverse situation. I’m the one that stacks the dishes on the sides of the sink.” She told me that her reasons for holding back with other women were complicated. “There’s this kind of narrative that is very true—I see it—of, like, gender roles in households, and on the one hand, I feel really lucky that I don’t have to stick to that. On the other hand, I’m like, What’s wrong with me that I’m not in that position?”
Derek, a twenty-nine-year-old stay-at-home father raising two young daughters in North Carolina, avoids friendships with other at-home men. “Even the dads who are at home full-time, when we hang out as families, the women are upstairs with the kids, and we’re in the basement talking about fishing. I’m concerned about leaving the kids upstairs—the other dads aren’t. I don’t want to just leave both of them with Caitlin while I’m doing something else by myself. That’s not fair to her. I think even those dads still have nonprogressive views on family. They don’t really acknowledge being at-home fathers. It’s more like, ‘I’m just in between jobs right now.’” (While this attitude frustrates Derek, there’s likely some truth behind it. In 2016, only 24 percent of at-home fathers in the U.S. reported that they were there specifically to take care of their home or family.
Tiffany, a thirty-four-year-old social worker in Queens with a six-month-old son, has watched her friends raise their eyebrows in response to what goes on in her home. We drink tea on the couch in her railroad apartment while the baby naps nearby, and as her husband, Carlos, is in and out on errands. It’s a Thursday afternoon, but Carlos, an office manager, requested and was granted permission to work from home one day a week after their baby was born. Tiffany herself has returned to work only part-time.
She explains that she’s nursing, and that her husband gets up with her in the middle of the night whenever their son needs to eat. Carlos rubs her shoulders or gets her water or just keeps her company. They’ve been doing this together since night three, when she came home from the hospital after giving birth. Reflexively, I respond with a “wow.” Tiffany replies, “I know. My friends are like, ‘Why is he getting up?’ Because he wants to, and he’s helping me!” Tiffany feels like she has to defend their arrangements. I get that. My own reaction belied my belief that at least one of them should be sleeping, and of course, that would necessarily be Carlos. But my response—like Danielle’s concern that there’s something wrong with her, or Derek’s experience of his fellow stay-at-home dads—was really just a symptom of the problem itself. It’s one thing to believe that things should be different. It’s another to see that belief through to its logical conclusion.
Marisol, a twenty-nine-year-old ophthalmic assistant and military wife with a toddler and a baby in Las Vegas, tells me, “Before kids, we had an agreement that he paid all the bills while I took care of the house. The money I made, I got to keep to myself. Now that we have kids and I take care of them, mainly, I feel like the work should be divided evenly. He says he’ll help, but it only lasts for a couple of days until he stops helping. Then I reiterate that I can’t do everything on my own, and he starts to help again for another couple days. And it keeps going in a circle.” I ask Marisol why it works this way, and it’s clear that her assumptions about nature leave her capable of loving kindness but not outrage. “I think women generally take care because the maternal instincts come naturally to us, where for men, I feel like it is something that needs to be learned.”
University of Oregon sociology professor emeritus and prominent family studies researcher Scott Coltrane believes it is the very idea that mothers are instinctively the most capable caregivers that underscores the pervasive inequality in the division of child care.11 The research backs him up. A 2008 study of young men and women in Iceland found the belief that women were naturally more adept at parenting was related to a more traditional division of labor.12 A 2007 study in the U.S. found that the rejection of essentialist beliefs about women’s natural ability to parent was related to the opposite—a life in which both partners cut back at work and split child care in half.13
Raj, a gay man raising a now-teenage son outside of Boston explained how he and his husband have divided their parenting responsibilities. “We’ve both always done what we’re good at,” he told me. Heterosexual couples divide responsibility the same way—but essentialist beliefs deem women the de facto presumptive better match for each and every kid-related task. And despite the enthusiasm for the idea of the modern, involved father, most Americans continue to believe that a mother knows best. In 2016, Pew Research found that breastfeeding aside, 53 percent of adults say that a mother is better equipped than a father to care for children (1 percent said a father is better; 45 percent that the two are equal).14
Colloquially, we speak of maternal instinct, the presumably inborn, hardwired, and natural driver of the wisdom and devotion we ascribe to female parents alone. Biologists don’t use the term because it’s technically incorrect. By definition, an instinct is a behavior that does not have to be learned, shows almost no variation between members of its species, and manifests in a rigid sequence of behaviors performed in response to a stimulus. It’s also called a fixed action pattern, or an FAP. In bears and pigeons, hibernation and homing are instincts. In some species, caring for newborns is instinctive. After a rat gives birth, she removes the pup from the sac, licks the newborn, and eats the placenta. Rich with prostaglandins, it stimulates lactation and helps the uterus to contract.
A pregnant rat does not go to birthing class. From animal to animal, this behavior shows no variation based on temperament or culture. It’s programmed into her DNA. A rat has a maternal instinct. So, too, does a grayback goose, who immediately pushes any round object near her nest inside to incubate it, no matter if it is a billiard ball placed there by an impish ethologist or an actual egg. Round object (stimulus) produces rolling behavior (response). The less intelligent an animal, the more its survival depends on instinct.
In contrast, almost every aspect of primate behavior is mediated by a larger and more developed brain. Evolution has equipped us with a neocortex that requires us to learn in order to survive. With a neocortex, biology remains relevant but is no longer determinant. Natural selection ultimately favored flexibility. Animals that can rapidly adapt to shifting conditions have an advantage over those that can survive only a narrow range of circumstances.15
The most defining characteristic of the primate brain is actually its plasticity. Plasticity allows us infinite potentials, at least in comparison to instincts, inflexible as glass. “The flip side of this escape from rigid, stereotypical responses is that practice and learning become more important—even essential,” University of California, Davis, anthropologist Sarah Hrdy writes in her seminal book Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species.16 Humans no longer rely on reflexes or instincts, though we still have a handful, like raising our chin and eyebrows at the sight of an acquaintance. Instead we operate under the auspices of a sophisticated nervous system that interacts with the environment to alter the physical structures of the brain. This alteration is referred to as learning.
After she gives birth, a human mother is without a fixed action pattern. Her social world shapes her behavior. I gave birth in a hospital, guided by Western medicine. After each of my daughters was born, the doctor showed her to me, gave George scissors to cut the cord, wrapped her in white blankets with thin pink and blue stripes, and handed her to me to suckle before taking her away for her Apgar test. With my older daughter, the doctor asked for permission to send the placenta to a lab for study because it was heart-shaped, which she said was very rare.
In the hunter-gatherer society of the !Kung San in southern Africa, a woman gives birth alone, delivering the child into a small leaf-lined hole that she’s dug in the sand about a mile from her village. She is instructed not to shout out in pain—crying during labor is thought to signal to the gods that she does not want the baby—but, rather, to grit her teeth or bite her own hand. She cuts the cord with sticks and places the placenta next to her baby to serve as its temporary guardian before returning to the village to fetch other women to join her in a ritual welcoming ceremony.17 In a Tanzanian tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Hadza, women give birth in huts, attended by their mothers and grandmothers.18 Men are intentionally excluded. The placenta is typically buried far outside of camp because it’s considered dirty, unsuitable for male eyes. Culturally transmitted norms stand in for instincts.
The neocortex allows flexibility, but the loss of instinct also comes at a cost. Charles Snowdon, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, has spent his career studying marmosets and tamarins, cooperatively breeding New World monkeys. In most groups of tamarins, the young help to take care of babies, while in a minority of groups, they do not have this opportunity. In a field study of tamarins without prior infant-care experience, Snowdon and his team discovered that babies born to first-time parents never survived. They guessed that naive mothers and fathers didn’t know enough either to parent on their own or to accept help from more experienced kin. Later, from comparative data, his team discovered that the survival rate was much better in the groups where young siblings had helped out with babies. Across primates, infants born to inexperienced parents are at higher risk of death.19 Snowdon explains, “When they don’t have experience with infant-care skills, there’s a very low breeding success rate. Parenting skills are learned. They’re not innate, for males and females equally. Both are clumsy parents. You have to learn to tolerate a squirming infant on your back. You have to learn to share care of your baby. First-time mothers don’t know how to position infants to nurse on the nipple. They hold them upside down.”
The idea of maternal instinct doesn’t apply just to birth and its immediate afterward but also to everything mothers do to care for their children over the course of a lifetime. It neutralizes thoughts of oppression, reflexively serving to undergird the notion that women make superior—and perhaps the only suitable—primary parents. It’s meaningful that we fail to imagine a correspondent paternal endowment. Human culture has hardly allowed for the entertainment of such a notion.
In the 1800s, Victorian-era thinkers like Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer fit emerging science into their lived experience and concluded that women alone had evolved an instinct that made them responsive to infantile helplessness. Spencer, an influential philosopher in his time, also believed that women’s singular reproductive role had forestalled their mental development. Half the population, he wrote, had not developed higher intellectual and emotional faculties, the “latest products of human evolution.”20 Darwin himself rejected the idea that social feelings grow out of experience and fell back on the concept of instinct. He wrote, “Maternal instincts lead women to show greater tenderness and less selfishness and to display these qualities toward her infants in an eminent degree.”
It was an idea in search of a reality. A retrospective on human childrearing offers little support for so many Mother Teresas. In his History of Childhood, the psychohistorian Lloyd deMause describes recent centuries when abandonment, horrific abuse, and even infanticide were commonplace. As Darwin sat in his study in England dreaming of selfless women (and their correspondent unencumbered men), there was a long-standing epidemic of child abandonment under way in Europe.
Around that time in Paris, it was legal for poor women who gave birth at a state-run charity hospital to leave their newborns. The length of stay for these mothers varied, and in tracking the variations, the staff discovered a trend: Women who left the hospital on the day they gave birth had a fifty-to-one chance of departing without their babies, while women who remained just two days longer had only six-to-one odds of the same. When mothers were required to remain for a full week postpartum, abandonment dropped from 24 to 10 percent. Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy writes, “Neither their cultural concepts about babies nor their economic circumstances had changed. What changed was the degree to which they had become attached to their breast-feeding infants.”21
Anthropologists have found that across primates, whenever mothers leave babies, they almost invariably do it within the first seventy-two hours.22 Hrdy explains that while there’s no critical period right after birth in which mothers and babies must bond, close proximity between mother and infant during this period produces feelings in the mother about her baby that make separation hard to bear. Hormones plus experience equals attachment. Nature and nurture work in concert. Mothering is biologically and socially determined.
To assert that there is no maternal instinct, then, is not to say that there is nothing innate about a mother’s love. As Hrdy explains, every mother’s response to her baby is influenced by a composite of biological responses of mammalian, primate, and human origin. “There is endocrinal priming during pregnancy, physical changes during and after birth, the feedback loop of lactation, and cognitive mechanisms that enhance preference for kin.” But almost none of these biological responses is, as Darwin postulated, fixed (nor—mammary glands aside—are they exclusive to females). Instead, Hrdy explains, what women relative to other female mammals choose to invest in their children “is complicated by a range of utterly new considerations: cultural expectations, gender roles, sentiments like honor or shame, sex preferences, and the mother’s awareness of the future. Such complexities do not erase more ancient predispositions to nurture.23
“Our views of ‘motherhood’ . . . derive from . . . old ideas and even older tensions between males and females. The fact that most of us equate maternity with charity and self-sacrifice, rather than with the innumerable things a mother does to make sure some of her offspring grow up alive and well, tells us a great deal about how conflicting interests between mothers and fathers played out in our recent history.”24 (You’ve got this under control; I’m going to play video games.)
Hrdy underscores that female primates have long been dual-career mothers, foragers with children to maintain, reliant on babysitters, and necessarily making compromises between their children’s needs and their own—less giving trees than “flexible, manipulative opportunists.”25 Continuous-contact mothering was always a last resort for primates, whose families thrived only with help from large support networks.
Male reproductive success, on the other hand, “has long depended upon viewing females as individuals to be coerced, defended and constrained.”26 We derive our belief that primary maternal care is natural, inborn, and obvious from a long history of female subjugation. We call that history “nature” and continue to surmise that the sex bearing children must provide them with most of their care. Sciencey-sounding terms like “maternal instinct,” which have no paternal equivalent, reinforce that thinking. The naturalistic fallacy shows up time and again in our ubiquitous commitment to the idea of mother as her baby’s one and only, a convenient proposition that struggles to make actual sense.
At a glance, the mammal class and the behavior of half its members generally support the idea that males were not destined for meaningful parenthood. Pregnancy is invariably a female pursuit. The mother is the only parent guaranteed present at birth, the only one equipped to feed. The animal kingdom’s most devoted fathers are not mammals but fish and birds, species that neither lactate nor gestate internally. The amphibian and the insect place second; still, you wouldn’t want to marry one.27
Only some fish parent at all, but when they do, exclusive male care is the norm, about nine times as frequent as female solo care. These males typically court passing females who love and leave. The males release milt over the eggs, defend their territory, and otherwise tend to offspring until a day or two after the hatch. In birds, while only females lay eggs, males are just as involved thereafter. Around 90 percent of birds exhibit a 50/50 division of parenting work. That’s especially impressive when compared to the slight 3 to 5 percent of mammalian males who contribute anything whatsoever to childrearing. As anthropologists Kermyt Anderson and Peter Gray put it in their book Fatherhood, “Male investment in offspring can in principle (and in practice often does) end in ejaculation.” Female investment, too, is less enduring in nonhuman mammals. It often ends at weaning. Many mammal mothers, on encountering their offspring years later, won’t even recognize them.
According to Yale biological anthropologist Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, primate paternal behavior—action directed toward infants that has a positive effect on development, growth, well-being, and survival—remains poorly understood.28 Based on the fact that the primate species exhibiting paternal care are only distantly related, Fernandez-Duque and others in his field hypothesize that this care resulted from evolutionary trajectories that developed in varying circumstances. If parenting by male primates increased offspring survival under certain ecological or social conditions, then paternal care may have evolved. Still, fathering manifested only in some taxa. Even within the same genus, there can be huge variation in father involvement. Male macaques, a type of monkey, generally have little to do with infants. The closely related Barbary macaque males, though, love babies and, if you don’t count nursing, provide as much care as the females. Males hold, carry, provision, nuzzle, and respond to cries of distress. Primatologists posit that Barbaries have lived in harsher environments, necessitating contact comfort, warmth, and protection by males for survival.29 There is also within-species variation. In the wild, rhesus macaques are absentee dads. In captivity, where the pressures of competition for food and mates are eliminated, they closely attend to their young. Caretaking behaviors are unisex potentials.30 They just don’t emerge as freely in males.
“These days, those of us thinking about evolution of behavior, we run away from dialogue of learned versus instinct, nurture versus nature. If there’s something we learn by the day, there tends to be some kind of underlying genetic component, but it’s extremely flexible,” says Fernandez-Duque.
There’s also the issue of paternity certainty. Fernandez-Duque has spent his career studying owl monkeys and the titi monkeys of the Amazon. The two are among the taxa that show the most extreme paternal care. In studies of captive titi monkeys, the babies demonstrate a stronger bond with their fathers than their mothers. In the wild, when given a choice, the titi baby goes to its dad. Says Fernandez-Duque, “We’ve learned from them that paternal care happens more and in extreme forms when the risks of cheating—and then the likelihood of providing care to an infant you did not sire—tend to be reduced.” Raising one’s own offspring rather than some other guy’s is so important in the animal kingdom that males in some polygynous species—a type of brown bird called the dunnock is one example—are able to calibrate their provisioning of a brood of chicks according to how often they mated with the mother. They determine the probability of being the biological father and then provide the correspondent percentage of necessary calories.31 Whether this capacity persists in humans is debatable, but one 2018 study of human fathers living apart from their babies found that those with children who resembled them spent more time with these infants in their first year of life.32
Relative to mammals overall, a high percentage of primates mate monogamously (the exact numbers are “a huge topic of disagreement,” according to Duque). Evolutionary biologists can agree that all primates evolved from polygynous ancestors. In some primate lines, polygyny eventually morphed into monogamy, and once monogamy developed in a given lineage, it never went back. Mating systems evolve when they increase reproductive fitness, or the reproductive success of the individual. The shift to monogamy must have involved upping the odds of catapulting one’s genes into the next generation—and in ensuring that one’s offspring survived to reproduce as well.
Today biological anthropologists surmise that in some primates, monogamy ultimately resulted in involved fatherhood.33 Researchers hypothesize that among early hominims, once adult pair bonds predominated, permanent relationships allowed for a greater sexual division of labor. Males could afford to spend their time looking for often-elusive prey while females gathered plant food, a more reliable calorie source than meat. Assuming couples slept next to each other at night, fathers would have found themselves in proximity to pregnant females and then offspring. More nuanced social relationships advantaged infants with more complicated brains. More complicated brains required more time to mature, and slow-growing offspring needed more care to reach independence than one adult could reasonably provide.
What seems to be true of both primates and humans dating back to hunter-gatherer tribes is that fathering behavior has long materialized when it was necessary for the well-being of all interested parties—fathers, mothers, and children. Hunting and gathering is how humans have subsisted for about 90 percent of evolutionary history. Today’s remaining hunter-gatherers suggest how early humans may have lived.
Alyssa Crittenden, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has studied and lived among the Hadza of Tanzania. She explained to me that today, Hadza men and women continue to divide labor according to sex, and openly acknowledge that women are the harder-working group in their camps. “The Hadza are egalitarian. Women are equal in terms of social status and position. That doesn’t mean there’s an equal distribution of labor. Women have equal decision-making power, but they also do way more work—the Hadza men talk about it.
“The men are in charge of meat, and the women are in charge of everything else. All the staple foods in the diet are foraged by women. Women are in charge of building houses, fetching water, collecting firewood, taking care of nursing infants. But Hadza women aren’t mad. They don’t think their husbands are louses. There are sisters and aunties around to help with children, and once the kids are toddling, they go off into the pack, where they do a lot of self-governing and self-care. There’s a cooperative caregiving system in place that attenuates some of this cost and alleviates this burden for moms.” (In contrast to what Crittenden has heard from the Hadza, many hunter-gatherer ethnographies do report that women routinely complain about men’s failures to “meet sharing obligations.”34)
Crittenden also noted that, generally speaking, the level of paternal involvement among hunter-gatherers is dictated by the subsistence needs of the group. “Everything goes back to resources,” she said, which helps to explain why humans show more variation in fathering activity than all other primate species combined.35 Male and female Aka Pygmies hunt together with nets, and fathers are intensely involved with their children. Among the Hadza, both men and women forage, though not usually together, and women do most but not all of the child care.
In tribes where men hunt big game alone and spend long periods away from camp, their interaction with young children is minimal. Male pastoralists relocate frequently in search of literal greener pastures, and have multiple wives and little involvement with their biological children. Historically and around the globe, participation varies according to how both parents earn a living. Adaptation to circumstance has forever been the rule.
In 2017 The New York Times published a short piece called “The Birth of a Mother.”36 It explored something anthropologists have termed matrescence, or the process of becoming a female parent. The writer noted: “[T]his transition is also significant for fathers . . . , but women who go through the hormonal changes of pregnancy may have a specific neurobiological experience.” The nod to fathers is cursory. The “but” that follows makes the sentence’s main point: that women are the sex hormonally primed for parenthood. This notion is so generally accepted that it escaped the fact-checker’s scrutiny. Like much of the conventional wisdom about the hard-core nature of maternal versus paternal parenting, it’s also misleading.
Men undergo their own neurobiological experience as their babies-to-be gestate. Throughout the prenatal period, men in close contact with pregnant partners are physiologically primed to care for infants. Expectant fathers experience a rise in the levels of the pregnancy-related hormones prolactin, cortisol, and estrogen in proportion to that of their baby’s mother.37 Additionally, testosterone, associated with competition for mates, declines.38 Second-time fathers produce even more prolactin and less testosterone in the company of a pregnant partner than do first-timers.
The mechanisms for these changes in men remain unidentified; not so for the marmoset monkey. Research has established that the marmoset fetus sets off its father’s hormonal shifts when its adrenal gland produces a glucocorticoid that’s ultimately excreted in the mother’s urine. The scent of that glucocorticoid readies the marmoset male to love and care for his infant.39 While it is unlikely that this occurs in men, cells in the human nose do show an electrochemical response to airborne estratetraenol, an odorless steroid found in the urine of pregnant women. (And here’s something George finds amusing: Estratetraenol has also been shown to worsen men’s moods.40)
Throughout their children’s lives, involved fathers continue to experience hormonal changes. In North America, men in long-term relationships like marriage and fatherhood almost uniformly have lower testosterone levels than their single and childless counterparts. One five-year observation of men (twenty-one years old and single at the study’s outset) found that those who became fathers experienced a significant drop in testosterone production relative to those who did not. The study’s authors write, “Our findings suggest that human males have an evolved neuroendocrine architecture that is responsive to committed parenting, supporting a role of men as direct caretakers during hominin evolution.”41 As anthropologist Sarah Hrdy observes in Mothers and Others: “Men are physiologically altered just from spending time in intimate association with pregnant mothers and new babies. To me, this implies that care by males has been an integral part of human adaptation for a long time. Male nurturing potentials are there, encoded in the DNA of our species.”42
Anthropologists also have a word for the process of becoming a male parent: “patrescence.” The New York Times has not published an article about it. It garners only 264 Google hits versus 10,400 for “matrescence.” Those with an interest in the formal study of fatherhood continue to note the relative lack of research in the field. In 2005, journalist Paul Raeburn was inspired to write a book he ultimately titled Do Fathers Matter?* while attending a meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. “I found hundreds of scientists describing research on children, families, and parenting, and only a dozen or so dealing with fathers,” he recalls. “Nearly all the authors of these studies began their talks by noting how little research on fathers had been done.”43
Our pronounced cultural biases about which parent really matters have influenced the reach of scientific investigation, which then in turn underscores those biases. They also inform social policy. In 1971 President Richard Nixon cited evolution as one reason for his veto of a bill that would have provided universal government-subsidized early child care. He feared it would disrupt nature’s mother-centered plan.44
In the social sciences as well, assumptions about special maternal biology have had a far reach. It was 1970 before psychologist Milton Kotelchuck questioned the orthodoxy of developmental psychology and asked what hard evidence existed to support the notion that children relate uniquely to their mothers. Kotelchuck used the “strange situation” research protocol—during which young children are observed as their parents enter and leave the room in the presence of a stranger—to upend then-prominent beliefs about the special and exclusive relationship between mothers and babies. He demonstrated that six-to-twenty-one-month-olds were just as likely to be calmed by the presence of their fathers as their mothers. “It did not seem reasonable that in a world where mothers often die in childbirth that we’d have a species where children can’t adapt to other people,” Kotelchuck said.45
Late in the 1970s, Michael Lamb, a pioneer in the research on the importance of men to their children, was the first to look at the physiological underpinnings of fatherhood. Lamb monitored skin conductance, blood pressure, and mood among parents watching videos of crying or smiling infants. Mothers and fathers did not differ in any measures of responsiveness to the videos.46
Around the same time, psychologist Ross Parke and colleagues studied fathers of newborns in maternity wards. For most of the behaviors his team measured, fathers and mothers hardly differed. Men spoke to babies in high-pitched voices and responded with sensitivity to infant cues during feeding. They also exhibited patterns similar to their wives in heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance when holding their children. The major difference Parke observed was that fathers, unlike mothers, took a step back from their child’s care in the presence of their spouse.47 Their assumption that a baby primarily needs his mother limited their involvement, the naturalistic fallacy in action.
Sarah Hrdy speculates that, at the outset of a child’s life, at least, the problem is not only that fathers believe they should step back but also that mothers may be slightly predisposed to step forward with more haste. In a study that measured response times and hormone levels in parents listening to infant cries, mothers and fathers were equally reactive to wails of distress (recordings of baby boys being circumcised). When the cries were fussy rather than pained, mothers’ physiological responses and then also their reaction times were a little quicker than fathers’, though fathers’ responses were quicker than those of childless adults.48
Long past our daughters’ infancies but on the same continuum, George felt this difference play out between us. “You don’t give me the chance to do things,” he observed to me once during a long weekend out of town. It was dinnertime at a crowded family lodge, and there was a buffet for the kids. I got up to get the girls food as soon as we were seated—an attempt to curtail the whining of hungry children, cries that are fussy rather than pained. It had never occurred to me that George would step in if only I slowed down. I’d mistaken his sluggish pace for disinterest, his slow reaction time for inertia.
Hrdy supposes that men’s marginally lower threshold for responding to infant signals is likely innate, a result of the developmental trajectory of the mammalian brain (that is, females were caretakers long before males developed that neural architecture), but then asks, “So what? Who cares? And that’s just the point. The act of caring has consequences—habits of mind and emotion. . . . The point is, consequences are magnified out of proportion to initial causes.”49
When one parent gets into the habit of quickly responding to an infant’s needs, the other is likely to accommodate that habit by failing to respond. This pattern then calcifies over days and weeks and months and years. I heard similar themes in the musings of many of the mothers I interviewed. Erica in Portland explained, “When he’s on, he’s great. But it’s almost like I have to remind him or take myself out of the picture for it to happen. If I say I need to be out of the house, he’ll step up. But as long as I’m there, he won’t.” Emphasizes Hrdy, a mother herself who acknowledges big feelings about this issue, “A seemingly insignificant difference in thresholds for responding to infant cues gradually, insidiously, step by step, without invoking a single other cause, produces a marked division of labor by sex.”50
The attempt to locate essential differences between men and women in the structures of the brain began in the mid-nineteenth century with tools like tape measures and sacks of millet grain. Findings were used to oppose women’s suffrage and equal access to education.51 Today more technologically advanced approaches like neuroimaging can serve the same function. Since these studies’ conclusions are often used to reify gender stereotypes, neuroscientist and author Cordelia Fine has dubbed this line of work neurosexism. She writes, “Remember that psychology and neuroscience, and the way their findings are reported, are geared toward finding difference, not similarity. Male and female brains are of course far more similar than they are different. Not only is there generally great overlap between ‘male’ and ‘female’ patterns, but also, the male brain is like nothing in the world so much as a female brain. Neuroscientists can’t even tell them apart at an individual level.”52
When I call neuroscientist and author Lise Eliot to ask if there’s an unavoidable, innate explanation she can think of for the problem I’m investigating, I can all but see cartoon smoke blowing from her ears. “I’ll cut to the punch line,” she says. “There’s very little in human behavior that’s innate. Most of what we do is shaped by our conscious and unconscious experience. Calling gendered division of labor ‘innate’ is a convenient way of maintaining the power structure, period.”
Off the top of my head, I run a couple headline-grabbing female/male brain difference findings past Eliot, and she counters each with information to the contrary. Per her own research, for example, when corrected for overall brain volume, women do not have a larger corpus callosum than men, an apparent misrepresentation I remember reading about during grad school.
The corpus callosum is the structure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. If women’s hemispheres were more connected than men’s (the technical term is “less lateralized”), the two sides would communicate more fluidly. This spurious finding has been used to explain women’s supposed greater facility with multitasking as well as men’s supposed greater capacity for STEM work. A handful of the mothers I interviewed referenced the former to explain why they naturally, if half-heartedly, take on more at home than their spouses. “Women are known to be better multitaskers,” said Marla, a forty-three-year-old social worker in Chicago and mother of a six-year-old daughter, as she explained why she managed more of her daughter’s life than her husband.
Eliot responds, “It’s bullshit. Our brains get good at whatever we’re faced with doing. Secretaries are good multitaskers. We’re letting men turn us into secretaries.” More tellingly, even if the corpus callosum difference had held up, the conclusions popularly drawn from it align more closely with retrogressive attitudes about the sexual division of housekeeping (and careers in the sciences) than with actual animal research, which suggests that creatures with more lateralized brains are better at simultaneously accomplishing multiple tasks.53 The inferences drawn from brain-difference studies are often, to use another Fine-ism, neurononsense.
In actuality, brain functions arise from distributed neural networks and a daunting complexity of connections, neurotransmitter systems, and synaptic functions. The brain’s structural architecture alone doesn’t provide much information of the kind that’s being sought—and to be clear, as Fine jokes, here’s the gold standard for exciting discovery: “I finally found the neural circuits for organizing child care, planning the evening meal, and ensuring that everyone has clean underwear. See how they crowd out these circuits for career, ambition, and original thought?”54
Still, as Eliot explains, sex differences sell. “They always have this kind of outré, anti-PC overtone to them. ‘Oh, look, we’ve been deluding ourselves when science is proving otherwise.’” Eliot, herself the mother of three grown children, tells me, “Everything we call a sex difference, if you take a different perspective—what’s the power angle on this—often explains things. It has served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hardwired. It’s been harmful for women to live that.” Today, while popular “science” continues to underscore that patterns of behavior rooted in the brain are hardwired, or something one is just born with, real science has landed in a different place altogether. Contemporary neuroscience is all about plasticity, “the capacity of the nervous system to change its organization and function over time.”55 Brains are not so much hardwired as constantly rewiring themselves in response to real-time experience.
A 2014 study out of Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv exemplifies this understanding. Researchers compared FMRI data in three groups of first-time parents: primary-care mothers, secondary-care fathers, and gay primary-care fathers raising babies without women. If an MRI is a still photo of a brain, then an FMRI is a movie. It allows researchers to look at brain function as well as structure. The brain activity of the three groups of subjects was not identical. In primary-care mothers, parenting behavior caused greater activity in the amygdala, the evolutionarily ancient structure involved in emotion processing. In secondary-care fathers, the same parenting behaviors went along with greater activity in the newer sociocognitive structures of the neocortex. In both groups, parenting integrated the functioning of those two neural networks—and the more involvement fathers reported, the more integrated the networks were. The researchers also found that the primary-care men, those who’d devoted as much time to their babies as the mothers, showed activation in the amygdala that was comparable to that of the women, as well as greater activation in the sociocognitive structures similar to the secondary-care fathers.
The researchers concluded that the differences between the three groups were not so much a function of biological sex or genetic relatedness to the infant (the primary-care fathers had adopted) but, rather, of how much time the subjects had spent in intimate contact with their babies. They write: “assuming the role of a committed parent and engaging in active care of the young may trigger [a] global parental caregiving network in both women and men, in biological parents, and in those genetically unrelated to the child. Such findings are consistent with the hypothesis that human parenting may have evolved from an evolutionarily ancient alloparenting substrate that exists in all adult members of the species and can flexibly activate through responsive caregiving and commitment to children’s well-being.”56
The secondary-care fathers were born to be partners, not helpers. But in a number of ways, assuming the secondary role stacks the deck against equality from day one—not due to so-called hardwiring but because of the failure to wire in the absence of experience. That is, the failure to learn.
The consequences of behavioral disparities that begin with very slight and possibly innate predispositions in the parents when the child is born grow larger as the baby does. When couples take the path of least resistance, the mother’s depth and breadth of experience eventually outpaces the reach of the father. How many parent-teacher conferences and calls from the nurse’s office and evites to birthday parties will a mother field alone before her expertise becomes unmatchable?
It was the fall of Liv’s first-grade year before I understood that we’d hit a point of laborious return. The pope came to New York, and his visit disrupted the trains. It was a Monday, my late night at work, George’s evening to pick up the kids. My husband sent me this text: “Not sure I’ll make it home in time. We need an alternate plan.” By “we” he meant me. Pickup was on him, and he had no alternate plan. For years I’d taken those on, in one form or another, and letting him try and falter now (as ever) was not an attractive possibility. If he failed, it was Liv and Tess who’d be waiting around, not to mention the staffs of their schools. Still, I might have demurred. George would have figured it out. But that felt wrong. We were supposed to be a team. I called another mother, and she said she’d get the girls. Despite our best mutual intentions, here George and I were, in the same place we always landed.
The Tel Aviv study offers: “[While] pregnancy, birth, and lactation . . . provide powerful primers for the expression of maternal care via amygdala sensitization, evolution created other pathways for adaptation to the parental role in human fathers, and these alternative pathways come with practice, attunement, and day-by-day caregiving.”
April, a chief operating officer and New Yorker raising two children alongside her wife, was initially her family’s secondary-care parent. That left her feeling less capable with her children. She said, “When you’re not usually in the primary role and you’re thrust into it for a day or two, you’re terrible at it. I’ve been in that position. I’m horrible. I don’t know where the kids are supposed to be, the kids are tense, and everyone’s waiting for Jill to come back to make it better. When it’s only squeezed into your life sporadically, you’re set up for failure. In heterosexual couples, that seems to just exacerbate the theory that men aren’t good at this.”
Fathering, like mothering, is biologically and socially determined. It is the day-in-day-out experience of attending to children—and not biological sex—that encompasses what we now refer to as motherhood. The more we understand this as an experience available to either sex, the less sense it makes to characterize parenting as a particularly female talent. Such talk functions only to ensconce inequality, to reinforce for ourselves and then instill in our children the belief that mothers alone must bow under the weight of all tasks.