Once I started looking, I found there are an almost infinite number of ways to measure family commitment and the gradations of that commitment by sex. In 2008, University of Cincinnati sociologist David Maume arrived upon the Urgent-Care Question. He boiled parental responsibility in dual-breadwinner couples down to one metric: If your kid gets sick, who takes time off of work? Using data from the National Study of the Changing Workforce, a survey of U.S. workers, he found that 77.7 percent of women and 26.5 percent of men report that they are the sole bearers of this responsibility (the survey looked at individuals and not couples, hence the greater than 100 percent sum total). Maume concluded that not much had changed since family researchers in the late 1980s wrote that men “accept” child care responsibilities when they are away from work, but women “adapt” their work arrangements to their husbands’ schedules and the needs of their kids.1 In more cases than not, women remain the default parent.
In 2009, a group of researchers at Utrecht University in Amsterdam looked at the same issue through a different lens. They began with a gender-neutral hypothesis they called the demand/response capacity approach. This approach posited that involvement in child care uniformly depends on the demand made on the parent, and the extent to which the parent is free to respond to this demand. Having an employed partner and young kids increases family demands. Work obligations restrict the capacity to respond. They looked at 639 Dutch couples with children to test the theory that if either partner is unable to engage because of work obligations, the other will make up for this lack.
What they found was not gender-neutral at all. While mothers and fathers differed little in their reported commitment to waged work, mothers were going to greater lengths to prevent their jobs from interfering with their family lives. The demand/response capacity approach only applied to dads. The time mothers spent with their children was barely affected by their own or their partner’s workload. The researchers write, “Our study shows that mothers in particular experience low flexibility with regard to parent/child time. As a result, work demands may be met at the expense of other activities such as individual or couple leisure time without children. Fathers use their time for fun rather than basic care tasks. . . . The general pattern that emerges from our study suggests that fathers have more discretion than mothers with regard to child-related activities. Mothers feel a greater sense of responsibility.”2
Miranda, thirty-eight, an environmental planner with two kids in elementary school in Vermont, has found: “When it comes down to time crunch, if we both have stuff going on, I’m much more likely to say, ‘I’ll let work slide.’ In different jobs we’ve had, Lowell has had more responsibility at work, and he’s made it clear that he can’t leave. Sometimes that has been true, but it’s also been true that I have very limited leave. He gets a lot more time off than I do. So I’ll say, ‘If I take this day off to do this thing for whoever, I’m down that leave and I don’t have it,’ whereas he can take it off and it doesn’t matter. But that never plays a role in our decision making. It pisses the hell out of me.”
Miranda’s dilemma, her ambivalence about her role as the default parent, grows out of the bad fit between the nineteenth-century middle-class shift into separate gendered spheres and the late twentieth century’s changing labor patterns. As historian Stephanie Coontz has noted of America in the 1800s, “Female domesticity and male individualism developed together, as an alternative to more widely dispersed social bonds, emotional ties, and material interdependencies.”3 Once both work and extended family moved out of the home, it was left up to the public and the private sectors to assimilate those changes, and we all know how that worked out. Mothers took charge of caring for others, fathers embraced personal autonomy, and, in the U.S. at least, society removed itself entirely from the equation. Writes Coontz, “Self-reliance and independence worked for men because women took care of dependence and obligation.”4 The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Sociologist Annette Lareau observed fathers in families sending kids straight to their mothers when they needed help with their homework—even as those mothers were also making dinner. “When men do work, it tends to be because women are [physically] unavailable,” she tells me. Family studies professor Claire Kamp Dush notices herself excessively validating her husband when he picks up slack at home. “When it comes to husbands, I hit the jackpot. I give him credit. But sometimes he wants credit just for not being an asshole, when really, he’s simply doing what a parent is supposed to do.” Developmental psychologist Holly Schiffrin feels conflicted about her lack of gratitude. “My husband is a very involved dad, more than average, and when I complain to my mom, she says, ‘Oh, he is so wonderful.’ She’s comparing him to my dad. I’m comparing him to me, and I know that I’m doing more!” And developmental psychologist Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan watches her husband stare at his phone while their eleven-year-old daughter competes for his attention. “He’s a great dad in general, but I see that and think, This is not good. He’s oblivious to it. If I were to do that, my daughter would be upset. ‘Mom, don’t ignore me!’ She doesn’t have the same expectation of her father.”
It’s been twenty years since social psychologist Francine Deutsch published Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works, a study of 150 dual-earner couples. Like other writing in the field, Deutsch’s project grew out of her own experience as a woman raising children with a man, the fact that “when motherhood hit, egalitarian ideals went out the window.”5
Deutsch identified the unequal families among her subjects, the ones in which the women were the default parents. She divided the husbands in these pairs into three categories of secondary caregivers: helpers, sharers, and slackers. For example, as one mother related, “Eric will do stuff, but he wants to be asked. He wants to put it on his list. It’s not something that he’s thinking about unless I get him thinking, although he’s really helpful.”6 Eric is a helper. Sharers are fully involved in parenting, but only when other commitments to work or leisure aren’t getting in the way. Slackers relax while their wives work a second shift at home. In all the unequal families Deutsch studied, “There’s an assumption that women’s schedules are freer. It’s always easier to infringe upon mother; mothers are supposed to be infringed upon.”7
Carissa in Seattle told me, “One problem is all these unspoken assumptions about who’s going to deal with things. My husband will go ahead and make plans on a Friday with friends. He assumes he can do that. If I want to do something, I know I have to get him on board first, so I can have him home in the house. He’s not a party guy. He’s not doing anything he shouldn’t be doing. But he gets that time. I don’t get that time.”
Meg, twenty-four, a security guard and mother of two-year-old twins and an infant in Las Vegas, Nevada, works graveyard shifts, midnight to eight a.m. Her husband works the same hours as a taxi driver. Meg comes home, relieves the babysitter, and sets up the day for her children: baths, meals, toothbrushes, clothes. Her partner arrives home and heads straight to bed. She says, “I’m pretty much by myself. He’s barely learned to be a dad.” I ask Meg when she sleeps. “Never,” she replies.
Mothers avoid not only interpersonal conflict but also a more internal one when they resist forcing their partners’ hands. When men decide to become equally sharing fathers, they may give up money or status, but in exchange for something more virtuous, the elevation of family life. When women reject their role as default parent, they’re not taking on that same goodness. They cannot bask in its treacly moral glow. They are faced with relinquishing their virtue in the name of self-interest, or even just the occasional nap.
This is not an indulgence we take kindly to in women. One recent study out of the University of California, Irvine, for example, found that subjects presented with vignettes about parents who left their children unsupervised to tend to work concerns judged fathers less harshly than mothers.8 A father who takes on equal sharing may face criticism from the outside world for dialing back the traditional male role. The mother in that pair is left wrestling with moral ambiguity—both societal disapproval and its outgrowth, the fear that any wish for autonomy can be realized only at some cost to her kids.
In early 2018, a tweet from a woman I didn’t know caught my eye as I procrastinated on Twitter one winter afternoon: “Arranging for summer camps is a fucking nightmare and that’s even if you have every privilege. ATTN AMERICA: WOMEN WORK NOW.” A parent named Deb offered empathy, responding: “the bane of every mother’s existence from feb through march” before a third female tweeter chimed in with “and why is it not the bane of every *father’s* existence from feb through march?” It struck me as a valid question, so I wrote to all three asking for their thoughts. Deb answered: “Dads don’t consider, moms don’t insist. Fathers quickly lose touch with the million details and logistics of their children’s lives.”
In the language of family studies, women and men do not develop the same “parental consciousness” when they transition into mother- and fatherhood; they continue on separate and unequal paths of knowing or not knowing as their children change and grow. Parental consciousness is the awareness of the needs of children accompanied by the steady process of thinking about those needs. Women have come to call it the mental load, and in those relatively egalitarian households where men share day care pickup and put away clean laundry, it’s the aspect of childrearing most likely, as Skidmore sociologist Susan Walzer has put it, to “stimulate marital tension between mothers and fathers.”9
Francine Deutsch found: “Sometimes even when both parents tried to live up to principles of gender equality, mothers and fathers didn’t experience parenting the same way. That meant mothers did more. [T]he mental work of parenting was all hers.”10 Other researchers have noted that even men who put a premium on fatherhood usually remain mothers’ assistants; their vast potential for parental consciousness lies dormant.
Molly, twenty-seven, the foster care worker in Tennessee, told me, “We can’t afford full-time child care, so we’re somewhat tag-teaming in terms of who manages the day, but when it comes to scheduling, it’s me. My husband is never going to sit down and say, ‘Let’s look at the plans for the week.’ If we want something to happen, I’m going to have to be the one to take initiative. It gets exhausting. I’m the household manager. He’ll do what needs to be done, but not without some sort of prompt. If I bring it to his awareness, he’s like, ‘I get it.’ He sees it when I bring it up, but it’s not a continual awareness. And then he’ll be like, ‘How can I help?’ and I don’t even know how to hand it over to him.”
Christine, a forty-one-year-old accountant with a baby and a six-year-old in Illinois, said, “I can’t trust him to actually remember the minimal things I ask him to do. I have to remind him to do it. Whatever the activity is, I still feel like it’s on my list. So asking him to do things does not relieve any stress for me or any responsibility. The whole idea of just having a list to start out with . . . of course he doesn’t have a list. My son would not have what he needed if ever I woke up one morning and was sick or something.”
One problem with consciousness is that you cannot see it. The mental load’s relentless invisibility makes it hard to co-manage for two unequally motivated parties. It also makes it tricky to illustrate, and so a cartoon that accomplished this (“Fallait Demander,” translated as “You Should’ve Asked,” by French artist Emma) quickly went viral in 2017.
The cartoon featured a plainly drawn everywoman laying bare the effort that goes into default parenting: “The mental load means always having to remember. Remember that you have to add cotton buds to the shopping list, remember that today’s the deadline to order your vegetable delivery for the week, remember that we should have paid the caretaker for last month’s work by now. That the baby grew another 3 cm and can’t fit into his trousers anymore, that he needs to get his booster shot, or that your partner doesn’t have a clean shirt left. . . . So while most heterosexual men say that they do their fair share of household chores . . . their partners have a rather different perspective: ‘He always puts on the washing machine but never hangs the washing out to dry.’ ‘The sheets could be standing stiff before he thought to change them.’ ‘He’s never cooked a single meal for the baby.’”
Social psychologists have their own name for the mental load. They call it mnemonic work. Studies have established that couples intuitively, rather than consciously and explicitly, divide the work of planning and remembering. And just as intuitively, it mostly falls on wives. In the world of co-parenting, the word “intuitive” is actually code for “mother takes it on”; co-parenting intuitively rather than consciously is how modern couples get into this predicament.
Psychologist Elizabeth Haines and her colleagues at William Paterson University in New Jersey asked men and women to think about the tendency to help others remember their personal obligations, needs, and commitments versus the tendency to rely on others for those reminders. Both genders reported the assumption that it is women who do the reminding and that men are the beneficiaries of this effort. In the estimations of men and women, men are simply not held accountable for that kind of thing.11
When asked to illustrate the mental load in their own relationship, 64 percent of women gave an example in which they were the reminding one. Upon being asked the same question, almost the same percentage of men likewise cited an example in which their wives were the mental laborers. Additionally, in the rarer case that men were executing the mnemonic work, it was usually because they directly benefited from the task (for example, “I reminded my wife that she said she would buy me a jacket”). The psychologists conclude, “Doing more mnemonic work is one way in which women’s tendency to be communal manifests. . . . The prescriptive aspect of this stereotype would then denote that women and men are held to different standards—wherein the societal standard for men to engage in this type of work is more relaxed than it is for women, thereby resulting in men actually doing less mnemonic work than women do.”12
Vanessa, a thirty-four-year-old Queens, New York, parent with two young children who started her own business when her job in corporate America proved incompatible with mothering, told me, “With my husband, it’s hard to be on the same page. He’s good at a lot of things, but he’s not good at the day-to-day. If we need basics, if the kids need to be fed, I have to give him road maps, instructions, management. There’s not the intuition of anticipating needs. That’s not even remotely in the realm of possibility. I’ve stopped expecting it. My daughter’s first birthday party is tomorrow. He’s done nothing. He says, ‘Tell me what I need to do tomorrow morning.’ I have to lay it out. It’s frustrating to plan, manage, and execute everything. That’s five people’s jobs.”
Smith College philosophy professor Meredith Michaels co-authored 2004’s The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Undermines Women. She came to the idea after confronting how much the zeitgeist of motherhood had intensified between the births of her first child in 1972 and her fourth in 1989. She described interacting with her grown son around his parenting responsibilities today. “He lives nearby, and I do a lot of child care. I’ll ask him, ‘Who is picking up so-and-so?’ He’ll reply, ‘Ask [my wife]. That’s not my area to know who’s doing what and where.’ And I think, Why is that? And what are you doing to make up for fact that it’s not your area? What is your area?’”
In the late 1990s, Skidmore’s Walzer interviewed twenty-five middle-class, heterosexual couples with babies in upstate New York to try to get her head around so-called parental consciousness and its development—how do children fill their parents’ minds, and how do parents judge their thoughts about their kids? In the book chronicling her work, Thinking About the Baby, Walzer notes, “[T]he parents I interviewed carried particular images of what mothers and fathers were supposed to think about—what their responsibilities and feelings were supposed to be—and they were accountable to these images.” The fathers in her study spoke primarily about financial responsibility, while the mothers (also breadwinners) reported the belief that they were supposed to have their babies in mind at all times, no matter what.
One woman with reliable child care said that while she wasn’t actually worried about her baby while she was at work, she felt like she had to behave as if she were. To do otherwise would make her look—to herself and to the world—recalcitrant and immoral. Walzer writes, “Worrying was such an expected part of mothering that the absence of it might challenge one’s definition as a good mother. . . . Fathers do not necessarily think about their children while they are at work, nor do they worry that not thinking about their child reflects on them as parents.”13 As British cultural critic Jacqueline Rose has noted, “The expectations that are laid on [mothers]” are laden with “adulation and hatred, which of course so often go together.”14
Worrying to no purposeful end is unfortunate, but productive worry stimulates action: the scheduling of well-child visits, the installation of outlet plugs, the introduction of solid foods. The fathers in Walzer’s study both pathologized their wives for their vigilance and connected it to their babies’ well-being.15 It is not, however, connected to a mother’s well-being. Research has shown that family-to-work “spillovers”—thinking about family matters while one is technically otherwise engaged—are associated with increased stress, depression, and general psychological upset. Research shows that the transition between thinking about family and thinking about work can lead to difficulty concentrating, as well as negative self-appraisals that make people—mothers in particular—feel that they are failing in both roles at all times.16
The idea that a mother should always be thinking about her children isn’t new, but neither is it very, very old, and as Meredith Michaels experienced while mothering from opposite ends of two decades, it ebbs and flows with time. In the colonial period in the U.S., fathers were assigned one crucial task of childrearing: building their children’s character. There was less emphasis on the special and exclusive relationship between mother and child. This began to shift with industrialization, after the American Revolution, in the early half of the nineteenth century. University of Wisconsin–La Crosse historian Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, author of the 2014 book Modern Motherhood, explains, “The differentiation between mothers and fathers accelerates in the 1820s and ’30s. You see it in the women’s magazines’ ideal of the sentimentalized mother who is available, domestically defined, and selfless.
“The selflessness piece became really important to the cultural construction of motherhood. In flowery nineteenth-century language, it’s there everywhere. Women were to teach morality by being the more moral of the two sexes. Men could go out into the world and be rough-and-tumble, because women would maintain that sphere. All of this was happening during slavery and industrialization, which of course exploited many mothers and children, and made a sheltered domestic life impossible. But by behaving as selfless ‘moral mothers,’ white middle-class mothers were thought to be making a social contribution. They got a compromised idea of citizenship: You don’t get to vote, but you get to raise the sons that will keep the republic going.” So-called moral motherhood is an ideology that vested moral authority in women as mothers but denied them political or economic authority. It was also child-centered, commanding women to put their children first and confining them to the home. It endowed what is actually the world’s oldest profession with an ethical imperative that has since wavered, but only in degree. And it did not proffer the same for men.
Mothers and fathers butt heads in this mismatch of ideas about what makes an adequate parent. If I believe in my bones that being a good mother means thinking about my children’s needs a hairbreadth short of all of the time, and my husband does not believe in his bones that being a good father means thinking about his children’s needs a hairbreadth short of all of the time, we are reaching for different rings. I am bound to be baffled when our divergent internal pressures show their outlines—when he fails to register that spring break is approaching and we will need child care, or that the babysitter is coming and the kids will need dinner, or their teeth cleanings are months overdue. Walzer writes, “[S]ocial norms make it particularly difficult for mothers to feel that they are doing the right thing. I call this mother worry, and it is generated by the question: Am I being a good mother?”17
Does a father ever deign to ask that question? Is a mother ever free to let it go? The world does not conspire to lessen her concern. Sociologist Claire Kamp Dush remembers a text message received by a female friend of hers from preschool when the friend was out of town for work: “We miss you!” they wrote, above an attachment of a photo of her son dressed and dropped off by his father in wildly mismatched clothing and two different shoes. “The school did not say anything to the father. They just took a picture and texted it to my friend. The suggestion was that it was her fault. She told me and our other friend, and we were like, ‘Was the kid alive and at day care? Good enough.’ There’s that pressure society puts on women. If your mother-in-law comes to your house and it’s dirty, she’s blaming you.”
Meredith Michaels says, “Even in countries with more social support like Sweden, I think the sexual division of labor is still pretty codified along traditional lines. To be a good father does not include putting in the hard labor of knowing your children in that kind of intimate way. It doesn’t. Some men do, but it’s against the grain of everything that is culturally there. There’s this cultural overdetermination. When his mother died, Henry James said something like, ‘And she gave herself to her children as mothers should.’ Really? Huh. So you give yourself. I think that still prevails. I see young mothers now who basically operate under that rubric. I’m giving myself to my children. I’m not doing xyz for myself because my children need me.”
Whether or not they operate under that rubric, mothers today remain mindful of the rubric’s imperatives. Despite my own deeply held beliefs about what makes a decent parent—reinforced by a doctorate’s worth of reading on psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s “good enough mother,” a theory that centers on emotional attunement to one’s baby and not a never-ending diet of self-sacrifice—I often felt pressure to appear as if I were, as Michaels puts it, not doing xyz for myself because my children needed me. When our daughters were very young, on the rare occasion when George and I had time to go for a drink between work and preschool pickup, I’d rush him as the clock moved toward five-thirty, to his disappointment and dismay. School closed at six, but I hated to arrive last-minute. I feared looking immoral, like a mother who didn’t care. This had nothing to do with my children’s happiness. When I managed to arrive markedly early, they only asked to stay later to play.
As the psychologist Alice Miller writes of this narcissistic preoccupation with looking like a virtuous mother, “I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me.”18
Some years later, this preoccupation got old. Its pull manifested differently, in feelings of mild rebellion when I turned down, say, Liv’s request to be her third-grade class parent. By elementary school, it was liberating to decline a mothering ask. I could have yelled it from the heavens: “I don’t want to come up with healthy, thematic snacks and grade-appropriate crafts for the Halloween party!” And by the way, Liv never raised the issue with her father, who also would have said no, and felt only a momentary tinge of regret for the personal loss.
I am the default parent, though Liv adores George and knows that he always helps. Walzer concludes, “Embedded in the use of the verb ‘help’ is the notion that parenting is ultimately the mother’s responsibility—that fathers are doing a favor when they parent. The default position, which is a factor in mothers’ parental consciousness, is that the mother is on duty unless she asks for or is offered help. This is a state of affairs that creates dissonance for some of the couples I met, and wives especially, who expected their marriages to be partnerships.”19
One Thanksgiving not so many years ago, Brigid Schulte, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, mother of two, and author of the book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, resolved to divorce her husband. They’d invited eighteen guests for dinner. She’d spent the week making multiple trips to the grocery store and ordering special tablecloths. The couple ran their local Turkey Trot that morning, and upon arriving home, Schulte commenced chopping produce and assembling casseroles. By two that afternoon, the kitchen was a mess of vegetable peels and stained cookbooks, and Schulte was still in her running clothes. Her husband entered the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She assumed he was going to take out the turkey. Instead, he grabbed a six-pack and headed out the door. She recalls, “I had a knife in my hand as [he] walked out. I wished I had been a carnival knife thrower ’cause I just wanted to like [swish sound] right at [his] head cause I was so angry.” She spent the time that he was out mentally dividing their possessions: He could keep the couch. (Her husband, Tom, later conceded, “I’m not sure what I was thinking.”)
But it wasn’t just holiday meal prep that got Schulte to that point. At the time, she later recalled in an essay for Slate, “My husband didn’t know who the kids’ dentist was, had never made summer camp plans, never bought toilet paper, or filled out all those damn school and Girl Scout forms. He’d never clipped baby fingernails, nor had he been the one to figure out how to get work done when a snowstorm, strep throat or unexpected barf threw the whole jerry-rigged system of work and child care into disarray.”
In the weeks that followed, instead of finding a lawyer, Schulte employed the tools of her trade. She pulled out a notebook and started interviewing Tom. They’d gone into their marriage with the presumption of equality. How had they gotten off course? She told me, “You have to ask yourself, is it really worth destroying love and partnership, your desire for sharing your life together? Instead, we decided to think about how to equally share raising our children. Day-to-day, nobody wants to do drudge work. Mental labor is exhausting. My husband had no idea what I was keeping in my head. I was scurrying around and getting everything nice before he came home. We were caught up in traditional norms, what a good mother is. It was a failure of imagination. We both had to recognize that social pressures were policing us in a certain way. We needed to hold each other accountable. It’s important to automate as much as you can so that you don’t need to renegotiate and argue. Set a big vision. Experiment as you go. Because arguments over housework are not insignificant. The unfair division of labor is a big reason for the breakup of marriages.” (The third-most-cited reason, actually, after adultery and growing apart.)
By that Thanksgiving, Schulte had reached a “threat point,” defined in the social science literature as “the contribution threshold below which an individual may abandon the marriage rather than compensate for lowered partner investment.”20 Threat points grow out of bargaining problems, how two actors share a surplus that they alone generate. These come from game theory, the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation. Threat points are often associated with resources like money or physical attractiveness—or the very lack thereof.
Tracy, the domestic violence advocate in Washington State, explained her inability to negotiate better for herself: “My husband is a software engineer. He thinks my work is not as hard, despite my job, the six loads of laundry I have to fold, and the dog I have to walk. I have a high school education and a fifteen-dollar-an-hour job. If he stands up and says, ‘If you don’t like it, hit the road,’ what am I going to do?” How well either spouse might fare outside of the marriage because of their respective resources contributes to the estimation of threat points (for example, “The better able I am to support myself or find another spouse, the more I might demand from my partner in order to stay”).
Threat points are also colored by cohort-specific gender expectations. For couples married before 1975, wives’ employment was associated with greater risk of divorce. That is no longer the case. Similarly, wives’ household labor responsibility is no longer linearly associated with greater marital stability—but men’s willingness to contribute is.21
Schulte related the story of a female friend with a nine-month-old baby who got so fed up with her husband that she simply walked out. “She said, ‘We have the same job. Why am I doing so much more than you?’ Then she left for twenty-four hours. He got it together.”
SUNY Polytechnic Institute sociologist Veronica Tichenor, author of Earning More and Getting Less, explained what she heard from the women she interviewed. “Everyone around them is experiencing the same thing. They can laugh and commiserate about how tough it is and how incompetent their husband is. One woman in my book had two young daughters and complicated caretaking arrangements. She joked that if anyone in her life were going to walk out on her, it would best be her husband. ‘If your day care person leaves you, now, that’s a problem.’ She was only half joking. ‘I could get along without him. He does so little.’ That’s a risk for men.”
And here’s the rub: This risk just does not equal the reward. Or, more precisely, there is no clear-cut reward for “doing so little” in a marriage. In 2010, researchers from Dartmouth College, the University of South Carolina, and Indiana University looked at the emotional costs of inequity in the household division of labor. Prior work had established that this inequity fuels depression in women. The group wanted to establish a more nuanced take on the variation in feeling that it might create in both partners. Equity theory proposes that perceived unfairness in all manner of scenarios results in emotional upset—no matter which side of the equation one finds oneself on. Regardless of who is getting or doing less or more, both participants are likely to experience distress. Using data from the emotion module of the General Social Survey, they determined: “Consistent with equity theory, individuals who perceive themselves as either overbenefiting or underbenefiting with respect to housework report significantly more negative emotions than do their counterparts who judge the arrangement as fair to both parties. . . . The influences of under- and overbenefiting on negative emotions are approximately equal.”22
Equal but not the same. The group found that perceptions of inequity to self were linked to anger and rage, while perceptions of inequity to other were linked to fear and self-reproach (a concise articulation of a dynamic in my own marriage if ever there were one). Furthermore, positive emotions take a hit in the face of inequity. Tranquility specifically goes down for both members of a couple as their perception of unfairness goes up. To be sure, unequally shouldered workloads are carried at great cost. But here’s another difference between women and men: Women are more emotionally sensitive to overbenefiting. They feel worse when they’re the ones doing less. In contrast, men are more emotionally sensitive to underbenefiting.23 They may feel chagrin while resting as their wives pack all the lunches, but their hackles go up faster and higher in the event that this scenario is reversed.
Erica in Portland noted, “I have a couple girlfriends who are married to stay-at-home dads. But they’re overly accommodating as far as their husbands having time to themselves. In the end, they’re working and they’re doing more at home. I have a stay-at-home-mom friend who never gets a break.”
Vidya in Los Angeles told me, “Weirdly, even when my husband wasn’t freelancing much and I was working full-time at a job, I felt guilty that I wasn’t doing half the housework. It was important to me that I be doing half at home, even though I was working way more hours than he was overall, and also basically supporting us.” She felt better underbenefiting.
DC-area writer and mom blogger Dara Mathis describes efforts to avoid overbenefiting. “I do the cooking and he does the dishes. But we’re trying to sleep-train our fifteen-month-old, which is going terribly, and it takes longer for us to put her to bed. So I will do the dishes for him. In my mind, even though I had cooked and was with the baby all day, it was unfair to him to expect that he would do the dishes and then go directly to staying with the baby for thirty minutes.”
Women’s greater relative comfort with underbenefiting juxtaposed with men’s greater relative comfort with overbenefiting sets the course for men to refuse responsibility and for women to comply with their refusal. Men opt out in a handful of categorical ways. SUNY Stony Brook sociologist and gender scholar Michael Kimmel described discussions he’s had with them on the topic: “Men often tell me, ‘My wife gets on me all the time because I don’t vacuum, and I’m watching a baseball game, and she comes in and says, ‘At least you could vacuum.’ So I do, and then she comes back and tells me I didn’t do it very thoroughly. So I just figure I won’t do it anymore.’” My own reluctant impulse to endorse this position runs so deep that Kimmel’s retort to these men delights me. “I say to them, ‘Well, that’s an interesting response! If I were your supervisor at work and I assigned you a report, and I wasn’t happy with what you turned in, and I told you so, would your reply be, ‘Well, then, I’ll never do that again!’?”
Kimmel is describing a refusal-of-responsibility strategy that has been called “adherence to inferior standards.” Miranda in Vermont talked about it like this: “Even when we were first living together and trying to figure out who does what, I remember Lowell saying, ‘If you feel like things need to be cleaner than they are, then you have a different threshold than I do, and you have to do it yourself.’ So now I do almost all the cleaning and most of the cooking. Neither of us likes to cook, but I have more experience with it. He does almost all the dishes. That’s how we’ve dealt with that. But his idea of doing dishes and mine are different. He throws them in the dishwasher, the counters are still disgusting, and the table has food splattered all over it. I clean up after he cleans up.”
Other strategies include passive resistance, strategic incompetence, strategic use of praise, and flat-out denial.24 The parents I interviewed all spoke obliquely to these categories. Yana in California has three young sons and a stay-at-home husband. She described his passive resistance like this: “We tried at some point to divide things more equally. We had a schedule of who would put the kids to sleep. I take the baby, you put the others to bed. Then I’d be upset because he was taking so long. So now I put everyone to sleep. In part, I guess this is mutual. But I’d say, ‘Please do homework with the kids by the time I get home.’ I’d get home, and he hadn’t done it yet. So I took over, and now I do it myself. I just figured at some point that if I want things done, I have to stay on top of them.” Yana’s husband never explicitly turns down her requests—but he routinely fails to fulfill them.
Strategic incompetence looks like this: Nicole in Portland told me, “I cook because I have specific dietary needs, and he’s not into it. I believe in the health of my kids. If I left it up to him they’d eat Hamburger Helper.” Strategic use of praise like this: Meredith, from the new mothers’ group in my neighborhood, said, “He’ll look at me and say, ‘Am I doing this right?’ I have mixed feelings about it. Like, ‘Oh, there’s something I can do better than you, and you’re respecting that!’ On the other hand, it’s like, ‘I wish you spent enough time with her to know all these things as much as I do.’”
And finally, denial (that his behavior gives shape to her options): Mark, Nicole’s husband, said, “It has to do with my wife’s personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has the need to be doing something!” And Lowell, Miranda’s husband, told me, “I do laundry when I need it. I operate on my time scale. As long as there are clean clothes, I don’t prioritize that. We have different comfort levels about letting it build up. I could do it more often, proactively, but that’s not my default nature. So she tends to be the one that falls to.” Occidental College sociologist Lisa Wade summed up what she has seen like this: “Men find ways of being so difficult that it’s not worth it. You do it yourself.”
We play it as it lays. Wade said, “When inequality is what we’re used to, inequality looks like equality. If you do an experiment and show subjects a room that is fifty/fifty male/female, people see a preponderance of women over men. We’re so used to seeing rooms dominated by men that our vision is warped. I wonder sometimes, if men were doing half, if it would feel like they were doing two thirds. Now they can do a third and it feels like half.”
Men refuse because they’ve seen other men refusing. It almost looks like equality. Studies on women and leadership have underscored that exposure to one gender or another in a particular role tends to be self-reinforcing. When businesspeople are asked to draw an effective leader, for example, they almost always draw a man. Even when sketches are (rarely) gender-neutral, adjectives used to describe a drawing are male-typical. And studies of emergent leadership find that men, but not women, are recognized as potential leaders when they offer ideas to their colleagues.25 We use stereotypes to size up situations. Our assessments feel based on the present but are actually drawn mostly from the past. The tendency to go along like this is called the confirmation bias. Quick—draw someone doing a good job cleaning a table or putting a child to bed. Draw a parent alone in a room.
In the U.S. and other nations without strong family policy, men’s resistance strategies undergird women’s tireless immersion, what journalist Jill Filipovic has called the cult of female sacrifice.26 But in some countries things look, while not exactly egalitarian, different. Where there is state-sponsored universal child care—as provided in, let’s say, Denmark—time-use studies show that fathers spend the same amount of time with their children as fathers in the U.S. But the ratio in father’s to mother’s child care time is much smaller in Denmark because Danish mothers (with some help from institutions) are left to do that much less.27
While living in Paris, journalist Pamela Druckerman observed that mothers in France—where high-quality, state-subsidized child care is also widely available—express much less anger toward their husbands than their counterparts in the States. In her book Bringing Up Bébé, Druckerman writes, “France has less feminist rhetoric, but it has many more institutions that enable women to work. There’s the national paid maternity leave, the subsidized nannies and crèches, the free universal preschool from age three, and myriad tax credits and payments for having kids. All this doesn’t ensure that there’s equality between men and women. But it does ensure that Frenchwomen can have both a career and kids.”28 Frenchwomen may not have equal partners, but other support is available should they choose to take advantage of it, which female primates have been doing for centuries. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, anthropologist Alyssa Crittenden tells me, “Those of us who study family formation and the evolution of cooperative breeding, we don’t prioritize one caregiver over another. Distributive care is the most important thing. How that shakes out cross-culturally has to do with norms of the social group.”
The so-called cult of female sacrifice was necessarily reinforced during the Cold War, when social groups in the West who decried feminism’s goals aligned with the Red Scare. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the newly formed USSR declared state-sponsored early child care an important tool for indoctrinating children, or for helping them grow into ideal Soviet citizens. In the decades following, American opposition to government-subsidized early child care often centered on the premise that only mothers, and not state-funded preschools (or—and this didn’t even warrant mentioning—fathers), could raise warm-blooded American citizens.29
Lecturing across the country on egalitarianism in the 1970s, husband and wife psychologists Sandra and Daryl Bem acknowledged, “Middle class people were not open to the idea of providing child care outside the child’s own home. As hard as this may be to believe, on those few early occasions when we tried to talk about day care, even our college audiences branded it as ‘communist.’”30 As we added “under God” to the Pledge to differentiate from the godless Soviets, we solidified society’s distaste for the collective contribution to rearing healthy kids. The indoctrination that materialized in the U.S. was subsequently aimed not at children but, rather, their mothers. As Betty Friedan noted in 1963’s The Feminine Mystique, “fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949—the housewife-mother.”31 Friedan’s best seller chronicled simmering ennui among the period’s housewives. The book owed its success to the permission it gave midcentury women to admit to the idea of wanting other things.
But the fear that just maybe they shouldn’t was not so easily shed. And so writing over fifty years later, in 2017’s The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness, Jill Filipovic observed, “Women who think they’re entitled to pleasure and happiness for themselves alone are cast as selfish or immoral. . . . Women who pursue the pleasure of achievement are overly ambitious careerists, and if they’re also mothers, then they’re probably paying someone else to raise their children. Women who put their own desires even temporarily ahead of someone else’s—especially, god forbid, their children’s—are unfit parents and bad people. This cult of female sacrifice, often masquerading as love, has real consequences . . . women get the head-patting platitude that ‘motherhood is the most important job in the world.’ It should come as little surprise that, contrary to the clichés and the promises, having children tanks women’s happiness.”32 See journalist Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood for lamentations on that particular research finding.
The cult of female sacrifice takes on varied forms in different cultural subgroups but always ends with one consistent message. In Raising the Race, Yale anthropologist Riché J. Daniel Barnes describes the “strong black woman framework” that requires African American mothers to—sing along with me now—do it all. Black feminist scholars are leery of the framework, which, they assert, masquerades as an accolade while really just maintaining the patriarchal order. Barnes writes, “Despite critiques by black feminist scholars, the black community continued to celebrate black women whom they represented as managing it all—work, children, and economic, political, and social insecurity—alone. . . . ‘It is a badge of honor,’ I was told, and one of the few stereotypes of black women that is actually positive. For black professional women, however, this myth, encouraging them to be superwomen who are beholden to their careers, spouses, children, families of origin, and the larger black community, increasingly comes at a cost the women are not willing to pay.”33
DePauw University sociologist Tamara Beauboeuf-LaFontant asserts that maintaining the myth of the strong black woman is a “costly performance.”34 The professional women in Barnes’s study were doubly stymied—not only by sexism but also by racism. They “still contend with the idea that they, as a group, are undesirable; their status as wives is much more precarious than their status as mothers and career women, and therefore all, or at least the majority, of their efforts must go into maintaining the marriage.” Their threat points raised by the conventional wisdom, these women appeared reluctant, according to Barnes, to ask for or even acknowledge their desire for more from their husbands.35
In Feminism Is for Everybody, bell hooks writes, “When women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort and pleasure.”36 To test the hypothesis—also laid out by Arlie Hochschild in The Second Shift—that mothers feel burdened in their homes by the writ of female sacrifice (or the one of the strong black woman, take your pick), Penn State University labor and employment professor Sarah Damaske asked both men and women about their levels of happiness at home versus at work. When we spoke, I wondered if she’d found gender differences upon final analysis. “Yes,” said Damaske, who is herself a mother. “Women are happier at work, and men are happier at home!” She laughed uproariously for a good minute before continuing, “It makes a lot of sense. Men have less responsibility at home. It’s more of a haven for them than for their wives.” Her team also took saliva samples and measured the stress hormone cortisol. Damaske said, “People’s stress hormones decreased when they went to work. Everyone’s. We think of our homes and these wonderful family moments, but home is also the daily chores of the dishes and saying, ‘Can you pick up your toys,’ and no one thanks you for cleaning the toilet. I think when you go to work, there can be this release of some of the daily stress of that labor.”
Natalie, forty-one, a special education teacher and mother of two teenagers in the suburbs of Los Angeles, remembers, “Some years back, I was trying to find more time for myself. I was getting really angry and really negative. I just was not pleasant to be around. It seemed like because I put myself last, the thought of hanging out at my house, I didn’t want to be there. It brought me so much stress. I’d go to yoga and feel relaxed, but I’d come back home, and that feeling would go away—as soon as I stepped in the door. My family could tell. I was carrying that load and not expressing myself. I was trying to be this perfect mom, wife, career woman, without taking anyone’s help. Or even expressing ‘I can’t do this all on my own.’”
Natalie said that she reached a breaking point and decided to make some changes. She and her husband, Rob, pulled their kids from school, sold their possessions, and spent a year driving cross-country in an old camper van. As they traveled, she considered how she’d made her own bed, but Rob never examined his part. She told me, “It’s interesting. We have these conversations. He says, ‘It’s the whole feminism movement. If you guys didn’t want everything, you guys would probably have it a lot easier.’ I can see that to some extent.” Feminism often plays the straw man in these discussions, as if the very desire for equality were problematic, rather than the fact that equality has yet to materialize.
Here’s another question that men do not have to ask: Can we really have it all? Why ask if the earth is round—if cars are made from steel? And so women are stuck with it; I’ve seen it on Facebook. In 2017, Raquel, a woman in one Midwestern mothers’ group, responded to a question about having it all from a member who’d recently been promoted: “I dislike the phrase ‘have it all.’ I am self-employed. Can I hustle 60 hours a week and spend tons of time with my family? No. Can I find success and fulfillment in my career and get to spend plenty of time with my kids? Absolutely! Does it suck that my husband never even has to think about this in his career, even though we work hard to have an equal relationship? A million times yes.” The Twitter account @manwhohasitall highlights this particular brand of gender-role ridiculousness, posing questions like “Can you have a successful career AND be a good dad?” and “Is it too risky to hire attractive men?”
Like Natalie, Rob is a teacher. He could not assume the financial responsibility of supporting their family alone, though it would have been his preference. Absent that traditional (and ever more unattainable) male capacity, he nevertheless continues to expect his wife to be the traditional default parent. He blames feminism for giving Natalie big ideas—social justice movement as creator of mirage. He never questioned his right to the very same big idea: the ability to have a family, a work life, and also some time to himself.
Vanessa in Queens has her own business, two young children, and a husband who admires her ambition. Still, helping her to have it all has not been in his wheelhouse. She said, “My husband is totally accepting and supportive of strong women. The actual functioning of our life is a different thing. On paper, it sounds great. But in actuality, he lets eighty-five percent fall on me. He decided to buy a gym after our second child was born. He decided to begin the most grueling training program on the planet two months after she arrived. It didn’t feel like the right time to take on something that would take him away from the family, but he didn’t make that connection.” So while he pursues his dreams unfettered, her possibilities narrow. “I have to make some decisions. I don’t work out the way I used to. My husband goes for a run every weekend. I don’t have the luxury to do that. I don’t get to relax. I have to decide what needs to be done in a day and what can be tabled. It sucks, but I have to boss him around. He’s a great father. If he were only that good of a husband.”
The ABC sitcom Splitting Up Together features a newly divorced couple with three kids who decide to continue living in the same house for the good of their offspring. A montage sequence in the pilot’s first minutes outlines the circumstances of the breakup in broad strokes. The father, played by Oliver Hudson, is on his way out the door for a run. The mother, played by Jenna Fischer, comes downstairs in a ponytail and glasses, carting a basket of laundry. He says, “I was just going to go for a quick run before work.” She replies, “Cool. I was just going to do the laundry, vacuum, plunge the upstairs toilet, call a guy about the broken sprinkler, go to work, come home, and make dinner.”
“Cool,” he says. “What’s for dinner?”
Boston College psychologist and psychoanalyst Usha Tummala-Narra reiterates that women receive positive reinforcement for caregiving from a young age. “You see what behavior gets you ahead, and that’s internalized. This is what works, this is how I can exist in society and be seen, acknowledged, recognized. Conversely, for men, they’re still recognized for masculinity and how much they’re able to earn. So external social markers of success are still driving women and men today in terms of how they make their choices. I see it as adaptive. You adapt in order to survive within a framework. But the framework doesn’t seem to be changing. The problem becomes, then, that the framework doesn’t change. It’s the framework, and not the behavior, that is pathological. Men are not socialized to feel guilty for having freedom or for not being there for other people. From the beginning, you’ve been internalizing the idea that this is the most important thing you can do. Being at work is great, but not ‘the most important thing’ you can do.”
Thus, men feel entitled to have it all, though to call it that implies that it is something out of the ordinary, and of course, it is not, if one is a man. In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama writes about the problem in the early years of his own marriage: “By the time Sasha was born . . . my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained. ‘You only think about yourself,’ she would tell me. ‘I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.’ I was stung by such accusations. I thought she was being unfair. After all, it wasn’t as if I went carousing with the boys every night. I made few demands of Michelle—I didn’t ask her to darn my socks or have dinner waiting for me when I got home. Whenever I could, I pitched in with the kids. All I asked for in return was a little tenderness. Instead I found myself subjected to endless negotiations about every detail of managing the house, long lists of things that I needed to do or had forgotten to do, and a generally sour attitude.”37 Later on, Obama takes a more sympathetic position toward his wife, but here he sounds like the new fathers I see in my practice, not to mention my own loving husband. While the mothers I work with are almost universally angry with their partners for their lukewarm parental consciousness—for being helpers, sharers, and slackers—the men I work with mostly seem as puzzled by their wives’ frustration as Barack was by Michelle’s, as George was by mine. I love her. I pitch in. What gives?
Michelle Obama, for her part, ultimately accommodated her husband’s entitlement. During his first campaign for president in August 2007, journalist Rebecca Johnson reported in Vogue, “As bad as the time crunch is now, it was worse when the children were smaller. Both the senator and his wife have been frank about their marital troubles during those years, when the bulk of child rearing fell on her shoulders, even as she tried to maintain her demanding career. ‘If a toilet overflows,’ she likes to say in one of her standard ‘stumps,’ ‘we women are the ones rescheduling our meetings to be there when the plumber arrives.’ . . . ‘I like to talk about it,’ she says, ‘because I think every couple struggles with these issues. People don’t tell you how much kids change things. I think a lot of people give up on themselves. They get broken, but if we can talk about it, we can help each other.’ Instead of quitting her job or divorcing her husband, Michelle decided to make peace with the situation. ‘I spent a lot of time expecting my husband to fix things, but then I came to realize that he was there in the ways he could be. If he wasn’t there, it didn’t mean he wasn’t a good father or didn’t care. I saw it could be my mom or a great baby-sitter who helped. Once I was OK with that, my marriage got better.’”38 Despite the obvious pragmatism of her choice, which I respect, my heart sank when I read this last bit. If that was the best even Michelle Obama could extract from her marriage, what audacious hope remained for the rest of us?
With the Obamas as the platonic example, it’s clear that it was not the then-senator’s disregard for women or commitment to traditional family roles that tripped the couple up. Clearly, when we’ve concluded that egalitarian values and feminist-leaning partners will produce equally sharing fathers, we’ve been missing some crucial information.
That information is in part about implicit biases. Implicit bias—the attitudes and stereotypes that affect our actions in unconscious ways—is thought to explain all sorts of unintentional discrimination, from the disproportionate hiring and promotion of men to the police shootings of unarmed African Americans. It is also in heavy rotation in the gendered distribution of labor in the home. One may have a conscious belief that men and women should be equal while simultaneously maintaining a less conscious commitment to the primacy of male desire.
Metacognition, the capacity to reflect more deeply on automatic and unconscious beliefs, is an important counterweight to implicit bias. In the pre-employment screening of police officer candidates, for example, psychologists today routinely examine metacognitive competence—not whether applicants are racist (most people wouldn’t label themselves such) but whether they can think long and hard about how they’ve been impacted by living in a racist society. “You really need cops who get this,” psychologist Dave Corey, founding president of the American Board of Police and Public Safety Psychology, told me.
Joan Williams at the Center for WorkLife Law expressed a similar sentiment about male partners. She explained that egalitarianism (the belief that one is not sexist) is not enough precisely because even men who don’t realize it typically continue to feel at complete liberty to put their own personal autonomy ahead of their wives’. She said, “My strongest advice to young women: Don’t just try to find a man who’s supportive of women. That’s a threshold. But consider, what is his attitude toward himself and ambition? That’s what determines your future. If he’s ambitious and feels entitled to that ambition, you’re going to end up embattled, marginalized, or divorced.” Like Corey, Williams suggests a sort of pre-employment screening. Can a candidate for co-parent think long and hard about the impact of growing up in a sexist world?
Summer, a forty-one-year-old lawyer and mother of a three-year-old in Chicago, laid out the toll of implicit bias for me. “At the end of the day, it’s always the wife that has to make the choice, a limited career or a limited family life. My husband wouldn’t say this outright, but his attitude has always been, ‘We have to look toward my career path.’ I was offered a job in Atlanta, and they were going to create a position for me, double my salary, and there’s a lower cost of living there. Even though he’s a consultant, in the office once every two months, he was like, ‘It would be a career-limiting move for me.’ I’ve turned down a lot of opportunities. I had to take a position I was overqualified for. It’s frustrating to report to somebody I’m more qualified than. I explain stuff to him and his bosses. All of my female friends at work have taken flexible arrangements, passed up promotions, or weren’t promoted because they had the flextime. All the men who were once at my level have higher titles and salaries than me now, no matter if they have kids—my male boss has three. I read Lean In before I was pregnant, and I was like, ‘This is great.’ I read it again after having a kid, and I was like, ‘This is bullshit.’ It’s unattainable unless you have a bevy of resources financially and emotionally.” Summer fails to mention a third resource, the one that Joan Williams espouses: a partner who can give thought to—and then is better positioned to surrender—an unbridled entitlement to his own uninterrupted pursuits.
Women who are not professionals find themselves bearing the weight of multiple biases, implicit and otherwise. While high-earning mothers may ultimately scale back their market labor because of time constraints and their husband’s unwillingness to compromise, mothers on the lower end of the income scale may be forced out of work altogether not only because their wages come in at less than their male partners (and below the cost of child care) but also because their work is disparaged.
The partners of pink-collar women often feel little respect for low-wage “women’s work.” Sociologist Sarah Damaske, who did the cortisol study, has interviewed working-class women with transient work in low-paying sectors. She said, “They don’t have access to the same work that men do, and make less money than their husbands. A lot of women I interviewed found their spouses to be dismissive of their work. I interviewed a woman who said, ‘I work at Kmart, so my husband says I should just quit my job, that it’s not worthwhile.’ That’s not a challenge middle-class women face—they might also make less money, but they work in positions that are more respected. Working-class women talk about cooking or cleaning or doing hair, work that takes skill. The woman at Kmart said, ‘I have to be able to always be polite and help the elderly person shop and the cranky person who wants to rush out the door.’ No one acknowledges that these jobs demand ability. Academics play a role in that, calling those jobs semi-skilled. It’s a real devaluation of that work. And that has an impact on the home.”
Faced with the knowledge that they cannot have it all, women in Japan have approached the problem by losing interest in marriage and procreation altogether. A 2011 report from Japan’s population center found that 49 percent of women between eighteen and thirty-four were not in romantic relationships, and 39 percent of women in that age group had never had sex at all. Experts there call this Japanese trend “the flight from intimacy” and believe it stems from the juxtaposition of a highly developed economy and a barely developed equity between the sexes in the home.39
In 2017, the World Economic Forum ranked Japan 114th of 144 countries in gender equality; in the same year, the U.S. was ranked 49th, the United Kingdom 15th. Traditionally, Japanese women have been expected to leave the workforce upon marriage. Those who don’t are known as “devil wives.” While the birth rate has been falling steadily in Japan since the 1950s, in 2014, just over a million babies were born there, a record low. This sets up what has been referred to as “a demographic time bomb”40—rising longevity paired with plummeting birth rates. The economy shrinks, leaving far fewer workers to support a top-heavy system or a healthy GDP. Prime Minister Shinzō Abe is addressing this “critical situation” with measures that support relationship formation (for example, government-hosted speed dating and fatherhood classes for single men), as well as work-life balance for families in general (state-subsidized child care and time off for new dads). The government has committed to increasing men’s time in child care from its current 67 minutes a day to 150 minutes a day by the year 2020.41
Japan is an extreme example, but among the nations of the developed world, demographers have shown strong relationships between national birth rates and levels of domestic gender equity. Australian National University demographer Peter McDonald asserts that low fertility is the “result of incoherence in the levels of gender equity in individually-oriented social institutions and family-oriented social institutions.”42 That is, in countries where women have equal opportunity in education and employment but remain the default parent, the birth rate has fallen to new lows (as it did in the U.S. in 2017). When childbearing takes a disproportionate toll on “the human capital aspirations” afforded women, some of those women will decide not to have children at all (what English journalist Suzanne Moore has called “women’s not-so-secret weapon. We could end humanity this way”43), and many will decide to have fewer.
McDonald explains that this phenomenon becomes an issue especially for countries whose social institutions do not lend support to combining work and family, and also in those who still pay lip service to the logic of separate spheres. He writes, “The argument that state support for the combination of work and family is the key to sustainable levels of fertility was made in the 2005 European Commission Green Paper on demographic change. It has also been used to support work/family policy initiatives in various European countries. . . . It is a sensible approach for governments to increase or sustain fertility through support of the combination of work and family for mothers. If they are working they will pay taxes that can be used to pay for the services that they require. Furthermore, [it has been] shown that the association between higher fertility and higher GDP per capita . . . is not so much the result of wealth alone but of the higher labour force participation rates for women in the highest income countries. In turn, these are countries that have focused on policies that support the combination of work and family. This argument is supported by outcomes in the Nordic countries and in the English-speaking countries.”
In contrast, demographer Thomas Anderson writes, “Where traditional norms regarding childrearing, household work, and male breadwinner roles prevail while institutional gender equity and female labor force participation increases, women are more likely to view having a family as being at odds with pursuing career aspirations . . . fertility falls to low levels.”44
Anderson and fellow demographer Hans-Peter Kohler have studied McDonald’s work. Anderson tells me, “Peter argues that in places where there are high degrees of family gender equity within partnerships, you tend to have fertility near replacement rate or slightly under. One cannot dispute that correlation. You can look at the number of hours that men versus women spend in unpaid family work, and you find that where fertility is around replacement rate, the gap between men and women is smaller. In places where the gap is massive, fertility is low.” The U.S. actually falls into the first category, and though fertility has fallen below replacement rate, it still hovers around 1.77, which is higher than the 1.5 births per woman now formally considered “very low fertility”—in Japan, it is 1.42.
Anderson and Kohler wondered about the interaction of two things: 1) McDonald’s correlation between birth rates and gender equity; and 2) research showing that husbands perform a greater percentage of unpaid labor in municipalities where sex ratios skew male—that is, the more men there are relative to women, the more likely men are to participate at home. The two began analyzing population data and domestic gender equality around the world since the industrial revolution. What they found was striking. As economies developed, birth rates fell. As each successive age cohort then became smaller, men—who tend to marry women four years younger than they are—found themselves in marriage populations that skewed toward female advantage (fewer women in the right age range to marry). As men sensed more limited possibility, or as women sensed an increase in their power in the marriage market, gender equity improved.
Anderson and Kohler called this effect “the gender equity dividend.” Anderson says, “In households in Sweden or France, men are more willing to pitch in than in more traditional countries. A lot of people attribute that to top-down legislation—the government legislating toward that end. In the English-speaking countries, the government wouldn’t go there. The U.S. speaks to that. They’ve got shitty, nonexistent policies on parental leave, but still, these days, men are doing more at home. There are multiple pathways to achieving higher gender equity in the household. It’s hard to show on an empirical level why change has taken place. We believe the gender equity dividend is one more pathway. It greases the wheels. Today there are thirty-three million more men than women in China. My prediction: Massive change in gender equality is going to sweep that country.”
This is how demography’s findings play out in real time. Erica, the thirty-eight-year-old project manager in Portland, has had little success at making her husband an equal sharer. “If my kids are sick, I get called by the school. I have to leave work early. He’s blissfully unaware of what’s happening. He doesn’t answer his phone. Occasionally, he’ll joke, ‘Things just get done.’ When I try to point out that that’s not the case, he’s like, ‘You’re Mommy the martyr.’ Birthday presents, vaccination records, dentist appointments. All the little things are things he has no clue about. I’ll ask him to do something, he’ll procrastinate and forget, and then I’m nagging. I buy their clothes, arrange play dates. He teases the kids, ‘If it were up to me, you guys would be wearing potato sacks.’ He makes a joke of it. But he’s not doing a lot of those kinds of things. I take the kids to birthday parties while he gets time to himself. He gets a lot of alone time. Which I crave.”
And so the birth rate in Erica’s family is not rising. “We joked about that. People would ask, ‘Are you going to have more kids?’ I can’t. I’d be booked into a psych ward. If I worked fewer hours or had family support, it might be different. Having two kids, I’m barely making it.”