Social scientists suggest that the last decades’ slow change in child care participation by men should not be mistaken for egalitarian achievement but, rather, understood as “a largely successful male resistance.” Do not ask why change is so slow; instead, ask why men are resisting. “The short answer is that it is in men’s interest to do so,” sociologist Scott Coltrane has written. That resistance “reinforces a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”1 The vigil of the privileged to maintain a crumbling contract—the sordid, steely mission of our times. In marriage, this requires a stalwart commitment to denial of the obvious: that men simply feel entitled to our labor.
The glow of this entitlement shines so bright. Christine in Illinois told me, “My husband is a participatory and willing partner. He’s not traditional in terms of ‘I don’t change diapers.’ But his attention is limited. I remember this profound moment where I had asked him to put the car seat back in my car after it had been in the shop, and he was like, ‘I promise I’ll do it.’ I moved on to other things I had to do. When I went to take my son to school in the morning, the car seat wasn’t there. I said to [my husband], ‘It’s great if you want to help, but I’m juggling balls, and if I throw you one and you drop it, I might as well be doing everything myself.’ We’d have these discussions: ‘Can you take the balls and keep the balls? It’s draining me.’ I can’t trust him to do anything, to actually remember.”
Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar, and forgetting is not just forgetting. To employ “limited attention” is to announce that one cannot be bothered, and when the task must ultimately be completed by someone, the forgetter is asserting his right to fail to attend. Who has the leeway to forget in parenthood? Who bears the ultimate strain of that thoughtlessness?
As my kids got older, it was male forgetting that irked me most in my own relationship. Last summer, after spending chunks of the year taking charge of all that was required to get both girls signed up for camp, I realized I was missing Liv’s medical form. With two months to go, I asked George to take care of it. He agreed he would. One month later, I checked in. He hadn’t gotten around to it yet. The week before the deadline for medical forms, I asked again. “I’ve been thinking about doing that,” George offered. “I’ll walk over to the office this weekend.” That is not how getting forms from the doctor’s office works. The very fact that he did not know this as he approached his second decade of fatherhood was in itself endemic of the problem. As had so often been the case, enlisting his participation had turned into more trouble than it was worth. I called the office and requested the form. They told me it would be ready in five to seven days. Seven days later, I hiked over and retrieved it. “I got Liv’s medical form,” I texted George, not that he’d seemed concerned. Indeed, had I never mentioned it again, the very notion of that form would have vanished in the murk. I texted wanting an acknowledgment of his forgetting, a commitment to doing better next time. An apology would also have been nice. Instead, he wrote back, “Oh great, thanks.” Déjà vu all over again.
The kids’ needs have changed since Tess was a baby and this all first became a big issue; the girls have gotten easier to manage, at least for this mercifully restful period between complete dependency and adolescence. (“The glory years are when they’re both in elementary school,” said Nicole in Portland with two high school students. “Then middle school hits, and it’s horrible, pre-warning.”) The dynamic with my husband barely shifts. Without intention, he continues to perpetuate a gender order that privileges men over women, him over me—and continues to deny that this is so. What changes if you write about this subject is that when you wearily address your frustration with your husband, he will occasionally retort, “Put it in your book!” (Maybe he’s just being generous, giving me material.) These days, George also considers what I’ve said once he’s had a little space. Later, after the fight we went on to have about the form, he came home with flowers. He trimmed the stems and put them in a vase on my desk.
“Did it ever enter into the mind of man that woman too had an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of her individual happiness?” Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked a male cousin in a letter in 1855.
Are you being unfair to your wife?
It’s a question I posed to many fathers—the husbands of the women I’d spoken with as well as other motley volunteers. Some of them answered in the negative, even those whose wives saw it otherwise. One mother had a lot to say about struggling for her husband’s investment. Her husband later told me, “We both worked less when our children were little. That was really good for us. She felt like we were in it together. We were both sacrificing to make that happen. What was negative about that, we were both really stressed out. But I think it paid off. We both know either one of us is willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the family.”
It might not surprise you to learn that interviewing men about their division of labor at home proved difficult. While they were generous with their time, it was not an idea that most of the fathers had given much thought, and even under direction, it failed to spark interest. Other women had come up against the same insouciance. Laura in New York City has been unhappy with the division of labor in her marriage since her four-year-old was a newborn. She said, “I’ve worked hard on identifying how I played a part and tried to fix it. My husband has not put any thought or energy into it even when I said, ‘This is kind of a deal breaker for me now.’ He got upset and cried and said, ‘Oh my God,’ but I haven’t seen personal work there. He always goes back to this lack of self-awareness.” For fathers, it seemed, the issue has never risen to the level of recurrent concern. The gender order works for them. It’s nothing to get hot under the collar about. They can resist without doing a thing. They quite literally resist by not doing a thing.
“Nobody gives up privilege voluntarily,” neuroscientist Lise Eliot said. “You really have to be very enlightened to do that.”
In San Diego, Gabe, thirty-eight, husband of Deanna, who at the outset of her marriage aspired to a 1950s television fantasy of married life, spoke with slight irritation about what he sees mostly as his wife’s uptight nature. “If I’m busy, I use lists, too, but when it comes to my life outside of work, I don’t. I carry what our plans are in my head; she writes everything down. She’ll wake up anxious on a Saturday morning, which is frustrating to me. I might carry the same ideas about what we need to do, but I’m not going to get myself worked up over it.” Fathers balk at mothers’ efforts but then also at a lack thereof. Sociologist Annette Lareau recalls observing parents for her book on race, class, and family life, “I found that some fathers were angry that moms signed kids up for so much. ‘Why can’t we just hang around?’ They’d get mad about it. But they’d also get mad if the mom goofed up and the kid missed a deadline for soccer or baseball. Everyone proclaimed it to be Mom’s fault.”
Jeremy, thirty-seven, in suburban Illinois, had been out with his guy friends the night before our scheduled conversation, and he brought up the topic with the group. He told me that it fell pretty flat. “It didn’t become a huge topic of conversation,” Jeremy said diplomatically, though one friend did offer that “if it were up to him, his family would just sit around the house. That’s his personality. He’s never planned anything. Even in high school and college.” He resists without doing a thing.
After months of putting it off, I finally sat down to interview George. “We have to do that interview,” I kept saying at inopportune moments. If the genesis for this project was a bleak period between us, things had really been much lighter for some time. (See above re: the kids’ needs becoming easier to manage. Remember, the research demonstrates that mothers of children under four report the greatest sense of injustice. I began thinking about this project when Tess was three. She was a month shy of six by the time I finished.) I was reluctant to dive back into that old darkness with him, even for the sake of a brief and theoretically academic discussion.
Having myself given our patterns a lot of thought—“Writing toward answers,” as feminist author Roxane Gay has called it2—I asked George, for the record, what he made of them. “For me, I know I often have a lot on my mind. I work five days a week. We’ve had other things going on. We had two new people to contend with and think about. I went from having to think about me and you to having to think about a number of people.”
He sounded defensive as he spoke, and as was not atypical for me, some trace hostility in his voice shut me down. Nothing he was saying was untrue. But his dilemmas applied equally to me, and I hadn’t responded by keeping my head down. Another woman might have had the stamina to remark on this. Characteristically, I did not—I knew it would lead to a fight I didn’t want to have. Such inability to pursue my co-parenting goals unabated had certainly gotten in my way over the years. This takes a lot of effort, and the fortitude required for it was apparently more than I’d had.
George went on, “Did I take it for granted that you were doing things? Yes, I suppose I did. But I didn’t like the fact that you were doing them and then criticizing me for not doing them. I’d have preferred you just not do it and tell me to do something.” I reminded him that he often forgot the things I asked him to take care of, and that having to ask in the first place was just another form of responsibility. “There’s probably something about men taking women for granted. Maybe men are much more responsible for that than they would care to think. There’s a truth to it,” he ultimately allowed.
Here is what I would have preferred to hear from my husband—unequivocally and without shame: “I am sexist.” That was the headline of a New York Times opinion piece by Emory University philosophy professor George Yancy, who took it upon himself, late in 2018, to implore men to join him “with due diligence and civic duty, and publicly claim: I am sexist,” to take responsibility for misogyny and patriarchy.3 Yancy’s sexism “raises its ugly head” in his own marriage. He writes, “I should be thanked when I clean the house, cook, sacrifice my time. These are the deep and troubling expectations that are shaped by male privilege. . . .” I nearly wept in gratitude for his admission. When men deny their sexism, they gaslight their partners, compounding an already painful problem by insisting that its clear and obvious precursors are the imaginings of a hysterical mind.
While Yancy made the unabashed admission of male privilege look easy, not every man can pull that off. One mother I’d interviewed got back in touch to tell me she’d shown Yancy’s piece to her husband. “I was really hoping this writer’s introspection might get through to him about this thing in our relationship that’s been a big problem for me,” she explained. Instead she was met with outrage. Her husband proclaimed that they lived as equals, and that patriarchy had no influence on their division of labor with their two young children. “We ended up in the biggest fight we’d ever had,” she told me.
I tugged at the sexism thread with the fathers I spoke to. Lowell, thirty-four, in Vermont, married to Miranda, was the only to allow: “The expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. I have some degree of that, too. My mom was a professional. She ran her own preschool. To this day, she cooks for my dad. He’s barely ever made a meal. I think I’ve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when you’re not being asked . . . I have justifications. It’s a copout.”
Because of the inimical success of male resistance, copping out of drudge work remains a viable option if one is a man. This is true not only at home, in relationships based on love, but also at work, where little love is lost. In 2018, a headline in the Harvard Business Review teased, “Why Women Volunteer for Tasks That Don’t Lead to Promotion.” Here’s the answer per the research: because someone has to do them, and all the men tend not to, at least not if there are women at the fore. In a series of lab studies, economists Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, and Lise Vesterlund, along with organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart, found that women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. Women are also more likely to be asked to perform this work (no matter the sex of the requester), and then to say yes when asked.4
In an interview with NPR, Versterlund explained, “The belief or expectation that women will step up to the plate is a pretty important factor in all of this. . . . The reason why [the women are] doing it, at least in our study, appears to be because they’re expected to. The men come into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games. They know that the women are going to volunteer. And the women look around and they see the men and they also know how we play these games. We know that the women are going to be the ones who will raise their hands.”5 In the all-male groups in the study, men volunteered as readily as women. It was only in the mixed-sex groups that men deferred responsibility. Many of the mothers I interviewed emphasized that their husbands capably take over when they themselves are out of the house. The assignment of thankless tasks to women over men appears not situational but universal.
Marla, a social worker in Chicago, told me, “When I moved in to Brian’s apartment, the moment my stuff got unpacked, I became the one responsible for everything. ‘Marla, where do we keep the blah-blah-blah?’ One day I was in the kitchen and he asked me, ‘Where’s the peanut butter?’ It’s exactly where you’ve been keeping it for the last four years! A switch goes on in a man’s brain once there’s a woman. ‘I’m not responsible for anything anymore.’”
We know this without knowing it. In the summer of 2018, on the heels of two tie-dye parties (one at the end of school and one in the middle of camp), I laughed out loud at the following on Twitter: “It is 3 pm on wednesday and camp just emailed to say that tomorrow every camper has to bring in a white tee shirt to tie dye and then I jumped out of a window to my death.” When I stopped laughing and looked closer at the writer’s profile picture, I saw that the tweet had been composed by a man. This threw me. Sure, George had been the one to stop by Kmart for the six-pack of extra-small children’s white T-shirts after I asked him to, but the idea that a father would 1) read that email, 2) feel compelled on his own to be concerned about that email, and 3) have clearly had enough prior experience with such emails as to understand their tragicomedic appeal? Well, it didn’t make sense. I Googled the man to see if he was a single father—since he was a public figure of sorts, it was easy to learn that he was. Without a woman to take care of all that for him, he’d been the one to step up to the task.
Gender dynamics write the rules for what Vesterlund calls these games. Inasmuch, the concept of fairness comes to dominate the minds of mothers but not dads, who are willfully blind to their own copping out. The anthropologist Sarah Hrdy explains, “Long socialized for subordinate roles, women may be more inclined to look at the world from more than one perspective, male as well as female, dominant as well as subordinate. For those accustomed to the perquisites of patriarchy, however, it would less often be useful to see the world from the point of view of those female subordinates. . . . And few men—without guidance and extra effort—seem eager to do so.”6
Research in economics moves in parallel. There are “substantiated gender effects” in how men and women perform in the popular lab experiment known as the “dictator game.” The game involves a participant dubbed “the dictator” distributing a good, often a cash prize, between him- or herself and another unseen player with little to no decision-making authority. Women worldwide distribute the money more fairly than men, keeping the experience of the other (less powerful) player in mind. From East Asia to the United States, women are more likely to equalize payoffs, while men keep more for themselves. Men do not pause to consider the experience of the other, or at the very least, they appear unmoved by it.7
Thinking about the experience of another is called empathy. You’ve likely heard that women are innate empathizers and that men are not so much. You’ve heard that because old research in psychology seemed to attest to it, and when research findings match sexist stereotypes, they get a lot of press and then stay locked forever in our minds. Indeed, in multiple experiments, when men and women are told explicitly that they are participating in tasks measuring empathy, the men perform worse than the women. Except. Do the same experiment and change the conditions—do not say you are measuring empathy (a known female trait); call it something else. Suddenly, the men perform equally well. Or continue to call it empathy, but attach a monetary prize to stellar performance.8 Again men’s scores rise to match women’s. So much for the story about hardwiring and women and being born to consider others all the time.9
Related to women’s greater willingness to engage empathy, gender studies find that women consistently handle conflict differently than men. Women are more likely to use cooperation and collaboration to resolve discord. Men take a competitive stance. Writing in 2014’s The Silent Sex: Gender Deliberations and Institutions, their book about sex-typical behavior in the workplace, political scientists Christopher Karpowitz and Tali Mendelberg explain that this difference, too, is driven by cultural norms. Anthropologists have compared competition in Masai and Khasi culture, two hunter-gatherer societies that differ in women’s status and role expectations. Like most of the world, Masai culture is patrilineal; Khasi is matrilineal. In the female-dominated society, women are the more competitive sex. They are literally more likely to enter competitions. Of male-dominated societies, Karpowitz and Mendelberg write, “women are socialized to be more cooperative and interdependent with others, then . . . may dislike situations where there is conflict or competition, or even merely a lack of cooperation. When they are in such situations, women may tend to withdraw from the interaction in order to distance themselves from the conflict. The common denominator for these preferences may be the aversion to situations where the social ties of the participants are frayed.”10 If women in patriarchal societies are oriented toward maintaining social bonds, and men in patriarchal societies are oriented toward winning, the two will never even cross paths. The women will try to collaborate, and the men will leave the field without a fight. Successful male resistance rules the world.
bell hooks has written, “Certainly many women in relationships with males often found that having a newborn baby plummeted their relationships back into more sexist-defined roles. However, when couples work hard to maintain equity in all spheres, especially child care, it can be the reality; the key issue, though, is working hard. And most men have not chosen to work hard at child care.”11
When men choose to work hard at child care, it can be disorienting even for them. “Why are no other dads in this text chain!?!” I overheard Pete, whose kindergartener plays soccer with Tess, asking the mothers sitting near him at practice one crisp fall Saturday as he shook his phone in the air for emphasis. He was referring to a two-years-running text chain among some local parents (and by “parents,” I mean “mothers”) that covered school activities, group get-togethers, and other life concerns. About fifteen families from his daughter’s former preschool were involved.
None of the mothers answered Pete. I wasn’t part of the chain in question, but I asked him what he thought. He said, “At least in this neighborhood, the moms do the planning, and the dads will show up if it’s a dad thing. Dads will ultimately participate, but the moms take the lead, do the logistics, make sure everyone is on board.”
This wasn’t satisfying to Pete—an accountant with one child—who’d long been agitating for greater involvement among other fathers. “I’ve mentioned the text chain in front of them a few times intentionally, usually using humor to see how they take it. And they just don’t have any interest in being part of it.”
Pete describes an intrinsic motivation to take part in his daughter’s activities. What he and his wife seem to have in common with some other equally sharing couples I spoke with or read about is that they didn’t divide and conquer—they just preferred not to. Pete said, “Our goal is always to do things together. School registration, her doctor visits. There are some areas where we like to divide things—it lessens the load. But when it comes to experience things like planning a birthday party, or joining soccer, the idea of fifty/fifty saddens me. Then one person misses half of the events. For us, on those things, full engagement from both sides is better. Somebody might take the lead, say, on planning a party, but the other will remain involved.
“There will be times when our schedules mean different responsibilities. In preschool, Sherry did all the drop-off and I did all the pickup. I didn’t master the morning routine. But now this year, with elementary school, I’m doing drop-off. So I’ve gotten better at hair care, dressing, breakfast. I used to be completely helpless with all that, but it was a learned deference. Once you get into a new routine and learn a new set of skills, there’s no such thing as default care.”
Matthew, a father from suburban Detroit with two teenagers, decided to work harder at child care after the birth of his second baby. When his wife’s maternity leave ended, he took the twelve weeks of unpaid family leave guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act. The time off made him rethink his role as the secondary caretaker, and upon returning to work, he asked to cut back his hours. Matthew said, “I had all this time with Isaac, and it was so nice, and while I was doing that, I was thinking, I don’t think I can go back to work in the same way.” His company allowed him to cut back, but Matthew remembers being greeted with suspicion. “Even now, more than ten years later and with my company being better about paternity leave and things like that, nobody does that. No father does. As soon as I said, ‘I’m not full-time,’ I had an asterisk by my name, almost literally. I was flagged as the guy who’s not here every day, who’s not fully on the corporate train. I was passed over for promotions and marginalized from that point on. But I kind of didn’t, and don’t, care.”
Matthew and his wife had lived more traditionally when their older child was born, but were co–primary parents from Isaac’s babyhood on. In my research, I found that equal co-parenting tended to happen under only three, often overlapping, conditions: when there was an explicitly steadfast commitment on the part of both partners to staying on top of parity; when men really enjoyed the type of regular and intimate contact that only mothers more typically have with their kids; and after fathers had taken substantial paternity leave. Research has found that men living with children in countries where they are eligible to take paid parental leave continue to perform 2.2 more hours of domestic work per week than men living with children in countries not offering that time long after their children are older and they are back at work.12
Matthew set aside his professional ambition for the sake of enjoying his family, and placidly, if not without some envy, watched his wife’s career take off. He may be the exception, not the rule. Anecdotal evidence and empirical work suggest that men have long been threatened by more successful wives. Research has found that for couples married in the 1960s and 1970s, a high-earning wife meant higher risk of divorce, and this was thought to evidence male discomfort with being outpaced. This correlation disappeared in the 1990s,13 but outsize female success remains a deal breaker for some men.
Studying the marriage and co-habitation histories of best actress and best actor nominees and winners from 1936 to 2010, researchers at the Johns Hopkins and University of Toronto business schools determined that after the award ceremony, best actress winners remained coupled for half the amount of time as those who were nominated but didn’t win—4.3 years as opposed to 9.5 years. Best actor winners, in contrast, stayed in their relationships for an average of 12 years, the same as the actors who’d been nominated and lost. The study’s authors write, “[T]he social norm for marital relationships is that a husband’s income and occupational status exceed his wife’s. Consistent with this norm, men may eschew partners whose intelligence and ambition exceed their own. . . . Violating this norm can cause discomfort in both partners and strain their marriage.”14
A woman who wins a political race finds herself in a similar position. Research in Sweden has found that for female candidates, winning a race for government office doubles the baseline risk of subsequent divorce; campaigning and then losing does not. Whether a male candidate wins or loses an election has no direct bearing on his marital future. The same Swedish study found that married women who become CEOs are twice as likely to divorce within three years of this achievement than men who accomplish the same.15
While conducting interviews for their 2003 book Women Don’t Ask, economist Lisa Babcock (see women and menial tasks research above) and journalist Sara Laschever repeatedly heard the same thing from successful women: It was important to behave deferentially and unassumingly.16 It is hardly deferential to win an Oscar or an election or a high-profile leadership role. Some markers of success are harder than others to disown. An experiment conducted in the early aughts at Columbia University reinforced the notion that men who date women prefer less successful mates—or, more to the point, that they feel compelled to occupy the traditional place in the social order of romantic love. Behavioral economists recruited grad students to take part in a speed-dating event, quickie conversations with a dozen or so potential partners. After a series of four-minute interactions, daters were asked to rate both their own intelligence and ambition (among other qualities), and that of the people they’d met on a scale from one to ten. Next, participants had to decide whether they wanted a proper date with that person in the future. For every additional intelligence point they gave their male date, women were 4.6 percent more likely to hope to see him again. In contrast, for every intelligence point that men gave women, they were only 2.3 percent more likely to want to see her again. Men’s response to female ambition skewed similarly. The men didn’t mind ambitious women, but only insofar as her score was not higher than his. The researchers concluded, “[O]n average men do not value women’s intelligence or ambition when it exceeds their own; moreover, a man is less likely to select a woman whom he perceives to be more ambitious than he is.”17
In the real dating world, men, like women, sometimes find themselves involved with people a little more intelligent or a little more ambitious than they are. Ambition, at the very least, is likely to ebb and flow over the course of a life. A woman’s extrafamilial aspirations may be interrupted during the period when she finds herself largely responsible for her children. It would be overly cynical to propose that men intentionally keep women in their place by eschewing family (and office) busy work, but doing so certainly supports their own position at the top of the status hierarchy. Sociologist Claire Kamp Dush told me a story about an ambitious friend of hers: “My friend is a firefighter, and she was thinking about going for a promotion. The [male] firefighters were telling her she should really just be home with her kids. She was feeling guilty. I told her, ‘They want that promotion! They are not your friends!’ They were using maternal guilt to try to get her not to achieve.” Or, as Sharon Hays writes, “[T]he ideology of intensive mothering serves men in that women’s commitment to this socially devalued task helps to maintain their subordinate position in society as a whole.”18
Back in the 1960s, psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson set out to test “the experimenter effect” in classrooms of elementary school kids. The experimenter effect suggests that the expectations held by an experimenter can impact the results of the experiment. As a young professor, Rosenthal had demonstrated the experimenter effect with rats. He deceived a group of lab workers, telling them that some rats in their care had been bred to be exceptionally good maze runners, and that others had been bred to be exceptionally bad. The rats’ cages were labeled accordingly. After the duped experimenters trained the rats to run the maze, the rats in the group labeled “maze bright” performed with more speed and accuracy than the rats in the set labeled “maze dull.” The researchers’ beliefs about the rats’ potential impacted the rodents’ success.
Rosenthal imagined that if rats were vulnerable to human expectation, the same might be true for children. At the beginning of an academic year at a California public school, tests of general ability were administered to students in grades one through six. Twenty percent of the students in each class were then randomly selected to be part of the experimental group—their teachers were told that these were the kids “most likely to bloom” over the course of the year. At the end of the school year, all children were retested, and the kids in the experimental group had indeed made remarkably more progress than the others for whom expectations were less high. Over the years, what became known as the Pygmalion effect (named for the Greek myth about the sculptor Pygmalion, whose desire for his beautiful female statue brings her to life) was found to have an impact everywhere from homes to military training centers to corporations. Wherever social or relational expectations exert influence, their preconceived notions become powerful. People perform better when a lot is expected of them and worse when it is not.19
I initially imagined that George would get Liv’s medical form. But I also knew I’d have to remind him to do it. Am I contributing to his lackluster performance with the soft bigotry of my low expectations? Is the world? In New Zealand, educational researchers have filmed teachers interacting with students as part of a study they called the Teacher Expectation Project.20 In watching themselves on video, teacher after teacher commented that they’d had no idea how much they were communicating with nonverbal cues: a raised eyebrow, a bored expression, a wandering gaze. A similar project at the University of Virginia trains teachers to be aware of their body language in order to help them establish more productive relationships with their students, and the students they’ve taught have shown improved performance on standardized tests.21 I often feel trepidation when asking George to take something on. I don’t trust him to remember. I communicate my hesitation.
The norms of parenting are so sticky because what supports them is completely circular. When we begin with an overarching presumption of inferior male capacity, the men fail to master the maze. The self-fulfilling prophecy plays out and then again. Believe it and it will be so. Gabe, Deanna’s husband, experiences his wife like this: “I think there’s a belief that if she’s not going to do it, then it won’t get done.” Deanna confirms this but emphasizes that her belief is based on past experience. “We fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious, and I learned to resent him,” she says.
The theory of “stereotype threat” is not unlike the Pygmalion effect, with stereotypes substituting for the role of experimenter, contributing to the outcome of a task. Stereotype threat is fear of “being judged and treated poorly in settings where a negative stereotype about one’s group applies.”22 As performance anxiety is triggered, the fear often manifests in stereotypes being borne out by reality. The research suggests that awareness of a negative stereotype about one’s group can interfere with the performance of the members of that group whenever the stereotype is invoked. For example, distribute a math test to a roomful of male and female students of similar ability levels, and they will perform similarly. Give the same test but introduce it with “This test has been designed to determine why some people are better at math than others,” and the women’s scores will plummet. The well-trod notion that women are bad at math is activated by the introduction, priming a sense of uncertainty for women about their own ability.23 In similar experiments, Caucasian men perform worse when told they will be compared to Asian men.24
One group of researchers hypothesizes that the effect of the stereotype is “to make sure that any sign that they might be confirming the stereotype is identified and suppressed. Ironically, this increased vigilance and control hijacks the same central executive processor (i.e., working memory) needed to excel on complex cognitive tasks, producing the very result—poorer performance—that they are trying to avoid.”25 Stereotype threat research has been carried out over multiple domains, from academic to athletic to affective. The expectations laid out by stereotypes influence results. Research has also found that people engage in self-handicapping to reduce the applicability of a negative stereotype to their performance. That is, they will not try as hard—say by failing to practice a skill—in order to avoid hits to their self-esteem. When they fail, they can attribute their failure to lack of personal effort rather than natural inadequacy.
Stereotype threat research warns that members of marginalized ability groups—in this case, let’s call them fathers—are stymied by their own knowledge of how they’re popularly perceived. The threat doesn’t even have to be explicit. Women who are especially good at math do more poorly on math tests when the ratio of men to women in the room is high.26 The more men relative to women taking the test, the more intense a woman’s concerns about whether she belongs among the group. The combination of familiarity with a stereotype and membership in a stigmatized group impairs performance. Even the gender of an experimenter can cue the stereotype threat, heightening anxiety and depleting cognitive resources.27 Imagine yourself a father in a mommy-and-me class. Imagine that class as a metaphor for the fathering life.
University of British Columbia social psychologist Toni Schmader studies stereotype threat. I asked if she thought stereotypes about fathers might get in the way of men becoming the most effective and involved parents they might be. “It’s a sensible hypothesis,” she said, before adding more dubiously, “I think we all have our areas of feigned ignorance that can help get us off the hook for certain things we don’t really want to do.”
The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the best known in the history of social psychology. Twenty-one volunteers solicited from a California newspaper agreed to participate in a mock jail exercise in which half of them would be assigned to act as prisoners and the other half as guards. The guards underwent a job training session, while the prisoners were arrested at their homes and booked into rooms that looked like cells. Though the study was supposed to last two weeks, it was halted prematurely after only six days, as the guards became abusive and the prisoners broke down.
The study was thought to demonstrate the banality of evil, the idea that institutional power might make any man exploitative and inhumane. In the time since the prison experiment, though, the conclusions drawn from it have been reexamined. It seems it is not evil that is so banal but, rather, our desire to meet the expectations of our social environment. The so-called demand characteristics of the prison experiment influenced the behavior of the participants.28 The guards and prisoners inferred the expected outcome of the study and carried on accordingly, as cooperative people do.
Expectations, stereotypes, and demand characteristics hang in the air as we calibrate to family life. But forewarned is forearmed. Writing about the potential undoing of stereotype threat, Toni Schmader has noted, “[T]hese differences can be reduced if not erased by changing the nature of these performance environments to encourage more positive views of one’s group or one’s own abilities, or through greater transparency of the pernicious effects that stereotyping can have. By deconstructing stereotype threat, we can diffuse the damage it can do.”29 What Schmader means is that the power of stereotype threat lies in its invisibility. We can counter it in one of two (not unrelated) ways: by putting a stop to the ways in which we marginalize fathers, or by shining a light on the fallacy of the stereotypes.
Lise Vesterlund, of the women and menial tasks research, suggests a third way: “We’ve spent time thinking at the top end of the spectrum, how do we break the glass ceiling, how do we lean in? We’ve spent much less time thinking at this end of the spectrum. Anyone can do these tasks. Rather than ask for volunteers, we should just take turns. It’s an easy way. It’s not even that I need to debias anyone. We just need to become aware that we have a systematic problem . . . and then take charge.” Here Vesterlund echoes Elizabeth, the mother in Northern California who spent her twenties carefully considering division of labor. Forearmed with knowledge about the systematic problem, she and her husband resolved to stay on top of their biases. They didn’t have to debias anyone. Instead they made an Excel document. They took logistical charge.
Implicit biases, stereotypes, and demand characteristics are socially acquired impediments to progress. Lisa Lahey is a faculty member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Minds at Work, a consulting group that specializes in facilitating organizational change. In Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization, she and co-author Robert Kegan propose that more idiosyncratic and personal unconscious motivations often also impede transformation. Lahey and Kegan use the body’s immune system as a metaphor for our psyche’s automatic attempt to fight change, that perceived threat. For example, a manager who explicitly expresses that he wants to be more receptive to the ideas of others might alienate employees with curt feedback because of an underlying and unconscious commitment to getting his own way. Without knowing it, the change he wants becomes the very virus he’s working to ward off. Conflicted, he undermines his best intentions with counterproductive behavior that maintains a dysfunctional but familiar system30.
Lahey’s work builds off of concepts in my own field about conscious objectives versus unknown and forbidden wishes. I spoke to her when I was stewing about Liv’s medical form and asked her to weigh in. “It’s a good example of a system that is being reinforced by your holding the responsibility and delegating in ways that are not effective,” she said. “And what’s happening is you continue to micromanage, and he continues to know he can count on you. He is not where the buck stops. Change really requires everybody to do a better job of being much more explicit about what makes this unsuccessful.”
Lahey suggested that I express the following: “If this doesn’t come through, it’s your responsibility.” She asked me, “What are the potential consequences? It would be great to bring him along there.” Had I let the situation with the form play out, Liv would not have been able to start camp on its all-important first morning. George would have had to stay home with her, upsetting both of our kids, reneging on his professional commitments, and losing a day’s worth of income.
I might have laid that out when I initially asked him to get the form. George agreed it would have helped him to remember, but he also deemed that way of speaking to him “pissy and confrontational”—though wasn’t I entitled to be both of those things? Our societal orientation to female anger complicates the predicament further. Without a greater comfort with our own human ire, we are left only to seek lukewarm solace from our friends.
Lahey asked, “What are the complexities for each of you that need to be seen and not swept under the rug?” It was a subject I’d certainly considered: our respective immunities to change. To be reductive, George grew up resenting the complaints of his overtaxed single mother; I grew up with the sense that my concerns fell on deaf ears. The personal narratives we weave around the parenting dynamic we’ve established coalesce in old familiar ways. He resents my complaining, and I feel perpetually unheard.
Our situation was overdetermined, though also and not least by our genders. This very scenario—fueled by any number of idiosyncratic life histories—plays out too reliably in one direction. Had I been raised in George’s home and he in mine, our respective positions in the adult family we’d built would hardly have been reversed. These gendered sticking points are all but never reversed. This is because the immune system that Lahey invokes kicks in not only in response to personal history but also in response to the social world at large. She acknowledged as much: “There are different levels of analysis. Men feel they need a wife who’s in charge at home. Women don’t feel they have the right to ask for more and then don’t ask wholeheartedly.” Like the boss who unwittingly discourages feedback, the men who say they want to be equal parents have other, less conscious motivations. They fail to seize what Lowell called “the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when you’re not being asked.” They fear, as George Yancy says, “the ‘loss’ of [their] own ‘entitlement’ as a male.” Their immune systems work to maintain their patriarchal privilege without ever forcing them to reckon with the fact that they have it in the first place.
In Couples, Gender and Power, Carmen Knudson-Martin and Anne Rankin Mahoney state plainly, “[G]endered behavior is kept in place in part by the latent and invisible power that accrues to men in a society based on a gender hierarchy. This is hard to identify and address.”31
We’re living in a time of embattled masculinity, and we have seen that it exacts a rancid toll. Stereotypes of men are rigid and slow to change. They confer status and power but have a dark underbelly. Manhood once anointed must also be defended. The dominant need someone to submit. To live differently can be isolating. Derek, twenty-nine, a stay-at-home father in North Carolina, has felt shamed for his choice to be his young children’s primary parent. “When I first said I was staying home, my dad would say, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re able to do that,’ but I know he’d go back to his wife and they would talk. My brother is four years younger than me. He had a kid a year ago. He believes that the breadwinner just breadwins and comes home and should not do anything else. He thinks that I’m lessening myself by staying home with the kids. He said to me, ‘At least I can take care of my family.’ It’s affected our relationship. We don’t speak. My wife and I recently moved, and I don’t feel the need to go make friends. It’s not embarrassing, but I always kind of feel that other people are judging. That’s the thing. I don’t want to be judged, even by another stay-at-home dad.”
It has been said that the work of feminism remains incomplete in part for paying little mind to advancing a more egalitarian masculinity. One solution to that might lie in encouraging men to fully embrace the identity of dad. In their research, University of Colorado Boulder social psychologist Bernadette Park and her colleagues have found that the cynical attitudes that rain down on men as a category do not extend to fathers. When asked to associate adjectives to the two groups, participants characterized “men” negatively but “fathers” favorably—as favorably as “women,” who in turn are viewed as favorably as “moms.”
Park suggests that the social role of dad could be leveraged to change gender stereotypes of men. She writes, “A less constrained definition of manhood and masculinity would likely afford greater flexibility in how to ‘be a man,’ an outcome desirable not only for men, but as a means for decreasing rigid demarcations between the genders more broadly.”32 In Sweden, where ninety days of paid parental leave are specifically apportioned to fathers—who must use it or lose it33—latté pappas, also known by the acronym DILFs, are lauded for their sexy, masculine swagger-with-a-stroller. Since 1995, when fathers were first encouraged by government policy to take parental leave, divorce and separation rates have also been falling in that country—in a time when they have largely risen elsewhere.34
Park told me, “There’s been a fairly recent uptick in conversations around men in this country, the notion that white men in particular are feeling disenfranchised and don’t see a role for themselves. They don’t have the old traditional role of being a sole provider, the head of family. The idea is, all these problems we’re seeing now with men—health issues, lower graduation rates, higher levels of drug abuse and incarceration—they’ve lost their sense of identity and, in some ways, are trying to find a place in the world.” Park proposes fighting so-called toxic masculinity by granting men greater and deeper access to fatherhood. “In implicit association tests, dads are more closely linked with the professional world than the parenting world, which is crazy, given that a dad is also a parent, but it’s a holdover from the 1950s prototype of what a dad is and does.” Some evidence suggests that the implicit associations like the ones Park mentions aren’t as slow to change as one might guess. A study of undergraduates at an all-women’s college found that entering students were slow to pair the word “female” with leadership terms. That changed after just one year at their single-sex school.35
Park says, “There have been shifts both behaviorally and in terms of stereotypes about dads and involvement, but there hasn’t been as strong a shift in making that connection to men in general. There is this group called dads, and they do this thing, but men as a group remain less tightly connected in people’s minds, from a social-perception perspective, to fatherhood. When manhood is threatened, aggression tends to be the response. But if you could answer a threat to manhood by invoking the social role of fatherhood, that could repair the threat and ameliorate the aggressive response. Fatherhood can be an important part of your identity. It lets you feel a sense of fulfillment and purpose, allowing you to think of generative and positive ways you can affect the world.”
Sam, thirty-two, is a stay-at-home father in New York City. He left his job a year ago to take care of his toddler daughters after their nanny quit and he and his wife realized they could get by on her salary alone. He said, “I was raised by women, my grandmother and my mom. I’m very grateful for that. They were dad and mom to me. If I’d had a macho dad, I don’t think I’d have this attitude toward being home at all. I would feel like I wasn’t a man. I have a more rounded view of things because of female influence. For me, personally, that’s the biggest thing in allowing me to do this.” Without a man in his childhood home to steer him subtly away from his own feminine-typed traits, Sam never experienced shame around his impulse to take care of others, impulses that his imagined macho father might have derided.
Michael Kimmel, director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University in New York, endorses helping men embrace their feminine impulses, shifting their focus from being “real men” to being “good” ones. Lecturing in 2017 at West Point about sexual assault, he asked the cadets to define each. Real men, they told him, were tough, strong, “never show weakness, win at all costs, suck it up, play through pain, be competitive, get rich, get laid.”36 A good man, in contrast, was defined by sacrifice. “Honor, duty, integrity, do the right thing, stand up for the little guy, be a provider, be a protector.” Kimmel later said, “I was not there to tell them that their behaviors were toxic. I was there to tell them that they are already experiencing a conflict, inside them, between their own values and this homosocial performance. So my job then shifted. . . . I [also] work a lot trying to engage men to support gender equality in corporations. . . . So my job has been to find what are the entry points for men into this conversation about gender equality? One of them turns out to be involved fatherhood.”
Kimmel, the author of books on masculinity, is a popular speaker precisely because the unflinching demands of masculine performance are hard to cast aside. Patrick Coleman is an editor at Fatherly, a Web portal for dads. In his early forties, he’s also the father to two young kids. He told me, “I don’t think that men are just blithely traipsing through their days in the family not understanding there’s an unequal division of labor. A lot of them do recognize it. I consider myself a progressive guy, but even when my wife was still working full-time, there was an unequal division of labor at home. It’s so stuck. I’m not trying to say that men are victims—obviously, they have agency; if we were more mindful, we’d be able to snap out of it—but a lot of men continue to internalize this idea of masculinity. It’s so in our face every day. We’re supposed to be this strong pillar of authority, but what happens if I’m washing dishes and I’m cooking? I don’t have this authority anymore in my household. I think that can feel very crippling to men. That strong, independent, quiet authoritative character has been so internalized, even if a guy wants to be progressive and wants to do this stuff, there’s a fear there that just kind of locks us down.”
In 1970, the lawyer, priest, and civil rights activist Pauli Murray said, “Men have become enslaved by their dependency as well as their dominance. They pay a heavy price in shortened lives, military casualties, broken homes and the heartbreak of parents whose children are alienated from them. Many men find themselves unable to live up to the expectations of masculinity which men have defined for themselves, and many are now chagrined to find that women are no longer willing to accept the role of femininity which men have defined for women.”
And we won’t be moving backward. Women, Kimmel said in an interview with the feminist journal Signs, are “not going to have an Ann Coulter moment where they go, ‘Oh, you know what, they’re right. Let’s stop voting, let’s stop serving on juries, let’s stop working, let’s stop driving cars, let’s stop having orgasms.’ I mean, that’s not going to happen. The fix is in. Men’s choice is, are we going to be dragged kicking and screaming into that future, or are we going to say, ‘All right, that’s the deal, let’s check it out, it might not be bad for us also’? And I don’t think that’s a bad thing to say.”
The rewards of living outside of cultural scripts are not negligible. Despite his insecurities, Derek finds fulfillment in the time he has with his children. Matthew, who took his FMLA leave and then cut his hours, said, “When our older child was born and I was still working full-time, my wife was on maternity leave and would go to all these mommy groups. She got all this time with Leah and was introduced to a whole new social scene that she loved. These women are still her best friends to this day. Not that I wanted to hang out at the coffeehouse with a bunch of mommies, but she was in this other world that I was not a part of. It didn’t feel great. I didn’t want to hear about it after a while. I was jealous, especially with the first kid. I just wanted to play with her all day, and instead I’d come home at seven and get to see her for forty-five minutes before she was asleep. After Isaac was born, I cut back on work and it was ultimately fatal to my career, but during those years, I had Fridays in the park with my son, and when he was in elementary school, I got to pick him up three days a week.”
As long as cultural scripts remain largely intact, evidence suggests that even the modern, involved father will remain less likely than his female partner to see his transition into parenting as a major life development. Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy reports that in industrialized countries, almost half of all children lose touch with their fathers not long after their parents divorce (within ten years, that number shoots up to two thirds).37
The relative failure to see fatherhood as that major life development underscores all sorts of misfortune. Education may offer a solution. The 1960s gave rise to childbirth education classes, which set out to teach women and their partners how to manage labor and delivery with minimal medical intervention. Hospitals and obstetricians rallied around the classes. By the year 2000, according to the nonprofit Childbirth Connection, 70 percent of first-time mothers who gave birth in hospitals had participated in a birthing class, most commonly alongside their partners. What to do once delivery is over, though, has been left for parents to untangle on their own.
Sociologist Anne Rankin Mahoney and psychologist Carmen Knudson-Martin have proposed that formal parenting education might help couples achieve greater parity. Their proposed curriculum includes emphasizing the fact that parenting is a gender-neutral talent, reinforcing the need for couples to talk about their plans to share responsibilities, and helping them develop ways to maintain collaboration.38
The research of husband-and-wife psychologists Carolyn and Philip Cowan suggests the potential benefits of such an intervention. In a series of studies culminating in the Supporting Father Involvement Project, the Cowans have shown that couples who attended four months of weekly groups on the potential challenges of family life showed significant increases in both father involvement and relationship satisfaction. Among at-risk families referred by the child welfare system, attendance at these groups also reduced alcohol use, couple conflict and violence, and older siblings’ problem behaviors.39
The Gottman Institute in Seattle offers the Bringing Baby Home workshop, which has likewise shown promising results. It offers a gender-neutral take on prenatal family education. This remains rare. Popular parenting books continue to emphasize the special and exclusive role of the mother. The workshop—usually given, like childbirth classes, in two-day-seminar format—prepares parents-to-be for relationship strain, offers primers on infant development and interaction skills, and stresses the equal importance of father involvement in family life. By 2018, the Gottmans had trained more than two thousand educators worldwide to teach Bringing Baby Home.40 In follow-up research with new parents, compared to families with no child care education, fathers who’d attended Bringing Baby Home were rated more positively in infant-father attachment, reported greater satisfaction with their domestic arrangements, demonstrated better co-parenting in a play study, showed greater responsiveness to their baby’s signals, were less likely to exhibit signs of depression and anxiety, reported more stable relationship quality, and had babies who responded more positively to their soothing. (Benefits accrued to mothers in the study as well.41) The men who took part in these classes—exposed to alternatives to patriarchal privilege—saw the fruits of a reimagined fatherhood.
Michael Kimmel says, “I want to sell feminism to men. Because greater gender equality—embracing a fuller palette of traits, attitudes, and behaviors—cannot help but be good for men as well as for women. Women have shown us over the past fifty years, ‘This is really good, this works really well, see, aren’t we awesome? Aren’t we more interesting now?’ So now men need to be whole human beings. You’ve asked me, what can we offer? How can we sell this? We sell this by saying, ‘You’ve cut yourself off from half the human experience by embracing this traditional notion of masculinity, the thing that we call toxic. You’ll have a better life if you could actually be a person.’”
A 2014 study out of George Washington University found that men talking to women interrupt 33 percent more often than when they are speaking to other men.42 That same year, linguist and tech industry CEO Kieran Snyder began cataloging the interrupting she often found herself witness to in mixed-sex meetings. In fifteen hours of conversation over four weeks, she found that men interrupted more than women overall, and that they were also almost three times more likely to cut off women than other men. When women do interrupt, they are similarly much more likely to be interrupting women. Eighty-seven percent of female interruptions were made when another woman was speaking.43 The lower relative status of women is preternaturally reinforced. It almost looks like equality. It was not until his daughters were practically grown that Barack Obama said, “I can look back now and see that, while I helped out, it was usually on my schedule and on my terms. The burden disproportionately and unfairly fell on Michelle.”44
Because how on earth would a man embroiled in it know? If a tree falls in the forest and that’s just what trees do, who cares if it even makes a sound? Men use what has been called hidden power to resist. Hidden power is not overt power—telling the little woman what to do. Neither is it covert power—purposely ignoring something that makes your wife unhappy in order to maintain your comfortable position. Rather, hidden power exists beneath a surface, baked into ideologies that give one person advantage over another—say, the right to interrupt or to sleep late all weekend long. Ethan, a father of two in Brooklyn, told me, “Let’s say we both have to be at work, and the kids get sick. I’m sorry, I’m going to say this: I don’t give it a second thought that my work comes first. That’s an entitlement that I feel.” He and his wife have no discussion. Hidden power at his back, Ethan gets dressed and heads on out the door.
Back in the early aughts, San Francisco–based clinical psychologist Joshua Coleman was the father of three young children and a contributing editor at a magazine for the parents of multiples. In the latter capacity, he got a lot of mail from women complaining about their husbands’ resistance to family work. Hearing similar grievances from his own wife and the couples he saw in marital therapy, he decided to write a book he eventually called The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework. In The Lazy Husband, published in 2005, Coleman suggests strategies that women can adopt in order to mitigate their husbands’ lethargy. I asked him, based on his personal and clinical experience, what makes it easy for men to be so lazy. He said, “I, like everyman, would never call myself lazy. I think that’s how women think of us. We don’t think of ourselves as lazy.
“When I was raising my kids, I earned more money. I had the arrogance that comes from men who earn more money. I can buy my way out of those activities. That kind of thing. I also think that I, like many men, have less guilt about being more self-centered. I have a greater feeling of entitlement to taking care of myself. Women have a more collaborative identity, and so they’re easier to manipulate in that way, to take advantage of.
“Women also have more sensitivity to feelings, to the internal world of the child, than men, myself included, even though I’m a very involved father. I’m not tracking stuff, but it isn’t because I don’t see it. I don’t think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife did, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. There were many times when if I could choose that level of involvement versus something more selfish, I would probably have chosen to do the more selfish thing.”
I called Coleman because I knew he’d given co-parenting a book’s worth of thought, and I hoped that he’d be willing to speak freely. He was. Men’s resistance would be an abject failure if there were more men who spoke like he did (to be clear, he was not condoning his own behavior). Imagine if your children’s father said these things to you, directly and out loud: Women are easy to take advantage of, your efforts are ultimately unnecessary, the needs of our family are not worth my attention, and I’ll choose the more selfish thing. Fathers are implying every last bit of this with their resistance all the time. You are easy to manipulate. These things aren’t worth my attention. I’ll choose the more selfish thing.
In Love’s Executioner, his 1989 book of essays about his clinical work, the psychologist Irvin Yalom includes a piece about a couple’s treatment that has long stayed in my mind. A man named Marvin comes for marital therapy alone because his wife, Phyllis, has developed agoraphobia and rarely leaves their house. After many sessions, Yalom intuits that Marvin’s unexpressed dependency on his wife is serving to virtually imprison her. The agoraphobia—her symptom—is not hers alone but theirs. Yalom instructs Marvin to spend the next weeks repeating the following to his wife every two hours: “Phyllis, please don’t leave the house. I need to know you are there at all times to take care of me. . . .” Only once Marvin’s long-implicit demand on her is clearly and regularly articulated is Phyllis freed to be indignant and uncooperative. Her agoraphobia is cured.45
Successful male resistance has necessarily required reasonable men to obfuscate unreasonable demands. Their entitlement hangs in the air, omnipresent and indiscernible. In response, women become like the agoraphobic wife acquiescing to gratuitous requests, directives at once clearly made and never quite delivered.