Much as I’m all about women’s power, men are absolutely crucial to the childcare issue and there’s no doubt that getting fathers involved benefits us all. If dads do their bit, women are off work for a shorter time so their careers and earnings are less impacted. Sharing care also alleviates the emotional burden of leaving a very young child to go back to work until you feel they’re ready for formal childcare to start.
Fathers who take time off tend to be more involved long-term in their families, which has health and emotional benefits for them and their children.132
We all win when it comes to getting men more involved in caring.
But while it’s pretty much accepted now for them to have up to two weeks of paternity leave after a baby is born, efforts to get UK fathers to take more time off have hardly been a resounding success. Shared parenting leave (SPL) was touted as the way to do it when it was introduced in 2015 because it gives parents the right to split up to fifty weeks off work and up to thirty-seven weeks of pay.
‘All right!’ I hear you say. ‘Let’s do this!’
Don’t get too excited. Only around 3 per cent of working fathers have taken it.133 It’s not that many of them don’t want to do more caring. About half of the fathers surveyed in 2017 said they would take SPL.134 But this time our working culture and money work against men.
A dad who takes SPL is worse off financially than a woman who goes on maternity leave. While a woman gets 90 per cent of her earnings for the first six weeks of maternity leave before statutory pay kicks in, men who take SPL are only eligible for statutory pay.
Even if dads are working for employers who offer enhanced parental leave then, as we know, they will usually be earning more – and that means taking time off has a greater knock to the family finances, which is another disincentive. Then there are all the men – mainly young or low paid – on insecure agency or zero-hours contracts who report that they have been sacked after asking about family-friendly policies.135
Things are beginning to shift a little. Netflix – famous for its progressive culture – announced in 2015 that parents (NB: ‘parents’, not ‘mothers’) could take up to a year of leave on full pay after the birth or adoption of a child.136 Insurance giant Aviva now offers twenty-six weeks’ leave on full basic pay to its employees.137
Claims for sex discrimination by fathers who wanted to take SPL but discovered they would earn less than their female partners have been upheld by employment tribunals.138 Maybe employers will be forced to take the issue more seriously when the lawsuits start coming in.
Change is also afoot politically. In March 2018, a parliamentary committee that had been looking at the issue of working fathers lambasted ‘workplace policies [that] have not kept up with the social changes in people’s everyday lives’. It called on the government to look at introducing ring-fenced leave for fathers as an alternative to shared parental leave.139
The pace of change is so ridiculously slow, though, that in the UK we’re more than twenty years behind what some countries are doing. And guess what? It’s those forward-thinking northern Europeans who have, once again, taken the lead.
More than twenty years ago, Sweden introduced a policy of non-transferable leave for fathers to encourage new dads to take a full three months at home, and it’s now proposed to extend it to five. There are similarly progressive ideas coming out of Iceland and Germany, where the financial offer is much more robust.140
But this is about much more than finances and legislation. Once again it’s about the culture we in Britain are working in and whether a full life – which includes family as well as work – is valued.
Japan has the most generous paternity leave entitlement in the world – thirty weeks at full pay – but also a notoriously tough attitude to work. Just 2 per cent of fathers took advantage of the leave available in 2015.141
The USA, the world’s largest economy, doesn’t have a national policy on paid parental leave yet (although, at the time of writing, Donald Trump had put forward proposals for a national policy of six weeks’ paid leave for all parents). It doesn’t strike me as coincidence that many fathers in these two ultra-alpha cultures either don’t take the leave on offer or aren’t given any at all. The commitment to overworking as a way to ‘prove’ worth is a major hurdle we need to get over if we want men to be more involved. Long hours are as much, if not more, of a badge of honour as they ever were in alpha culture.
The commitment to overwork is the key way in which workers ‘prove’ they’re fit to climb the ladder, either put in voluntarily or demanded by the organization as part of an unspoken pact, and men are more likely to work those long hours than women. In many jobs more hours often equal more money – and more money means more status.
So, aside from practical measures such as improving flexible working and job-shares, the focus – yet again – must be on culture. It is vital that our dedication to the idea that more work is better work is severed. Because it’s not. Even though it’s been proved that regularly overworking causes a significantly increased risk of everything from strokes to diabetes, we’re still tied to our desks – and phones, which means we never leave work behind.142 If our ancestors proved their strength by killing sabre-toothed tigers, their modern equivalent does it by refusing ever to switch off their email.
There’s pressure on all of us to overwork but even more so on men: while women are ‘allowed’ to take time off to care, fathers who want to get more involved can be stigmatized by colleagues. MPs who talked to working dads heard that they were mocked by co-workers for going part-time to accommodate childcare pick-ups, with colleagues saying, ‘Bye, part-timer’, or ‘Are you working part-time again?’ or ‘Oh, you’re off early again.’143
This is the message that alpha culture is sending all of us – particularly men. Changing the way we work should not be seen as tackling a ‘woman’s problem’ – it’s everyone’s.
Dismantle the alpha focus on long working hours and you’ve taken a big step towards equality, which is why I’ve tackled this issue very seriously. At Portas, it’s no longer a question of how long you work but how well.
We’ve now got systems in place to ensure that staff don’t feel they should be doing sixty-hour weeks. And although we know there are busy periods in the run-up to client delivery, for instance, we wonder what’s going wrong if someone is sitting at their desk night after night. It’s a tough nut to crack in our industry, where long hours have been ingrained into most people. Who wants to be thought of as the ‘slacker’ who leaves on time every day?
But to check and balance this, we ask staff to fill in timesheets that are monitored by managers. If we see that someone is regularly working too many hours, it’s flagged up and we talk to them. Either their workload is too much, they don’t have the right skills to keep on top of it (which means we have to give them support and training) or a health or home issue is keeping them at their desk.
There are certainly ways to shift our culture from overwork to one that enables all of us to care more but, right now, business is not doing enough to use them.
It means that all too often, rather than share an unavoidable hit on earnings, status and promotion potential, women take it alone as it’s argued that children need one primary carer rather than two equally involved ones.
And this is the chicken-and-egg conundrum that creates inequality: men earn more because they do more hours, and get promoted more because they show the ‘dedication’ that’s needed to move upwards. Women, meanwhile, are left quite literally holding the baby – and earning less.
Removing the cultural barriers facing fathers at work is as much about changing our own personal attitudes as it is about what happens at the office.
I’m afraid it’s time for some difficult conversations across dinner tables about how much men are going to step up. And I suspect there will be quite a few who wouldn’t want to care more, even if they could, because they’re happy for their female partners to do it.
I understand. Looking after a baby or a small child is wonderful, rewarding and a part of life that has layers of meaning. But it’s also monotonous, isolating and, at times, the most emotionally challenging work there is. I’m not surprised some men are happier to stay at work. I remember going back and almost crying with happiness when I could make a coffee without the baby monitor going off. Even getting on the Underground to go to work felt like a break.
But if we’re going to reframe our attitudes to shared caring as a society, we also need to reframe them personally – and men who see equal care as a choice must start to realize that it’s not. It’s a responsibility.
Then we need to have an honest conversation about how they feel about getting more involved: their fears and concerns, the social pressures they face and what they can do to alleviate the desire to stab their eyes out with a fork when the Peppa Pig theme tune comes on for the hundredth time. Because just as women are crippled by the images of the ‘perfect’ mother or hampered by the notion of ‘superwomen’ in leadership, I suspect many men are also deterred by the image of a hipster dad carrying his baby in a sling. It’s not exactly a relatable image for a welder in Scunthorpe or a corporate lawyer in Edinburgh.
There are many reasons why men are less involved in childcare than women: the biology of birth and initial care, the reluctance of women to give up control, and many men’s fear of being in charge of a small child. They need to be not only encouraged to take more responsibility for their children’s care but supported to do so. They’ll find that, by spending time with children, it’s possible to acquire new skills – like empathy, patience and multi-tasking – which are of benefit in the workplace. So, too, is the inevitable new perspective about what’s really important in life.
I know this is possible because Leon Barron, a lecturer in forensic science who is also one of the few fathers who’s taken SPL, told me so. He’s refreshingly honest: he wasn’t driven by a need to be an earth dad when he took SPL. He did it because he felt responsible enough to share the care for his children with a wife who’d also worked hard at her career and he was aware that spending time with his two sons would allow them to forge a close bond. And Leon believes other men need to take a more active role in caring, too, because it benefits both their home and working lives.
Women have a part to play in getting men more involved. I know a lot of us are happy to do this caring work because we’re committed to our children. But if we’re serious about achieving equality at work, it’s time we asked men to do more at home.
I certainly know women who think that men ‘can’t’ care as well as they can – and that perfectionist streak really needs to be reined in. My defining moment on that came the day I left Verity with Graham while I went to work. Her school play was on that afternoon so I left work early and arrived to find kids wearing everything from princess dresses to mini suits. Then Verity appeared on stage with a mop of unbrushed hair, wearing scuffed My Little Pony trainers and worn-out lavender leggings.
‘Why did you dress her like that?’ I hissed at Graham, later on.
‘Because she chose it,’ he said innocently, and I wanted to scream that you never, ever, let a four-year-old choose their clothes on the one day when they’re appearing in the school equivalent of a fashion parade.
But I didn’t. I let it go. If I wanted him to do his bit, I had to let him do it in his own way, not mine.
We also need to get on top of the drive to stop inadvertently propping up the idea that this is ‘our’ work by making life happen as if by magic. Many of the women I know are constantly – and silently – filling the gaps. They sort out birthday parties and doctor’s appointments, produce all that’s needed for Christmas or the summer holiday without so much as a blink. Even twenty-something women, my daughter’s age, seem to be doing the same thing by booking holidays and arranging shared social calendars.
And the moment we sigh in awe at how good a man is to take an active role in caring or look at him askance in a playground filled with mothers, we’re saying, ‘This is women’s work.’
Instead of valiantly marching on, slowly disappearing under the weight of office deadlines, school projects, homework and organizing everyone’s social diaries, women should stop asking for help as if it’s a favour. Instead, we need to start seeing our relationships as a lot more equal than many of them are right now.