For years, social critics have heralded and ardently awaited the arrival of a new, gentler dad: a spirited Super Guy who, juggling junior with one hand and job assignments with the other, would rescue mom from her bondage to the home. Super Guy, however, has proved to be an elusive fellow. Even as mom has spent more and more time at work, her mate has not, by and large, assumed a proportionate share of responsibility at home. He has not, in short, embraced the idea of Mr. Mom. And, ironically, neither has she.
A recent survey by Louis Harris & Associates found that roughly 90 percent of married women considered taking care of the family to be their job. Even those who claimed to earn half or more of the household’s income generally carried the lion’s share of the load at home.
One social scientist explained the phenomenon by declaring that men “want it all,” meaning that they want women to work but also to be traditional homemakers. There is some truth to that assertion. Yet to try to understand what is happening between the sexes today as a simple case of one gender or the other “wanting it all” is to misunderstand how much stock each sex has in clinging to tradition, and how vigorously both sexes conspire to escape the practice of true equality.
Though the working woman has become the norm, society still views her work less seriously than it views a man’s. And though the current crop of fathers is more concerned about parenting issues than the previous generation, the world continues to define men largely by their ability to pay the bills.
I am struck repeatedly by how deeply even “liberated” men and women are invested in some aspects of traditional roles. New York-based journalist Michel Marriott, for instance, spoke of the difficulty men faced in giving up the “hunter” and protector portfolio-at least partly because of the expectations of women: “I think deep down inside all the liberation rhetoric,
all the liberation literature, all the liberation philosophy . . . I think, deep down inside, most women want to at least know that their man can be these things. That, if need be, he can be the protector. If need be, he can be the hunter. I think that’s still important. I don’t think they want it bandied around in their face all the time. So I think they want sort of more compassionate, more sensitive packaging, but deep down inside they want to know that coiled down in there somewhere is that old-fashioned guy that they can call on when they need it.”
“Whatever his other roles in a family, a father is first and foremost expected to provide economic support. When he fails to do so, society considers him irresponsible, and the government evokes legal procedures to collect payment. If a father fails in other fathering roles, it is assumed that the mother will be there to fill those roles, to look after a child’s other needs. But failure as a breadwinner is a mark of not measuring up,” proclaimed a 1994 National Research Council report.
I asked Barbara Caplan of the polling company Yankelovich Partners Inc. for her interpretation of the figures. She took them to mean that women, particularly those in their “family formation years” were, in effect, saying that if the man makes enough money to support the household, then she could spend more time taking care of the kids. While there are millions of exceptions, evidence indicates men and women, on average, do indeed view work differently. Men tend to work longer hours, to be more concerned about job security and to place more emphasis on (and be more optimistic about) their chances for advancement, according to a survey by the Families and Work Institute.
Lisa Jacobs, a 27-year-old publicist and writer, observed: “I think that the guys of my generation are confused, and so are the women. . . .
“Women’s careers are really important, but many of us came from very traditional backgrounds, and there is this subconscious . . . . desire to emulate the parent. But there is also this recognition that things are changing. So, deep down, I think there are a lot of women out there who see their primary role as that of supporter of the husbands and caretakers of the children, and the career comes secondary. But many women are not conscious of this. It’s not perceived. It’s not the way women are supposed to be today.
“And I think a lot of men . . . say that they don’t want to have that burden of supporting a family. They want a women who’s strong and who has her own career and her own ideas. But I think with them there is this underlying desire to have this he-man role, the king of the household role.”
Thinking men and women have always known that, barring an extraordinary set of circumstances, people don’t transform themselves overnight. So it is not exactly startling news that the feminist revolution is far from complete. Nor, given the dynamics of sexual politics and the general paucity of intergender empathy, is it surprising that men and women alike are concluding that they are getting a raw deal.
Women who are toiling in thankless jobs and raising children also find themselves not only struggling against discrimination at work, but facing unrealistic expectations at home. And men, faced with demands that they give up masculine privilege, wonder whether they are being offered a devil’s bargain: Give up the benefits of being a man but retain all the disadvantages. So they question the brand of sexual equality that doesn’t relieve them of the need to be a primary breadwinner or entitle them to a presumption of equal competence as a custodial parent.
In an age when many women are every bit as career-oriented as the hardest-charging men, the idea of man as breadwinner seems more than a little quaint. Yet, as we have seen, the image refuses to die-although the increase in dual-career households has forced modifications in the archetype. These days, man is not necessarily the breadwinner, but a breadwinner, and not always the principal one at that. The result is not unqualified relief at shedding an outmoded and burdensome role, but often disorientation.
Some men, young and old alike, find the new flexibility troubling. An aspiring pop musician in his late twenties said he was worried that women with careers were abandoning their natural role.
“I don’t know how this may sound, how women may like it or not, but that is not what they were made to do,” he said. “Society right now is like, ‘Okay, we want women to work. We want women in high positions, to make them feel important.’ So, they give them positions. At the same time as they give them these positions, you still have the man who is so used to being at work he has to work a little harder. Therefore, that makes the woman work harder. It’s pushed into the minds of women now that they feel that they have to be equal to us, when they don’t have to be that.
A woman’s “duty,” he said, was to be domestic, “because she has certain instincts beyond men, as far as child-bearing, as far as child-caring goes.”
Other men, who are nowhere near as conservative as the would-be pop star, nonetheless fret over how working women will affect them. A 33-year-old unemployed engineer declared: “I’ve met women in the workplace who are very good at what they do, and there have also been some who are idiots. I’ve never really tied it to their gender. The only thing I have a problem with is basically reverse discrimination. They want to fulfill quotas and things like that at different companies, and you know, because I’m a Caucasian male, I’m the least desirable in that respect. And that’s the only thing that really bothers me.”
Not all men, of course, are rattled by the progress of women into and within the workplace. But most would agree with Stephen Johnson, a psychologist and executive director of The Men’s Center in Woodland Hills, Calif., who asserts that “it’s a whole new ball game for men.” Things are not made any easier, says Johnson, by conflicting expectations that burden men with traditional roles and then condemn them for being traditional.
Journalist Michel Marriott observed: “Most of us are still convinced that we are looked to . If the family fails, if people are homeless, no one’s going to point any fingers at Mrs. Marriott. They’re going to say: ‘What in the hell happened? What did Michel do?’ ” Men, he says, feel tremendous pressure “to have a certain sort of status and to maintain it. And no matter what anybody says, they feel responsible.” Yet, because women are ubiquitous in the workplace and sharing the breadwinner burden, the provider role is no longer a reliable anchor for male identity. Society, however, does not seem disposed to sanction a new masculine concentration. Men are not seriously being urged to focus less on work and more on their families.
As Lisa Jacobs remarked: “There are a lot of men out there who would love to be househusbands, who would love to put family in front of career. But they can’t. . . . There’s a stigma against it.” Certainly, society still looks askance at men who want to take much time off for, say, paternity leave, or, for that matter, to do anything else that is not particularly career-oriented-despite the fact that large numbers of men are unable to find work.
Many modern young professionals, despite their professed belief in sexual equality, cling to conventional roles reflexively. A professional woman in her early 30s recalled a point when her self-employed husband’s business was not going very well. She was not only worried, she confessed, but angry. How dare him not carry his share of the load! In retrospect, she said, she was ashamed of her reaction, for she knew that had her earnings dropped, he would not have complained about supporting her. The difference, of course, was that he was The Man; paying the bills was his job.
Ieva Massengill, a Chicago accountant, has noticed that some of her female confidants, both young and old, assume that a man is somehow deficient if he is not carrying most of the household’s financial burden. She tells of one friend whose husband had been laid off, who was so angry at him for not contributing to the couple’s finances that she was considering leaving him. Another, she said, had turned down a relatively good paying job to stay temporarily unemployed while she awaited an opportunity at a more agreeable position. The preferred job paid considerably less, but it was more in keeping with her aims for personal fulfillment. “Women get angry if they’re not allowed to follow their dreams,” concluded Massengill. “They get pissed off if the husband can’t support their unemployment.”
Sean Casey, a law student in his mid-20s, reflecting on his relationship with his fiance, said: “She goes to law school, too. But . . . I do 100 percent of the finances. I’m in charge of buying the house. I have to buy the car. . . . I do every single financial thing. I tell her constantly, ‘Don’t worry about what school you go to. Your job should be nothing more than fun.’ . . . But I feel more of a duty to make money.”
A big-city prosecutor confided that he was thinking about changing jobs. Though he enjoyed his work immensely, it didn’t pay very well, and since he was considering marriage, he needed to make more money. His prospective wife, an actress, he pointed out, did not have his earning potential.
He observed that upon taking on familial obligations, the men in his office typically left. “The women don’t. I don’t think that it’s necessarily male chivalry that makes men leave lower-paying positions, public service positions . . . and then go into a higher paying job. I think it’s necessity. . . .” The “biological reality” of childbearing and the fact that men, by and large, could get higher-paying jobs, virtually obligated men to focus more on money than women did, he said. “It’s what men are conditioned to do.”
Such conditioning explains much about why so many men still don’t take women’s professional aspirations seriously. James Challenger, founder and president of Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc., a Chicago-based outplacement firm, said that he has often encountered a sense of resentment toward women among men who had lost their jobs. “There’s still a feeling, especially among the older men,” Challenger noted, “that women don’t have to work and don’t really want to work, that they’re just doing it because it’s something to do.”
When such men lose their jobs, he said, the experience can be cataclysmic-“like a loss of the genital.” “It’s been their duty to bring home the money. Whether or not he has a spouse who is bringing in equal or more . . . when he loses a job, he’s not doing what he’s supposed to be doing in the world.”
For Kip Trum, group vice president of Drake Beam Morin, a New York-based outplacement firm, shame was the word that came to mind. “It’s genuine shame that people suffer about being out of work. And that can become crippling,” said Trum: “the shame, the anger, the fear which adds up to terror. . . . They can still function, you know: ‘Oh, how’s it going?’ ‘Oh, it’s going fine; best thing that ever happened to me. This is terrific.’ Then they have to sit down and start making some telephone calls.” And that, said Trum, was “not easy to do.”
Nonetheless, observed Challenger, laid-off men suffered less now than they did in the past: “There were people 20 years ago who couldn’t tell their neighbors that they lost their jobs. In some cases they couldn’t even tell their spouse. . . Now we no longer see that type of thing occurring as often.”
Even in today’s topsy-turvy job market a man who does not work for any substantial period of time risks not only social censure but his career. Women, meanwhile, have been granted more leeway, if only because of the widespread, albeit unstated, assumption that they generally are not serious about their careers at any rate. It’s all right, goes the reasoning, for a women to be distracted by a family, but a man should always keep his eyes on the prize. The result is a workplace that discriminates in different ways against men and women alike and that fosters the very stereotypes that enlightened corporations say they wish to erase.
In a 1990 study, Joy Schneer and Frieda Reitman examined the impact of a brief period of unemployment on careers of MBA graduates of Pace and Rutgers Universities, where they then taught. Though work interruptions hurt both men and women, the researchers discovered, they hurt men more. Men who had been out of work for a few months earned, on average, 25 percent less than other men. Women who had taken a break from work earned 15 percent less than other women. Controlling for experience, responsibilities and hours worked reduced the work-break penalty somewhat, but nowhere near totally.
Part of the reason women were hurt less is that women generally were paid less-regardless of whether they had taken time off or not. Even those with seamless work histories made 15 percent less than did never-unemployed men- though they made more than briefly unemployed men. By contrast, men and women with a gap on their resume made roughly the same amount.
At the time of the survey, 98 percent of the male respondents had full-time jobs, compared to 77 percent of the women. To make the cohorts more comparable, Schneer and Reitman eliminated from their analysis those who were not currently working full time; they also removed anyone with more than one work break-reasoning that chronically out-of-work respondents might skew the study. Even after the culling, sharp gender differences remained. Twice as many women as men reported a career interruption. For women, child-rearing responsibilities was the most common reason for leaving a job; for men, corporate restructuring was generally the cause. Not a single man had put his career on hold to raise a child. Though men with a resume gap reported lower levels of career satisfaction than those without one, women showed no such divergence.
The findings suggest men with non-traditional career paths may be facing discrimination in the workplace, concluded Schneer and Reitman. The researchers also surmised that the women had not expected to work continuously. On the contrary, they had anticipated taking time to raise a family and accepted the career penalty for doing so. Men had no acceptable reason for being out of work-and were not prepared to bear the professional consequences. “I think there was this feeling that there’s something wrong with a man who loses his job,” Reitman noted.
In 1994, Schneer and Reitman reported on a follow-up survey. By then, the respondents were in midcareer. The average age was 44, compared with 38 during the original survey. Those whose careers had been interrupted early-on still made substantially less than those whose had not. Mid-career interruptions also depressed earnings, though not quite as much as early-career gaps. As in the earlier survey, Schneer and Reitman found no men reporting a career interruption to care for children. They did find one important difference from their previous study. In an era in which firings had become epidemic in corporate America, the men who had been laid-off seemed more accepting of their fate.
The MBAs Schneer and Reitman surveyed were not everyday American wage-earners. Their incomes-typically around $100,000 a year-were much higher; and their aspirations presumably were higher as well. Still, to the extent that their experiences can be generalized, they say volumes about how far America remains from achieving equality in the workplace. Women, whatever their work history, seemed, for the most part, destined for a lower track than did comparable men. And men, whatever their disposition, appeared barred from claiming family time that women took as a matter of course. For men, any work interruption, including a layoff, constituted an unforgivable transgression-which one paid for quite literally for the remainder of a career.
The same reasoning that prohibits men from taking time off apparently also prevents them from adjusting their schedules for child care. A 1991 Census Bureau survey found that only 2 percent of employed fathers of preschoolers allowed child-rearing considerations to influence their work schedules. Mothers were ten times as likely to say they had adjusted work schedules for their children. Even among fathers who cared for children while mothers worked, only 6 percent said they had arranged work to accommodate those responsibilities. A national survey of 3,400 workers by the Families and Work Institute also found that men were less inclined to make such accommodations than women. Among male and female employees with children under the age of 13, women were roughly twice as likely as men to say they would sacrifice earnings and advancement for more flexible work arrangements.
When men have been offered time off or flexible work hours they have been timid about taking them. In 1993, the Washington Post reported on several major companies that had implemented policies that, theoretically, at least, freed up men for family duties. The companies uniformly found that the men didn’t respond. Campbell Soup Co., which offered employees a three-month unpaid leave for family-related business, found that 95 percent of women who were eligible took advantage of the perquisite, but not a single man did. At Levi Strauss, the male response was not much better.
Few experts believe things have materially changed since the Family and Medical Leave Act took effect in late 1993. That legislation guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to most full-time workers at larger companies to attend to certain family business (including a child’s birth, adoption or a family member’s illness). Many business organizations fought the measure, and it was vetoed twice-by Ronald Reagan and George Bush- before Bill Clinton signed it. The law no doubt has been an immense comfort to many families, but it has not yet resulted in a swarm of men staying home with the kids.
That may not be entirely men’s fault. Our society is sending men very mixed messages. We tell them that their children are the most important thing in their lives, but marginalize them if they put family first. Given such conflicting signals, it’s hardly surprising that men aren’t eager to take on more duties as parents.
One government lawyer whose superiors actively encourage their subordinates to take paternity leave was struck by the fact that most eligible men took it, but such offices clearly are not the norm-certainly not in the private sector.
A 1990 Los Angeles Times poll found 39 percent of fathers in Los Angeles and Orange counties claiming they would prefer to stay home and raise their children rather than work full time outside the home. When asked, “How much do you think the job you are doing as a parent has suffered because of the demands of your work career?” 51 percent of men said “a lot” or “some.” Fifty-seven percent said they felt guilty for not spending more time with their children.
Obviously, most of the men who say they would quit work and stay home with the children are voicing nothing more than a fantasy. They have heard too many times, and from too many different people, that real men belong at work-not in a nursery.
James Levine, director of the Fatherhood Project at the Families and Work Institute, has coined a term-“daddy stress”-to describe the inner turmoil men experience when they feel trapped between family and work. Though working men and women experience work-family conflict in roughly equivalent numbers, says Levine, “men don’t talk about it.” Employers often compound the problem by informally restricting family-friendly policies to women.
“”Employers expect that women are going to be the ones who are going to ask for those accommodations,” said Levine, “and if accommodations are going to be given they’ll be given to women.” Some men, he acknowledges, do take the unconventional path, “but by and large we’re seeing guys sort of trapped.”
In a November 1994 article, “Family-Friendly Firms Often Leave Fathers Out of the Picture,” the Wall Street Journal portrayed a corporate world hostile to fathers wanting to care for their children. Some companies, in apparent violation of the law, reportedly told men that the family leave legislation applied only to mothers. Others simply made it clear that long hours at work-regardless of the impact at home-were absolutely necessary for a man to get ahead. Conditions were so bad, reported the Journal, that Child magazine gave up trying to award firms that supported good fathering. Not enough such companies existed to ensure a decent competition. That comes as no surprise to Edward Pitt, the Fatherhood Project’s deputy director, who argues that until men start seeing good fathering rewarded instead of penalized they will be reluctant to be the fathers they should be.
In this age of high-powered professionals, many women are pursuing careers more demanding and often more lucrative than the vast majority of men; and most are no more inclined to surrender that career to domesticity than would be a comparably ambitious man. Nonetheless, my prosecutor friend is right when he says that men, in general, are more “conditioned” than women to do the “economic thing.” While there are plenty of workaholic women in modern society, there are many more workaholic men.
The Families and Work Institute survey of workers, for instance, found that men spent an average of 45 hours a week on the job, while women averaged 39. Men also typically commuted longer distances. Even after lower-level workers and part-timers were eliminated from the mix, men still worked longer hours than women. Among full-time professionals and managers, men averaged just over 50 hours to just under 46 for women.
Women, as expected, typically put in much more time at home-though husbands and wives often had conflicting perceptions of the respective burdens they shouldered. Of those men with working spouses or partners, 69 percent said their mates took major responsibility for cooking, whereas 87 percent of the working wives said they did. Similarly, 78 percent of the working women said they were responsible for cleaning, as opposed to 63 percent of men who said their wives did the cleaning. Such discrepancies notwithstanding, men and women agreed on two key points: that husbands of working wives helped out more at home than husbands of non-working wives, and that wives, irrespective of employment status, did much more around the house than did men. Even in those homes where the wife was the principal breadwinner, wives tended to do the lion’s share of the household work.
A 1992 survey of more than 400 senior female executives with an annual average compensation of $187,000 found those who were married and had children were still largely responsible for child care. The husband was the primary caretaker in less than 8 percent of the cases. Still, 49 percent said that they and their spouses equally shared child-care duties .
When the same organizations (Korn/ Ferry International, the executive recruiting firm, and the University of California at Los Angeles graduate school of management) conducted a similar survey in 1982, things were somewhat less egalitarian. At that time, fewer than 3 percent of the female executives with children said their spouses were the main care-givers; and 42 percent said child care was an equally shared obligation.
The 1992 study found other indications that custom was loosening its grip. In the decade between the two studies, the number of women titled executive vice president had more than doubled-from 4 to 9 percent of the total; and the number of senior vice presidents had increased from 13 to 23 percent. The 56 hours worked by the women in an average week equalled those put in by men in a 1989 survey of senior executives at America’s largest corporations.
A comparison of the various surveys also yielded some striking male-female contrasts. Women, on average, earned only two-thirds the pay of the men (whose annual compensation was $289,000), but they were also younger (44 compared to 52) and held lower ranks in the corporations. The most conspicuous differences, however, had to do with family.
Ninety-one percent of the men were married, compared with 60 percent of the women; and 95 percent of the men had children, compared with 63 percent of the women. Of those women who were divorced -13 percent vs. 3 percent of men-nearly half said that their careers had been a factor in their marriages breaking up. One-third of all the women said they had postponed children for their careers, and over a third had taken a leave of absence, generally for maternity or other family reasons. Only 6 percent of the men had taken time off, and only 9 percent of those took it for family related reasons. Most took it either for education or government service.
Unlike the women in the Schneer-Reitman studies, most of those surveyed by Korn/Ferry reported no negative consequences for taking time off. Seventy percent said it had no effect, and 18 percent said the effect was positive. Obviously, however, since Korn/Ferry included only management’s stars, the poll effectively eliminated those whose careers had been sidetracked for family-related or any other reasons.
Notably, for all their accomplishment, the women seemed less than enthralled with corporate life. Even though they were younger than the male executives, they were more eager to leave. Over three-fourths, compared with fewer than a third of the men, said they wanted to retire before the age of 65. Only 14 percent aspired to be chief executive officers, compared with 46 percent of the men-a disparity conceivably related to the belief among 93 percent of the women polled that a glass ceiling existed for women.
The picture that emerges, in short, is one of a corporate world in flux, where women are being increasingly accepted and promoted, and yet in which their aspirations and mobility remain restricted. Not only are they less likely to move on to the CEO’ s chair, they are, quite literally, less likely to move. Women senior executives were asked to relocate less than one-fourth as often as men. They also traveled far less frequently for business. Whether the lighter travel schedules reflected residual corporate sexism or deference to the women’s domestic commitments is impossible to say, but clearly many of the women were routinely juggling 11- and 12-hour workdays and considerable domestic duties. For whatever reasons-perhaps exhaustion with the juggling act, suspicions of a “glass ceiling,” weariness with corporate politics or a more familial set of priorities-most were looking forward to getting free.
Nonetheless, most of the women and men were happy with their professional accomplishments. Many seemed to be delicately balancing both traditional and non-traditional roles. To a degree unseen in less affluent circles, they had worked out co-parenting arrangements with their husbands. The accommodation may have been made easier by the fact that most of the women had already assumed a substantial part of the “male” role. Nearly three-fourths of the women were the main breadwinner in their families. Even so, the men were not stay-at-home spouses. Virtually all were employed-the vast majority as professionals and managers.
Outplacement executive Warren Radtke said he was struck by the way many such “high level professional women” were, in effect, changing the rules-and by how easily their men (the “secure” ones, at least) adjusted to their lesser status. “I know one man who is building their house on Martha’s Vineyard all during the week and he’s just delighted to be doing that in addition to doing his other ‘lower level’ job,” said Radtke. His own son, Radtke added, “has a very good job, but is going to be a partner in one of the major New York law firms. He’s going to be the child-care person. He’s going to be the household manager.”
Few men have wives pulling down salaries of several hundred thousand dollars a year. Most men who are becoming “household managers” are not embracing a lifestyle choice; they are doing so out of necessity. Peter Baylies, a full time homemaker in North Andover, Mass., was laid off in 1992 from a large computer company. At the time he had a 9-month-old son and a schoolteacher wife, who suddenly was the family’s sole support. Given the cost of professional child care, the decision to stay home was easy; adjusting was not.
Initially, says, Baylies, he found it “intimidating” to be outnumbered by women when he took his son out to play. He also felt isolated, so he reached out to other full-time fathers by launching a newsletter, At-Home Dad. The quarterly, which Baylies claims has a circulation of 500 and is rapidly growing, offers commentary, recipes, child-care tips and news Baylies deems relevant to men like himself. The Winter 1995 issue reported on a survey comparing 49 “at-home dad families” with 44 families with stay-at-home moms. The small study provided the following upbeat news:
“”A strong bond is developing between at-home fathers and their children. When compared to fathers that work outside the home, children of at-home dads turn to their fathers twice as often for nurturing and comfort. This is creating a special bond between at-home dads and their children, one that fathers have not known before.” The newsletter also noted that “children still turn to their mothers more often for comfort no matter who the primary caregiver is. . . . Results show that in at-home mom families, children will wake their mothers for comfort at night 83 percent of the time. In at-home dad families, children still go to their mothers 55 percent of the time.”
Baylies said he has discovered that the primary reason men stay home is that they were laid off. Others were disabled. Some simply concluded that working and paying for child care makes no economic sense. But once they are forced into becoming homemakers, he says, many of them find it fulfilling. In his own case, says Baylies, he realized that he was weary of the “dual-income life style.” What was the point of having a son, he asked himself, if he could not be around to help him grow up?
At this point, says Baylies, who is in his late thirties, he enjoys his life, and has few thoughts of returning to the office. “I hope I can stay home forever.” But he recognizes, he says, that companies that claim to encourage men to take time for their children are generally liars. “When you go back to work you pay for it.” And he ackno wledges that some of the men in his network are worried about having to pay the price. Still, he claims, most feel no envy for the men married to their work.
For the time being, only a limited number of men will feel free to follow Baylies’ example. The man-as-provider role is too deeply etched in the collective psyche. Even the most open-minded sorts seem to have problems with any other model. Several years ago, Psychology Today, in search of the “ideal man” conducted an unscientific poll of its ostensibly avant-garde readership. Househusbands got an unambiguous thumbs down. “Your ideal man is still supposed to win the bread, although he doesn’t have to strive to provide his family with a high standard of living,” the magazine concluded.
Yet, even if most men are not prepared to be homemakers, many are deciding that what they are is not very fulfilling. When NPD Group Inc., a research firm headquartered in Port Washington, polled 2,500 workers, they found the general level of satisfaction was not terribly high. They also discovered that women were more content with their lot then men. Forty percent of women said they were “very satisfied” with their work compared with 31 percent of men.
It’s not clear why that should be so. One possible explanation is that whereas most men with lousy jobs felt they could not focus their energies elsewhere, women could. Nearly a fourth of the women, for instance, were part-timers-compared to 6 per cent of the men. That is not to say that all (or even most) women are in a position to reduce their time at or leave disagreeable jobs; but at least society does not hold it against them if they do. Even if they can’t leave the job, they don’t necessarily have to make the job their life.
A study of women physicians by a University of California researcher showed that those who were most satisfied and also less conflicted had set their priorities in such a way that either family or work came first. Apparently which came first mattered much less than that they decided to give one precedence over the other. Most men, of course, feel they have little choice in the matter. Work must come first-for the obvious reason that being a good family man is contingent on being a good provider.
Obviously discrimination against women is real. I am not suggesting that they have it better than men, just that they have more role flexibility, thanks in large part to the successes of the feminist movement. Men, however, are still stuck with role expectations that predate the feminist age.
Liz Golden, a marketing specialist for a diversity consulting firm in the Philadelphia area, blames men and women alike for the current state of affairs. “I think this will not change unless men get behind each other and say: ‘This nonsense is killing us. It’s got to stop. It’s not worth it.’ I don’t see any way besides someone standing up and saying, ‘I will not buy a house that is bigger than I can afford so that I have all of this pressure for the next 30 years to work 75 hours a week in order to maintain this house.’ “
She also recognizes, she says, that little is going to happen unless both men and women wish it to: “Unless we’re in it with each other.” Al Baraff, the Washington psychologist, thinks one important shift is already in progress. “As women move more into the areas that have been mostly men, they are going to be experiencing some of the same feelings. They’re going to have less friends. They’re going to be less in touch with their feelings. They’re going to have the same kinds of illnesses that men have.”
Philosophy graduate student Tim Benjamin makes a kindred observation: “Perhaps giving up more than they’re going to get,” he said. “In order to gain a certain amount of equality on a business level, they give up a certain amount of perhaps fundamentally feminine characteristics-a certain level of seductiveness, for example, or certain privileges of femininity.” Benjamin believes it to be reflective of “a general trend that is occurring in the world toward homogenization, toward a truly equal society.” And the end product, he believes, adds up to a form of “mediocrity.”
If Baraff and Benjamin are right, the result-at least in theory-could well be the revolution that Golden envisions. For if men and women, in fact, find ourselves foundering in the same sea of discontent, we should be better able to understand each other and better able to address our mutual plight.
There is scant evidence, however, that such a happy ending is in sight. Instead of developing intergender empathy, many men and women seem to be cultivating higher levels of antipathy. As Aaron Kipnis and Elizabeth Heron put it in “Gender War, Gender Peace,” “Many women and men today express their issues by firing bigger and more articulate missiles across the gender gap, at each other.”
