Caregiving dads face discrimination from (evidently sexist) coworkers. Lame. (Photo via JSapfoto / Flickr)
In the professional pecking order, baby-raising knocks you down a few notches. Women have known this forever. Thank you, millennia of patriarchy. Hello, glass ceiling.
But guys who take on primary caregiving responsibilities feel the pain, too, though not as much as women who choose to prioritize work over child-rearing.
An about-to-be-published study led by Professor Jennifer Berdahl of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management found that middle-class dudes who assume traditionally female child-care roles get harassed and talked down to more at work than those who stuck to typical family gender norms.
It’s totally lame that that adults act like such sexist bullies against guys open-minded enough to step up their game at home. And yet, even in this scenario, working moms have it worse off.
“Women without children and mothers with non-traditional care-giving arrangements are treated worst of all,” says the Science Daily in previewing the research.
Performance did nothing to provoke coworkers’ judgment either. It’s notas though dads were leaving early to pick up the kids or prepare some formula or swing by the store for some dinner fixings. Nope, they kept the same schedule as their office-mates.
“Their hours are no different than other employees’, but their co-workers appear to be picking up on their non-traditional caregiving roles and are treating them disrespectfully,” says Berdahl, who co-authored the study with Sue Moon from the Long Island University Post.
Sad. But no shock there.
The work-life balance for female parents tends to be decidedly more demanding because they’re overwhelmingly expected to shoulder a bigger share of the child-raising and housework than men. When a couple decides to promote the man to primary caregiver at home, the woman is quite often judged for abandoning sacred maternal instinct and the guy for copping out as provider.
In an article published this week in Slate, University of California, Berkeley, Law Professor Mary Ann Mason talks about the career-stunting opposite to that dad-as-caregiver discrimination in the ivory tower of academic tenure.
“Women pay a ‘baby penalty’ over the course of a career in academia — from the tentative graduate school years through the pressure cooker of tenure, the long mid-career march, and finally retirement,” says Mason, whose book “Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower,” culls from career-long surveys of tens of thousands of graduate students.
The pervasive attitude in academia is that women who have children during graduate studies must prove to the faculty their capability to complete the degree, the essay says. That one-sided, gendered expectation pushes many women to drop out of the race early, narrowing the number of female academics who complete the tenure track to become deans, presidents and top-tier faculty. The industry alternative, stats show, demands a woman hold off on starting a family until she hits her 40s.
Men, for obvious reasons, don’t face those challenges in their academic research careers. Starting a family isn’t as time-sensitive. And work-fatherhood balance not typically as demanding as work-motherhood.
Maybe working parents (but mostly women) can’t have it all, as Anne-Marie Slaughter so matter-of-factly suggests in her much-talked-about essay for The Atlantic last year. Not yet. Not until companies and policy-makers get hip to evolving family dynamics and “take a look at improving how people are treated at work when they step outside of traditional family roles at home,” as the Toronto study suggests.
Perhaps in the meantime, though, we can learn how to have more by looking at the way same-sex partnerships equitably divvy up work-home responsibilities without the gendered expectations of hetero couple-dom.
h/t Science Daily
Find Jennifer Wadsworth on Twitter at @jennwadsworth.
